(CNN) — Donald Trump may be grabbing all the headlines, but partisan fights in state capitals across the country can do much more to change America than the drama surrounding the first former president to be charged with a crime.
The clashes between Democrats and Republicans over issues like abortion and guns, which could also shape future electoral laws and maps, herald the great debates to come in the 2024 presidential campaign. These simmering conflicts also reflect a divided nation. around their cultural and political identity, and show how sometimes small shifts in the balance of power can have far-reaching consequences.
In Wisconsin, one of the most closely fought states in the last presidential elections, a liberal judge prevailed on Tuesday in the race for a position on the state Supreme Court, in a victory that could restore the right to abortion in the state and give lead to a redrawing of the maps that the Republican Party had configured in their favor. The magnitude of her victory — by some 200,000 votes — will set off alarm bells in the Republican Party.
In North Carolina, Republicans were in luck after a Democratic state representative, elected a few months ago by a nearly 20-point margin, switched to the Republican Party this week, giving the party veto-proof majorities in both state legislatures, in their attempt to impose new limits on abortion and more restrictive electoral laws.
America’s torturous division over guns is sparking an extraordinary showdown in Tennessee. Rather than work to combat the mass shootings following last week’s massacre at a Nashville school, the state’s Republican lawmakers want to oust three Democrats who joined a gun control protest.
National Democrats, meanwhile, are looking to Chicago, where Bernie Sanders-backed progressive Brandon Johnson won the mayoral runoff on Tuesday. He defeated a moderate with a strong-arm message against crime, with a more nuanced discourse than his previous support for “defunding the police.” (Johnson said during the campaign that he did not want to cut funding to the police.)
And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who says his state is a laboratory for a more conservative America ahead of his possible run for the White House, signed a bill earlier this week that allows people to bring concealed weapons without permission. The state Senate also approved a very restrictive six-week ban on abortion on Monday.
This remarkable series of local battles is not always noted in Washington, where lawmakers are bracing for a looming debt-ceiling crisis and arguing over aid to Ukraine.
But political fires that start in the states can later break out nationally and define future general election showdowns. It is already clear, for example, that gender and transgender issues will be a dominant issue in 2024, as Republicans attack Democrats for adopting “woke” policies.
The intensity of the exchanges on issues such as abortion, gender and guns raises another possibility. For all of Trump’s appeal to grassroots Republican voters, he is running a campaign that is predicated almost entirely on his anger over his worsening legal troubles and his claim that he is being politically persecuted to keep him out of the picture. White House. The fights brewing in the states suggest that many voters have other things on their minds.
A result that will raise blisters throughout the political world
Wisconsin has been reeling from a conservative resurgence and subsequent liberal backlash since Republican Scott Walker was first elected governor in 2010. He was instrumental in the victories of Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 and remains on the cutting edge of the political knife facing a new cycle of presidential elections.
In the latest political swing in the state, liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz handily prevailed over conservative Daniel Kelly in a nonpartisan election that nonetheless had clear favorites between the parties. The race attracted significant foreign spending, making it the most expensive state judicial race in history, and Protasiewicz’s margin of victory was about 10 times that of Trump’s and Biden’s respective cushions of about 20,000 votes.
All elections are unique, but the Wisconsin judge’s victory underscores the power of abortion as a mobilizing issue and may fuel concern among GOP strategists that the issue could backfire on their candidates in 2024. The political fallout of abortion’s galvanizing electoral force could be seen on another Midwestern battleground this Wednesday. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the repeal of the state’s 1931 abortion ban, made possible because voters last fall gave Democrats control of both houses of the legislature.
Now, with a liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to strike down a pre-Civil War law that prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances, and which went back into effect after the US Supreme Court struck down the Roe v. Wade case. Protasiewicz’s victory will be a beacon of hope for Democrats, demoralized by the loss of federal abortion rights last year.
Sean Eldridge — founder and president of Stand Up America, a progressive advocacy group — said Protasiewicz would act as a check on “conservative efforts to eliminate reproductive freedom, disenfranchise voters of color through racial manipulation and overturn election results they don’t like. Your victory helps build a firewall for our democracy and the freedom to vote by 2024.”
But the lesson of Wisconsin’s turbulent political decade is that local Republicans, some of them enslaved by Trumpism, are likely to strike back with force. Indeed, Tuesday’s election also saw Republicans win an open state Senate seat, giving the GOP a supermajority that could be used to impeach top office holders, theoretically including Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. In an interview with WISN in Wisconsin last month, Dan Knodl — the Republican who won Tuesday — said he would consider a move to impeach Protasiewicz. At the time, she was serving as a Milwaukee circuit judge. It is unclear whether the legislature could remove her from the Supreme Court.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks with police officers about protecting law and order at the Prive catering hall on February 20, 2023 in the Staten Island borough of New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Anger at the gun debate
In another striking example of political polarization, the Republican-led Tennessee legislature is calling for the ouster of three fellow Democrats who led a rowdy protest in the state House of Representatives following the mass murder of three nine-year-old boys and three adults at a Nashville Christian school. House Speaker Cameron Sexton called the protest unacceptable impropriety and lawmakers have already been stripped of their committee seats. The Republican president said the protest was “at least equivalent to, perhaps worse” than the mob attack of Trump supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
One of the Democratic legislators, state Rep. Justin Pearson, explained on CNN that he supported the protest by gun reform advocates in the public stand because he believed the voices demanding action on the gun reforms were not being heard. alert laws and other gun safety measures. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of stricter gun restrictions, but support varies depending on the measure in question.
Pearson told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the trio knew they were violating a House rule on decorum. “But we didn’t know and we didn’t think we were doing something that could get us removed for exercising our First Amendment rights and encourage those protesters and children and grieving adults and parents to do the same in the House.”
The drama in the Nashville state legislature was matched by a remarkable turnaround in North Carolina this week, when Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham switched to the Republican Party, saying, “The modern Democratic Party has become unrecognizable to me.” Cotham echoed the Republican view that the rival party has gone so far to the left on cultural and economic issues that she has dropped out of the American mainstream, though the GOP has followed its own march to extremes. Cotham’s move has tricky implications for Democrats, because she gives the GOP enough votes in each chamber to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes.
Democrats accused Cotham of betraying his voters, and Cooper warned that his actions would have dire consequences. “Representative Cotham’s votes on women’s reproductive freedom, election laws, LGBTQ rights and strong public schools will determine the direction of the state we love,” Cooper told CNN in a statement.
The blows, meanwhile, keep coming for Democrats in Florida, where a landslide re-election victory for DeSantis last November and Republican control of the state legislature add up to outright conservative dominance. As he seeks to appeal to grassroots Republican voters ahead of a possible presidential run, DeSantis this week further relaxed Florida’s already lax gun laws. And after last year enacting a law banning abortion at 15 weeks, the state Senate just passed a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after the gestational age of about six weeks, or about four weeks pregnant.
The hardline abortion policy could allow DeSantis to solidify a message that he would be a more effective conservative leader than Trump. But it’s also the kind of positioning that would offer Democrats an opening should they become the Republican nominee.