Democrats had a good night. So did abortion rights. Glenn Youngkin, not so much.
The 2023 general election on Tuesday, November 7, featured only a grab-bag group of contests, but there was one clear overall theme in the results: Democrats did well.
Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Democrats seemed set to hold onto the Virginia state Senate and take over the Virginia state House, blocking Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing conservative policies (and perhaps his ambitions in national politics). Meanwhile, Ohio voters enshrined the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational cannabis.
Strangely, all this happened while President Joe Biden has been getting some of his worst polling numbers yet. As in the 2022 midterms, though, national dissatisfaction with Biden did not lead to a red wave sweeping out Democrats across the country or to wins for conservative policy proposals in ballot initiatives.
If you’re looking for tea leaves about how 2024 will go, don’t get carried away. Many of these outcomes were driven by local personalities, issues, and circumstances. And they took place in so few states that the results hardly present a clear picture of where opinion in the country is, or where it will be next year. But wins are wins, and Democrats got some significant ones on Tuesday.
Winner: Democrats
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Michael Swensen/Getty
Democrats had about as good a night on Tuesday as they could have reasonably expected.
Gov. Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky proves that Democrats can still win in Trump Country, especially if they happen to be the son of a popular former governor. Though Republicans won the other statewide races on the ballot in Kentucky, Beshear beat back the candidacy of Daniel Cameron (R), who had been hyped as a Republican rising star, to win a second term.
The other governor’s race on the ballot was in Mississippi, where Brandon Presley (D) put forth a surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Tate Reeves (R) in this red state but ultimately conceded the race late Tuesday night.
Then, in Virginia, Democrats swept into control of both sides of the state’s General Assembly, prevailing in an expensive contest against Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Republicans. Legislative races in the other states on the ballot this year — New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi — appeared to show little change. A Democrat won in Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court race as well, preserving the party’s 5-2 majority in a court that heard many election-related challenges in 2020.
This wasn’t a blue wave sweeping the nation, exactly. And the margins of key Virginia races looked more similar to 2021’s than 2020’s (when Biden won the state big). But considering how the incumbent president’s party usually suffers in off-year elections, and how bad Biden’s national numbers have been, Democrats should be pretty pleased with these outcomes.
Winner: abortion rights
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AFP via Getty Images
Tuesday was an excellent night for supporters of abortion rights — again.
Their biggest victory was in the ballot referendum in Ohio, which both codified abortion access up to the point when a fetus is viable and made clear abortions would be permitted even after viability if a doctor deems it necessary to protect a patient’s health. Ohio Republicans had previously passed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, but it had been blocked in court, with the state Supreme Court hearing arguments about it in September. Now that’s off the table.
But abortion rights were a major theme in Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky and Youngkin’s attempt to flip the state legislature in Virginia, as well as in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. In election after election and referendum after referendum in the post-Dobbs era, voters have made clear — even in many red states — that they are not enthusiastic about major abortion restrictions.
Yet Republicans remain beholden to right-wing voters and activists demanding such restrictions — and it keeps backfiring on them in elections.
Loser: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin
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Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty
Every so often this year, a story would pop up claiming that Youngkin was considering challenging Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. However, these stories all claimed, Youngkin would wait to make up his mind until after his state’s legislative elections, in which he was hoping to wrest control of the state Senate from Democrats. Big wins for Virginia Republicans, the theory went, would prove Youngkin was a political powerhouse who could win nationally too.
This never made a ton of sense, both because there are such things as ballot deadlines that would make the timing extremely difficult, and because national GOP voters have been quite loyal to Trump. More likely, Youngkin hoped that full control of Virginia’s government could let him pass laws like a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making himself a champion of the right and positioning him well for the 2028 presidential race. He made no secret of his abortion policy — hoping that he could show Republicans how to run on the issue and win.
But he didn’t win. Republicans fell short of retaking the state Senate and they lost control of the House of Delegates, likely in part because Democrats campaigned on abortion. Those wins will prevent Youngkin from using the legislature to cozy up to the national right. And Youngkin won’t get another shot — Virginia governors can’t run for reelection. So while it may be too sweeping to say his presidential ambitions have been squashed, they’ve certainly taken a serious hit.
Winner: Joe Biden
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Mark Makela/Getty Images
Biden was not on the ballot in any state this year, and it would be a mistake to think that Tuesday’s results have any real connection to how he’ll do in 2024.
But, as mentioned above, the president has been dogged by a series of brutal polls of late showing him trailing Donald Trump nationally and in most battleground states.
Democrats and political analysts have hotly debated what to make of these polls, with some arguing that they show Biden is a badly flawed candidate who might put Trump back into the White House if he persists in running again. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted this weekend that Biden needed to consider whether it would be “wise” for him to run again. Recent news reports spoke of some Democrats’ “worry,” “frustrations,” and “panic.”
But others have argued that these polls tell us little of value. After all, they’re being taken a year in advance of the election at a time when Biden’s likely opponent, Trump, has had a relatively minor (for him) role in the news cycle. Such a panic occurred before the 2022 midterms, they point out, and yet Democrats did better than expected there. Biden’s numbers will likely recover once the choice is clearly framed for voters as Biden or Trump, the argument goes.
Democrats’ wins Tuesday will likely ease some of the pressure on Biden, feeding a sense that in the party, regardless of what the polls say, Democrats’ strategy and coalition turn out to be solid when people actually vote.
Now it’s not clear whether that inference would actually be correct. I said just a few paragraphs ago that it would be a mistake to connect these races to 2024, which will feature a very different electorate. (It’s possible that Democrats are now the party that is structurally advantaged in non-presidential-year elections, since they now do so well among college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote consistently.) And even if Biden’s party does well now, it’s still possible that he himself is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, either due to his age or his record in office.
Still, winning is better than losing. So regardless of what the future holds, Biden has good reason to be happy about Tuesday’s results.
Update, November 8, 7:30 a.m.: This post has been updated to reflect the Virginia House of Delegates results.
From Pain Hustlers to Dopesick to The Fall of the House of Usher, filmmakers are fascinated by the epidemic. But what are they saying?
From its first moments, Pain Hustlers sets out to distinguish itself from the pack of recent series and movies about the opioid crisis with one simple declaration: This is the one that isn’t about the Sacklers.
The family most closely associated with the crisis — due to their company Purdue Pharma’s misleading marketing of OxyContin and the ensuing lawsuits — are at the center of a number of high-profile Hollywood productions, many of which are based on books by journalists. Dopesick is the best of the scripted bunch, a multi-Emmy-winning limited Hulu series that splits its time between Purdue executives and Appalachian victims. There are more, including the Netflix series Painkiller, HBO’s documentary series The Crime of the Century, movies like Ben Is Back and Hillbilly Elegy, and a lot of others. Laura Poitras’s excellent documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, also on HBO, centers on photographer Nan Goldin’s activism against the Sacklers and was among 2022’s best films. Even the most recent Netflix series from horror master Mike Flanagan, The Fall of the House of Usher, is based on the Poe novel but patterned more or less explicitly on the Sacklers.
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Netflix
Pain Hustlers, based on journalist Evan Hughes’s book, starts with mock-documentary footage introducing us to fictional characters from the story we’re about to watch, most of whom are composites of real people from Hughes’s reporting. Former pharmaceutical executive Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) says, with a touch of nonchalance, “What you need to remember is we’re not Purdue Pharma. We didn’t kill America. This was 2011. Strictly speaking, we’re not even part of the opioid crisis.”
As images of people on stretchers appear on screen, he continues. “You know, Lonafen” — the movie’s fictional opioid, based on the drug Subsys — “was never a street drug. But you know, people hear ‘fentanyl’ and they lose all fucking perspective.”
Perspective is precisely what Pain Hustlers aims to provide, a goal it shares with others that weave together stories of the addicted with the addictors, with varying degrees of success. Pain Hustlers is the story of a single mother, Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), who is living a life of not-so-quiet desperation, strapped for cash and camping out with her daughter and mother in her disapproving sister’s garage. One night, exasperated by her job as an exotic dancer, she plops down at the bar and meets Brenner, who drunkenly offers her a job. Turns out that Zanna, the (fictional, based on Insys) pharmaceutical company where he works, is also in desperate straits. So is everyone who works there. So are the doctors they approach in a barely legal attempt to entice them into prescribing Lonafen to desperate cancer patients. The whole thing reeks of panic, and even when Zanna’s coffers begin to swell, that feeling remains.
Pain Hustlers proclaims that the opioid crisis is at its core a story of American desperation: a desperate medical system that doesn’t work for anyone, a desperate legal system that unevenly applies justice, and desperate people sucked into the orbit who need money or recognition or just to be able to get through the day without wanting to die. Tonally, though, it’s a weird movie, with overtones of Wolf of Wall Street but not quite the same level of commitment to the bit, meaning that Liza comes out as kind of a plucky but misguided heroine with a good heart.
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Netflix
But in telling a story decoupled from the Sacklers, Pain Hustlers does get at something that can sometimes get lost in other media. That media has taken a variety of genre forms: Painkiller plays like a disaster story (and is directed by modern disaster auteur Peter Berg); Dopesick is a prestige drama; Fall of the House of Usher is gothic horror, with overt Succession vibes. Other movies have taken the form of addiction stories, a popular genre for a lot of Hollywood’s history, with middling success. Pain Hustlers feels like one of this year’s wildly popular business-guy movies, a tale of a rise and a fall that takes the suffering into account but has a different sort of arc.
That artists keep messing with genre in telling this story suggests a nation trying to figure out what, exactly, this story even is. What is the crisis … about? It’s about pain and our handling of it; it’s about desperation. It’s about villains — the Sacklers, or maybe just pain itself — but not the kind who can, or will, be beaten by heroes.
Trying to fit the opioid crisis into a genre arc is especially hard, I think, because Hollywood’s tendency is to point a finger at a single villain and make everyone else victims, and that doesn’t quite work here. It would be heinously wrong to call Purdue, OxyContin, and especially the Sacklers “scapegoats” for the crisis; they are in fact largely responsible for it, thanks to incredible disregard for the lives of others, and should be treated accordingly.
Yet the half-million dead and their grieving families across America aren’t suffering purely because some isolated rich people decided to take advantage of them. The tendency to overwhelmingly focus on the Sacklers risks suggesting that if they could be punished, the problem would be solved. But there’s far more to it than that. This is not a war story.
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Netflix
That’s why, in the end, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is such a monumental achievement and still by far the greatest of the current crop of opioid movies. Poitras and Goldin weave together Goldin’s activism and her addiction to opioids with some surprising strands. There’s Goldin’s photographs, particularly The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which she chronicled the lives of friends, many of whom died from drugs or HIV-related illnesses. There’s the story of Goldin’s family, and in particular her sister, who was repeatedly institutionalized and died at an early age due, in part, Goldin says, to her parents’ unwillingness to acknowledge what their children needed to flourish.
These are not matters that obviously relate to one another, except that they all happened to Goldin. But the juxtaposition creates meaning, especially framed within Goldin’s (successful) attempts to force major art museums like the Guggenheim and the Tate to remove the Sackler name from their galleries and stop taking money from the family.
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HBO
The Sacklers, and the kinds of people who profit in Pain Hustlers, can only be successful in the context of a social order that allows them to be. This requires systems that shield perpetrators from consequences, as long as they’re rich enough. It requires a public villainization of addicts. It requires a kind of delirious American optimism bent on burying anything that isn’t optimism, and a celebration of the wealthy. It of course requires a broken medical system that can be morally and ethically bankrupt. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed draws these themes through other sorts of public health crises, whether it’s HIV/AIDS or the (mis)treatment and deaths of queer people, or the immense need for better mental health care.
Poitras’s documentary best captures all of this, putting the crisis into its larger social and, one might say, spiritual roots. A society that pathologizes rather than cares for the weak, that stuffs what’s painful into a closet, can’t help but foster a crisis. Add some highly addictive drugs that stand to make some people very rich and you have a flame held to a puddle of gasoline. Nobody escapes the conflagration.
Pain Hustlers, Painkiller, and The Fall of the House of Usher are streaming on Netflix. Dopesick is streaming on Hulu. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is streaming on Max.
What goes up may not come down. Like, ever.
Life in 2023 means being in a constant state of sticker shock.
You walk out of the grocery store feeling like you’re not really sure what happened, but somehow, your normal fare ran you $50 more than you swear it should have. Did Diet Coke always cost that much? Or eggs? Maybe you’ve been putting off buying that new car in the hope prices go back to where they were pre-pandemic, but you’re starting to feel like the wait is awfully long. Or, the morning after a post-work happy hour, you’re left scratching your head. You swear you had two glasses of wine, but the size of your credit card receipt makes you wonder if it wasn’t four. “How expensive everything is today” is a top theme of conversation. The whole situation can be infuriating.
The root of what’s going on here can feel obvious: blame inflation, which picked up in mid-2021 and throughout 2022. But that isn’t really the issue anymore, at least not at the current rate, because inflation is coming down. The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
“Inflation in the US is falling relatively quickly compared to all of our other peer countries, and we have the strongest growth out of the recession,” said Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “But people don’t just want falling inflation numbers, they actually want deflation.”
Deflation probably isn’t in the cards (and the rub is we don’t want it to be). Higher prices might just be the sort of thing we’ve all got to get used to. The truth is we’re never going back to how things were in 2019 — we won’t be returning to the office at the same levels, we’ll never hear “corona” and only think of beer, and that night on the town is going to cost us more than it did before.
Paying more for stuff is the worst
Two things are true in the United States today: The economy is good, and people hate it. Poll after poll shows that many Americans think the economy is in the gutter and that it’s getting worse. That’s even though the labor market is robust, economic growth is strong, and many people say their personal financial situations are just fine. Not to mention that the recession many economists have been predicting for over a year hasn’t materialized. “Why do people say the economy is bad even when it’s good?” is a question dogging economists, journalists, and the White House, which would very much like to convince people otherwise.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers here, but I think one thing is quite clear: People really do not like paying more for stuff than they used to. That doesn’t mean American consumers aren’t still spending — they are — but they’re mad about it.
In June 2022, consumer prices were up by 9.1 percent from the year before, hitting a 40-year high that summer. In September 2023, they were up by 3.7 percent over the previous 12 months. (The Federal Reserve’s inflation target is 2 percent over the long term.) In other words, prices aren’t going up nearly as fast as they were before, but the cost landscape still stings.
“That surge of inflation really reflected a very high growth of prices,” said Rob Rich, director of the Center for Inflation Research at the Cleveland Fed. “Since the pandemic, and since we started raising interest rates, we’ve actually seen the inflation rate slow. Now … it doesn’t mean that prices have fallen. What it means is prices are not growing as quickly as they were before.”
If you’re looking at 2023 through a pre-pandemic lens, even if not intentionally, the situation feels pretty gross. “People might just be still annoyed that prices are high compared to where they were. Even if prices have stopped going up at the rate that they were, it still sucks if you still are anchored to what things were in 2019,” said Matthew Klein, the founder and publisher of The Overshoot, an economic research service.
The Fed’s interest rate hikes to combat inflation mean higher interest rates for consumers as well, meaning buying a house or a car or just paying your credit card bill is more expensive, too.
Some prices have declined and will likely bounce around and fall, such as for commodities and goods. Lumber prices, which soared in 2021, have settled. The same goes for eggs. Oil prices and many food prices depend on global factors, from weather to geopolitics, that are impossible to control. Airfare prices have fallen, but they’re likely to pick back up again soon.
In many areas where prices have come down, they’re not where they were pre-pandemic. As the Wall Street Journal noted in October, the prices of a number of items, from milk to gasoline to new cars, have declined from their recent peaks but are still above where they were ahead of the outset of the Covid-19 outbreak.
“There’s a couple prices people might track that might decline, and some things might normalize here and there. But, in general, the level of spending in the economy is not going to decrease, and the level of spending supports a level of goods and prices,” said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute. “That is unlikely to have a huge shift unless people start spending a lot less, at which point, there would be a recession.”
Prices tend to be “downwardly rigid,” Konczal added, meaning they tend not to go down (the same goes for wages). On the consumer end, once companies increase a price for, say, shampoo or soda, they don’t often revise them back down. Corporations have been quite open that people are largely hanging with them on price increases over the past couple of years, which has allowed them to hike more. There isn’t much consumers can do about it. Many parts of the economy aren’t competitive in a way that would force companies to price down, and it’s not clear how much corporate greed is at the heart of the issue anyway.
Some prices aren’t going to come down at all, meaning your $7 latte isn’t magically going to be $5 like it was in 2015. (On the positive side, with inflation slowing, it’s probably not going to cost $11 next year, either.) The same goes for aggregate prices on the whole.
“The things that people are very price sensitive about and that they really do think about — the price of gas, food prices, price of cars, the price of housing — is all pretty elevated. Cars and housing in particular saw a big shift up and have not declined very much,” Konczal said.
The situation is frustrating to consumers, but it’s important to note that prices suddenly dropping really isn’t a desired outcome — deflation, meaning a broad decline in prices, is generally viewed as a negative by economists.
“Episodes where prices actually fall can be really, really damaging to an economy,” Rich said. If consumers expect prices to fall further, they hold off on purchasing and pull back on spending, which can hurt businesses and impact hiring. Deflation is also a negative for contracts like mortgages and other debt instruments, he explained, because the amount of money borrowers have to pay is fixed, and if prices are falling, it becomes more of a burden. “While everyone may initially think, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s let prices all fall,’ that can actually be very problematic for an economy.”
Klein noted that deflation in the wake of World War I meant a depression. “Prices did go back down a lot, not all the way back to where they were before World War I,” he said. “But you also had a huge increase in unemployment, and you had a huge decrease in wages.”
There’s a silver lining here that we could feel better about than many of us maybe do
Day-to-day life in America is more expensive than it used to be — and, it’s worth noting, around the globe, because inflation hasn’t been just a US problem. Beyond pandemic-induced inflation, the problem of the cost of big-ticket items — health care, child care, higher education, housing — is far from being solved. There’s no denying the cost of living has gone up and that dealing with inflation is painful and a nuisance. The silver lining here is that many people have gotten a raise between then and now, and that 2019 paycheck isn’t coming back either.
Wage growth lagged inflation throughout much of the past couple of years, meaning that while people were getting more money in their paychecks, it didn’t feel like it because prices were going up so fast. But in 2023, that’s shifted, and wages are outpacing inflation once again. People at the lower end of the income spectrum, in particular, have made big gains on pay.
Better pay and even a better job hit differently, psychologically, than inflation.
One research paper Rich worked on from the Cleveland Fed found that people don’t think their wages will keep up with expected inflation. “If people change their inflation expectations, then what they report to us is they think that for every percentage point that expected inflation goes up, they would only expect a 20 percent commensurate increase in their wages,” he said.
When people do get a raise or find a better-paying job, they often don’t attribute it to forces in the greater economy. They see it as a reflection of their own productivity and merits, their hard work paying off, not of macroeconomic conditions.
Basically, if I get a raise at work, I think it’s because I’m awesome. That may be partly true, but that’s not all that’s going on — it’s also that the labor market is tight and wages broadly are going up. My current employer doesn’t want to lose me, and my future employer would have to pay me a little more to lure me away.
While many people see their employment situations (good or bad) as something they’ve earned, they see inflation as something that’s happening to them and that it’s the government’s fault. “The reality is inflation takes away and it gives back. It takes away, prices go up, and it gives back, wages catch up,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. “But you code what it takes away as inflation’s fault but what it gives back as your own genius.”
Overall, people do just seem angrier at inflation than they are happy about jobs. A recent Blueprint/YouGov poll found that 64 percent of registered voters would most like to see lower prices on goods, services, and gas improved in the economy, compared to 20 percent who wanted higher wages, 9 percent who wanted lower interest rates, and just 7 percent who wanted more jobs.
The rate of inflation really is slowing (and, if all goes well, will continue to do so), and the disorienting nature of what’s happened in the economy over the past few years will likely fade. Post-pandemic prices will eventually feel normal, and post-pandemic wages should make those prices more feasible — or at least not significantly less feasible than they were before. Sooner or later, sticker shock will feel a little less shocking.