Reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion along with student debt forgiveness helped Democrats. Those two issues, according to Judge Jeanine Pirro, motivated young Democrats to vote during the midterm.
Republican candidates have won 217 seats of the 218 needed for a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to a New York Times report. The GOP candidate is leading by at least five percent in three undeclared California races. Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District looks likely to undergo a recount since incumbent Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) leads by less than four percent.
Fox News further reported:
“I’ll tell you what won this election for the Democrats: Sure, the young people came out vote; they got paid — I mean, they got their student loans paid back. It was a buyout,” Pirro said Monday on “The Five.” “But the other thing is: abortion. It was all about abortion.”
President Biden offered up something many legal observers believed would eventually be struck down by the courts, but the student loan handout seemed enough to bring out the 18-24 vote to put Democrats over the top, the panel on “The Five” debated.
While a federal judge has since struck down Biden’s overture – which many said would have been the largest executive branch delegation of legislative branch power in some time – it was still timed well enough to invigorate young people to back the president’s party.
Pirro noted the president had little to do with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, but that the Republicans’ celebration of a win for the right to life soured many independents and Democrats they had been courting:
“Joe Biden didn’t do abortion. Abortion just kind of fell out of the Supreme Court for whatever reason in May or June of this year — And that was it,” Pirro said.
“That’s all the Democrats needed. Now they’re going to beat their chests. They’re going to say, well, it’s because we’re so great: Joe Biden, what a leader – [but] America hates him.”
Pirro added Democrats likewise see their Senate retention and rebuke to several conservative and Trumpian Republicans as a mandate to govern from the socialist or progressive left.
“The Democrats are taking this as a mandate… This will be the most progressive next two years that we’ve ever seen,” she said.
But, she noted Democrats misperception of a legislative mandate along with Biden’s unpopularity could really hurt them in 2024.
Unlike in 2022, when more vulnerable Republican seats were up versus Democrats, 2024 will host many more possibilities for the inverse, as Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin – a lawmaker whose state continues to grow redder – leads his party’s handful of potentially tenuous reelection races.
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