What Isn’t Dominating the Midterms?

Rick Klein, Maryalice Parks, and John Verhovek take note of the issues that are cropping up most in the midterm elections at ABC News. The issues they single out are:

Trump

That’s obvious enough. Trump has dominated the opinion pages of most major media outlets for much of the last two and a half years, largely in a negative light.

Firsts

So important they mention it twice. Women are likely to be elected in these midterms at the highest rate ever. Gender, race, sexual preference, and age are all hot topics. Unmentioned in the article is that if she is re-elected, Dianne Feinstein will become the oldest woman ever elected to the Senate. She’d need to run two more times to get a shot at being the oldest serving senator, though.

Health Care

That’s certainly the case here in Illinois. We’re being deluged with political advertising and just about every spot for a Democratic candidate castigates the Republican opponent for wanting to take people’s health care away. No word though on how they’d reconcile health care as an absolute right, a right to earn a living as a physician, and the right to property. If health care is not an absolute right, it means they want to take somebody’s health care away, too, and the whole thing is sophistry. If health care is an absolute right, either wages in health care must be driven to an arbitrarily low point or there is no limit to how high takes must be raised to pay for all of that health care. Claiming that your’re going to balance those rights somehow calls for more acumen and mental acuity than appears to be possible.

Border control

Most of the related complaints I hear are about illegal immigration rather than the broader topic of immigration.

What’s remarkable to me are the issues that aren’t important to people. We are still fighting a war in Afghanistan. We’re spending billions there which can’t be spent on anything else. Americans are dying. I can only conclude that Americans have accepted that we’ll be fighting there forever.

Despite its evergreen presence in the country’s opinion pages, global warming/climate change don’t seem to be much of a topic.

I’m not seeing as much outrage over the tax reforms that took effect earlier this year as all of the complaints about “tax cuts for the rich” might have led you to believe. It’s darned hard to cut taxes for anybody but the rich when most of the people who aren’t rich aren’t paying income taxes, either, and you can’t talk about cutting payroll taxes without being accused of attacking Social Security. That sort of defuses taxes as an issue.

I haven’t heard much about now-Justice Kavanaugh, either. I guess that caravan has moved on.

What other issues are surprising in not being major topics of discussion in the midterms?

8 comments… add one
  • Ben Wolf Link

    The biggest omission is, as always, avoidance of criticism regarding the system. The major media only tolerate discussion of certain excesses, and those excesses are treated as first causes. Consideration of a systemic problem is forbidden, especially its contradictions.

  • Andy Link

    Here in Colorado, the Democratic candidate for governor is running ads that exclusively focus on healthcare and that is also the focus of his campaign. The GoP candidate seems largely absent.

    Trump isn’t mentioned at all in state and local politics, at least from what I’ve seen.

    I live in a GoP bastion and have heard no advertising from either side for the House seat.

    The other big issues here are a few of the ballot measures. Ads about those are probably 2/3 of the political advertisements I see.

  • Jan Link

    Unfunded pensions, the ever-increasing debt/ deficit, SS & Medicare sustainability are issues rarely put on the public table for discussion. Also, positive gains, like the low UE rates for minorities, women, those without high school diplomas, manufacturing and small business optimism seem unimportant, in lieu of an obsession with lurid rumors and “MeToo” tidbits.

  • steve Link

    Should be more emphasis on the growing debt.

    Who is running on health care as an absolute right?

  • The Democratic candidate for Illinois state attorney general for one.

    IMO the deficit rising at 2-3% per year doesn’t really pose a problem. That would be $400-600 billion nowadays. 5% as now is too much.

  • steve Link

    ” Illinois state attorney general”

    Uhh, anyone with even remotely a national impact? The deficit went up over $700 billion this year and is expected to increase again next year. At a time when the economy is doing pretty well.

    Steve

  • There is no U. S. senate race in Illinois this year and I express my preference for Congressional representative in another post. It may seem odd to you but the offices for which I can actually vote hold more interest for me than those for which I cannot.

    Pritzker, who in all likelihood will be our next governor, is promoting a state-level “public option” (this in a state that already can’t pay its bills). Consequently, like-minded state-level officials concern me as well.

  • steve Link

    ” It may seem odd to you but the offices for which I can actually vote hold more interest for me than those for which I cannot.”

    Makes perfect sense. In a post that seems to mostly concentrate on national level issues (Trump, Feinstein, border, climate change) just seemed to odd to use that guy as evidence that there is a push towards health care as an absolute right.

    Steve

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