CNN
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In Democratic-leaning and swing states, voters last week delivered an unmistakable cry of resistance to the restrictive Republican social agenda symbolized by the drive to ban abortion.
But in red states where Republicans have actually imposed that agenda over the past two years, GOP governors cruised to reelection without any discernible backlash.
That sharp contrast underscored the depth of the divide between red and blue America and points toward the further partitioning of the nation into divergent, and increasingly hostile, blocs living under fundamentally different rules for civil rights and liberties. Last week’s results could simultaneously embolden red state Republicans to continue advancing the militantly conservative social agenda they have pursued since 2021 on abortion and other issues like voting and book bans – while also making clear that such an agenda is electorally untenable outside of those core GOP states.
“The momentum to regulate social policy is still really strong and perhaps growing in a lot of red states,” says Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan think tank that studies Americans’ social attitudes. But, she added, “in states where the right to abortion was viewed as being threatened … I think that the pro-choice momentum really helped Democrats.”
On a national basis, Democrats defied the history of big first-term midterm losses for the president’s party – and pervasive media predictions of a towering red wave – by largely reassembling the winning coalition of voters who turned out in massive numbers in 2018 and 2020 to oppose former President Donald Trump’s vision for America. That coalition centered on young voters, people of color and college-educated, urban and less religious adults, with women in each group leaning more Democratic than the men.
Compared to 2018 and 2020, the Democratic performance frayed with each of those groups, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. That erosion wasn’t particularly surprising, given that huge majorities in all those groups expressed negative views about the economy and many gave President Joe Biden failing grades for his performance so far, the exit poll found.
More surprising was that…
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