Today is Wednesday, August 24, 2022. Voters sent a clear message to repugnicans during the election cycle just ended on Tuesday with the victory of Democrat Pat Ryan who scored a win over his repugnican opponent, Marc Molinaro, in a swing district of New York’s Hudson Valley. Even though the numbers were close, it was expected that a Republican would win the seat of former Congressman Antonio Delgado, who was elevated to New York’s Lieutenant Governor. However, Ryan won with 52% of the vote compared to Molinaro’s 48% to finish out Delgado’s term. Thus in an opinion written today online by Jill Filipovic on what that election message actually is, the repugnican party should be worried about their prospects for the midterms this November. Her analysis is called “Opinion: New Yorkers sent an election message. And it wasn’t about inflation.”

Filipovic writes that when abortion rights are on the ballot, abortion rights win, not inflation, not hot culture war issues only promulgated by dickheads like Florida’s bully of a governor, Ron DeSant-ASS, and not crime. That is the lesson learned from this special election this week in the Hudson Valley of New York, in which a prochoice candidate, Pat Ryan, won his race.

The district is one where Joe Biden just barely squeaked out a win in 2020 – the kind of place where one would expect voters to swing the other way in the midterms. But not now! Not after the most chillingly conservative Supreme Court overturned a woman’s reproductive rights in June.

What should scare most repugnicans is that early voter turnout numbers suggest a disproportionate turnout from female voters. According to Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetS-mart, a Democratic political data firm, women make up 52% of voters in NY-19, but cast 58% of early and absentee ballots. “That higher female turnout suggests that abortion rights very well may have been a huge motivator in this race.”

The Hudson Valley is not the first place voters have made their support of abortion rights clear. In Kansas, a reliably Republican state, voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to curtail abortion rights. Even though it is true that progressives are more prochoice than conservatives, 61% of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases, and say that the right to end a pregnancy should be between a woman and her doctor – not her aging, white legislator.

During the campaign between Ryan and Molinaro, it was fairly telling that the former leaned easily into the abortion issue, while Molinaro slunk away from it. While Molinaro is antiabortion, he made a concerted effort to appeal to more moderate voters (upstate New York is often conservative, but it’s not the Bible Belt), he said he did not support a federal ban on the procedure, and that the decision should be left to individual states. Women voters did not buy this from Molinaro and cast their vote for Ryan instead.

A repugnican majority in Congress may indeed mean that lawmakers would vote to scale back abortion rights. They would certainly attempt to block any effort to expand those rights at the federal level. Thus in the upcoming midterms, choice is definitely on the ballot, even if you’re voting in a liberal state or district.

Filipovic accuses the Democrats of not being aggressive enough in expanding and preserving abortion rights, and that their longstanding assumption that abortion rights were safe is part of the reason we’re in this mess. However, the real blame should be pinned on aggressive right-wing attacks against abortion rights and the elevation of three horrible conservative justices to the Supreme Court appointed by the president who is currently facing potential espionage charges by the feds! This quote should be heeded when people vote in November: “Keeping Republicans out of power is the only way to protect what should be a universal right to make decisions about our own bodies.”

Very few repugnicans, as Filipovic noted, are beginning to grapple with the horrors they’ve set into motion. “In South Carolina, Rep. Neil Collins gave an emotional speech that suggests he is now second-guessing his support of an antiabortion bill that, a doctor told him, put the life of one of her patients at risk during a miscarriage.” Unfortunately, this congressman is in a minority. Most Republicans, sadly, are not shifting their positions on abortion in any meaningful way. Instead, the antiabortion movement is only growing more aggressive and pushing for more extreme laws.

The horror stories since Roe v. Wade was overturned are piling up: stories of miscarrying women being sent home and told to wait for a life-threatening infection before they can get care, stories of ectopic pregnancies going untreated, stories of a woman being denied an abortion even though her fetus doesn’t have a skull, stories of a child rape victim the law would have forced into childbirth and motherhood, all of these irrational and absurd tales are showing many Americans, for the first time, when you unjustifiably outlaw abortion. And those Americans are casting ballots now and in November.

Ideologues and antiabortion politicians, all repugnicans, have responded to these stories largely with distraction – they even falsely claimed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim was a hoax, for example. Another mechanism is engaging in denialism, claiming that laws that ban abortion don’t actually put women’s lives at risk and don’t do all of the awful things that women, doctors, and lawyers are saying they do.

Thank God, the public isn’t buying this drivel from repugnicans who are very afraid of how this untimely decision by a Trump-centric Supreme Court will spell doom for their party in November. It is becoming clear that criminalizing abortion will have real consequences for those women – and men – who are considering having a child.

Now Democrats are increasingly united and running unabashedly on abortion rights. Republicans in all but the most conservative pockets of the country are slinking away from the issue. Now it’s on voters to send a loud and clear message: In November, choice is again on the ballot, and it’s incumbent on us to show just how much it matters.

I’m personally overjoyed over the victory of 25-year-old Maxwell Alejandro Frost who won his first House seat from Orlando, Florida. This represents, to me, new hope for Democrats and the country in the elevation of this gun violence and abortion rights activist to Congress. He will surely bring youth and vigor to his new duties as a member of Congress. He will be the first Generation Z member of Congress, as he tweeted after his surprise victory on Tuesday. He seemingly came out of nowhere to best a wide field packed with senior political figures, and his personal background represents the best of a widely diverse America. His parents, who adopted Frost at birth, are a Cuban American woman and a white man from Kansas. His birth parents were a Lebanese Puerto Rican woman and a Haitian man.

Frost, who is Black, spoke both English and Spanish at home, and he capitalized on his multicultural upbringing to campaign in a district that’s as diverse as his own origins. Despite his age, Frost has been active for a decade, mainly campaigning against gun violence and for abortion rights in organizations like March for Our Lives and the American Civil Liberties Union.

This young, committed activist is all but certain to win in November, as the seat he’s competing for – a safe blue seat vacated by retiring Rep. Val Demings who is running for a Senate seat against Marco Rubio – was redrawn in a way that packed more Democratic voters together.

But Democrats see potential in Frost that extends beyond November. Victoria McGroary, the executive director of Bold PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus campaign arm, who provided support in his campaign, said, “Maxwell is the future of the Democratic Party.”

Again, this is a very hopeful sign of better things to come in the success of this very young, committed man. I tip my hat off to this ambitious and dedicated member of Gen Z who might just give the “Bitch” McConnells, the Lindsey Grahams, the Grassleys, et al. a run for their money.

Stay safe and be well.