And a bit of plausible futuristic fiction to make a point
FIRST: Vote!
Washington voters, if you’ve already voted, check with vote.wa.gov to confirm that your ballot has been received and accepted. Then encourage every like-minded person you know (or even just brush past) to vote, too. This is the last weekend before the election deadline on Tuesday, November 5. Turnout (or ballot turn-in in our state) is the key to this election. If you still have contact with anyone in the swing states of like mind call and encourage them, too! (I recommend the progressivevotersguide.org and/or the Search function at my jxindivisible.org archives of these posts.)
Like Robert Reich, I am “nauseously hopeful” about the results of next week’s election, but record voter attention and turnout will be the determining factor in both national and local races. If you know anyone tempted not to bother to turn in their ballot because, on account of the Electoral College, “my vote won’t matter,” consider reminding them that the people we send to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate could eventually make a huge difference to women’s reproductive freedom. The far right leveraged its voting power through Trump, Mitch McConnell, and their right wing U.S. Supreme Court majority to rob women of their bodily autonomy. This autonomy was supposed guaranteed by precedent under a U.S. Constitutional right to privacy. The Dobbs decision overturned that nationally recognized right made explicit in Roe v. Wade. Dobbs, in contrast, gave each state to regulate women’s bodily autonomy in any way that mostly non-medically educated, mostly white male state legislators saw fit to legislate.
The zealots of the far right are not done trying to enforce their narrow worldview on everyone nationwide. Any Republican, especially a self-described “pro-life Catholic” like Michael Baumgartner, once elected to the U.S. Congress, will vote to restrict a woman’s right to bodily autonomy—when and if such a bill is eventually presented. For a Republican U.S. Congressperson to vote against such a nationally restrictive law would be electoral suicide after a half century of the Republican Party promising to enact such restrictions. The long term goal of this segment of essential Republican voters is to establish the benign sounding concept of “fetal personhood,” a concept that could, in one fell swoop, outlaw all medical care that involves abortion, all contraceptives that are imagined to block implantation of a fertilized egg, and the use of IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), the method by which increasing numbers of children are conceived.
I thank another Substack writer, Robert Hubbell, for recommending an Oscar-nominated short movie (23 minute) that brings home the reality of one state’s (Arkansas’s) draconian law. I highly recommend that you click and watch Red, White, and Blue (free on YouTube). Then share it with friends who might not quite understand the stated goals of the Republican Party. (I checked. The film accurately depicts the effects of the current law in the State of Arkansas.)
In contrast, a vote cast for Carmela Conroy to represent eastern Washington (CD5) in the U.S. House is a vote in favor of re-instating a national right to reproductive freedom. I don’t mean to suggest immediate results in either direction, but we in eastern Washington tend, once we elect them, to keep our federal legislators in office for decades. Nothing substantive will happen until one party or the other controls all three branches of the federal government. This has been—and will continue to be—a “long game,” but a game the setup for which is now.
Finally, for anyone of my readers who still has the bandwidth, Thom Hartmann wrote an amazing piece yesterday morning set in early 2026 as a letter from Leavenworth prison written by him to his wife after the first year of a second Trump presidency. It is a chilling read—and, sadly, entirely plausible. Here’s the link to the post.
VOTE!! And encourage others.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. I torture myself by signing up for a newsfeed on my phone from Fox “News”. Last Sunday afternoon, true to form, a Fox banner read something like, “Star-studded cast gathered for Trump Rally in MSG [Madison Square Garden]”. I couldn’t resist. I clicked to see who these “stars” might be. The closest thing to a recognizable “star” in the line-up was Hulk Hogan—a sad testimony to what Fox News considers a “star.” Check out the speaker list here.