Whatever your politics and wherever you live, this week’s American election is something you’ve been inundated with stories and opinions about. On election day, I heard from friends in India, France, and UK about how shocked they were. My Facebook feed–it is limited to those I am in person friends with–is full of sorrow, anger, horror, and, yes, joy. I have friends who are now seriously planning to leave the country and friends who feel this election will serve our nation well. Most of the latter are religious and anti-abortion or are immigrants themselves.
We have no choice but to move forward. I am someone who hopes for the best, prepares for the worst, and believe that the future will be different but OK. I’m going to continue to work to create communities where all feel welcome and all are willing to work together–I really don’t see any other way to live. Oh, and I’m going to give as many as possible hugs and support.
Since I can’t actually hug you all, today I offer a poem of sorrow, hope, and compassion.
Much love,
Dabney
When I was growing up it seemed as though all the dangerous history had happened long ago and I was lucky to live in a time of peace and prosperity. And looking back now, it was a precious window of time. Sure, COVID turned the world upside down, but here in Australia we were largely insulated from the terror and chaos that swept many other parts of the world.
But this election, even from the other side of the world, has had a palpable feel of living through something momentous that is going to prove to be a turning point in history. It’s not a nice feeling. I hope we all come out the other side however you voted, if it was in good faith. Believe me, for every American who chose not to vote at all there was someone in another country who would gladly have voted instead. Your collective decision affects all of us.
During Trump’s first term I came to resent having to spend a lot of time reading the news that would have been better spent reading books. I will try to maintain a better balance this time….
I was thinking about how our elections shape world politics and decisions. With several volatile situations around the globe, how this country acts will have big impacts on much of the world. It’s scary. Sorry. Trump wants to turn America into a country like Hungary, and is using Orban as a role model. Let’s all hope our contstutional guardrails are strong enough to stop that.
As the saying goes – when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
I am someone who hopes for the best, prepares for the worst, and believe that the future will be different but OK.
This is a nice, but willfully naïve sentiment. A lot of people won’t survive this term, and a lot of people aren’t going to be “all right,” especially our Latino and trans neighbors. I am lucky to live in a deep blue state with one MAGA pocket in it, but even people here are worried by what we saw.
I think the future will be all right for some people, meaning people who aren’t likely to be deported or their rights taken away. When it comes to those people, I don’t believe the future will be rosy.
I agree that Trump’s policies on immigration are likely to both cruel and bad for our economy. My sister works with undocumented women, mostly victims of sexual abuse. She too is very worried for her clients. AND she believes that, as happened last time Trump was in office, that there will be more NGOs, individuals, and organizations that work against his rule.
When I say that I believe the future will be OK, I mean just that. I don’t believe that everyone will thrive or that everyone will suffer. I am more able to work on behalf of those who are in need if I believe there is a possible reasonable future for them.
Yep. And even they will find out what life under a tariff economy is like.
That plan seems likely to hurt the poor the most.
Oh, it definitely will.
Pretty much everything these days hurts everyone but the extremely wealthy.
People don’t remember that last time Trump was president he imposed tariffs on China. In retaliation, the Chinese stopped buying American farm goods. Trump then said he got China to buy from us again, but they didn’t. Congress had to appropriate $30 billion to make the farmers whole – that’s $30 billion of our tax money to pay for his tariff policy. I can only imagine what will happen going forward if he imposes tariffs on everyone.
Trump has no idea how tariffs work, even now. He keeps telling people that the other country pays the tariffs, which is patently untrue. The other day I read an article describing how tariffs actually work, and I was amazed at Trump-supporting commentors being shocked about it, and expressed real displeasure at how this awas going to affect them. This is going to really hurt the working class, and will include people like me with middle class incomes but a lot of people to support. I’m hoping his advisors will talk him out of it, since US voters have short memories and will absolutely out Republicans in the midterm elections if the economy tanks.
Or Trump enacts policies that are so wildly unpopular that the populace corrects course in two years.
If we’re allowed to vote in two years…
Agreed. As the mom of a trans child I’m scared about what could happen next. We’re moving to a reliably blue state as soon as we can, but some things Trump will do will impact every state and every person (and a lot of wildlife). We won’t be undoing the damage soon, either. Yes, we’ll fight. Yes, we’ll keep giving money. But if Trump does what he says, it could be years before we even get a chance to push back in the political arena.
I absolutely thought of you when I heard the election results, thinking of your family.
Thanks, it’s been rough but we’re trying to look forward. It takes on a different tone when family members could not only lose access to critical medical care, but could be targets of hate and violence. Just look at the horrible emails/texts being sent to black people in the last few days.
Like Nah, I thought of parents of trans children and what they must be feeling now. I also thought of all the illegal immigrants who were desperate to leave their countries and who are so fearful, even more than they were, before. It’s only the luck of the draw that I am not one of these people. I tell myself that thinking of Jews in hiding in Germany and other occupied countries is not comparable, but that’s how I feel. I am hoping and praying that I am getting all upset at what will not come to pass. So, I take deep breaths, and. . .
I am taking deep breaths. Not watching the news or reading political commentaries. I’m trying not to anticipate the future. Like “Candide,” I am tending my own garden.
I will continue to contribute to the ACLU and other organizations.
Fortune’s wheel will turn. That’s for certain. We just don’t know how long it’ll take.
Have hope, people. Don’t anticipate the worst. We are all old enough to know that such dreadful fears usually don’t come to happen.
Stay calm. And carry on.
I’ve been reading more about the political situation, not less, in the last few days. I want to get a perspective on what happened and why. It’s been very eye-opening and, in turns, infuriating and humbling. There are many well-written opinion pieces on what the Democrats got wrong, not just this cycle but for decades, and as hard as it is to hear it’s important to realize why millions of people would vote the way they did. Yes, they did vote against their own best interests in many ways, but I’m beginning to understand some of the whys and it makes a sort of sense. For me, reading people dissecting of the election has been helpful instead of worsening my anxiety. If we understand , then we can actually work to change. It’s time liberals took a look inward and see their own failings in being approachable and non-elitist. I include myself here.
There’s an article in the NYT today about a politician named Gluesenkamp Perez who won re-election as a Dem in a red district. She did it because she understands working class people and how they think and what really matters to them. It’s a thoughtful look at what Democrats have been getting wrong.
I too thought that was an interesting article.
I feel as though our state (NC) had lots of good news. While we went 51% for Trump–not great but didn’t surprise me–we elected a slew of great leaders for our State AND we broke the Republican supermajority that has allowed our gerrymandered government to overrule our Democratic governor again and again.
I’m a big fan of Jeff Jackson who has what it takes to win big in this state, Josh Stein who ran a very smart campaign, Rachel Rachel Hunt for North Carolina who flipped the lieutenant governorship, Elaine Marshall who narrowly won as Secretary of State, and Mo Green for NC for NC School Superintendent. All are smart, sane, and wil help NC flourish.
The national party should take a long hard look at how these candidates ran and what it takes to win.
I also was pleased with much of NC’s news, but don’t party yet. I just read that breaking the supermajority in the house is still not a sure thing as there are several very close races that will probably trigger recounts. Plus, many of the deciding votes are provisional ballots, and that will probably prompt lawsuits as well. The incoming Speaker has already says he feels confident they will be able to act as a supermajority anyway, since moderate dems have been known to cross the aisle. We’ll see.
I’m not partying but I am hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. <3
I’m less worried about my future (in my late-sixties with a significant portion of my life behind me) than I am for the futures of my three reproductive-age daughters—all of whom are on various forms of birth control. It’s not just losing access to abortion (I expect Trump to enact a nation-wide ban almost immediately as one of his first official acts) because we live in a very red state where abortion access has been restricted for years, it’s losing access to birth control (the next item on Project 2025’s anti-woman agenda) and the bodily autonomy that comes with that. I’m old enough to remember when my mom and her sisters and friends got access to the birth control pill (there’s a reason the baby boom ended in 1964) and how thrilled they were to realize they wouldn’t have to get pregnant again. I think for women younger than about 45 there are some dark days ahead—regardless of how they voted.
We’ll see. A nationwide ban would be wildly unpopular. Will he do it? Vance will certainly be pulling for that. A ban on birth control would be even more unpopular. Project 2025 may want that–again, we’ll see. A ban on fertility treatments–Vance has said these are safe but many of the laws passed after Dobbs fell are, doctors feel, a ban–would also be wildly unpopular.
Most who voted for Trump don’t believe he’ll do a lot of the stuff he said–we are about to find out.
Apparently there is a lot of curiosity in the US about the 4B movement. That is a fairly extreme response but from a Republican point of view, talk about unintended consequences….
I was just talking about 4B at dinner tonight!
I’ve seen/heard this a lot – “oh, he won’t really do that, and in any case, he doesn’t mean us.”
– and I think a lot of people are in for a big shock when they realise he DID mean them.
And by saying that, they also are admitting they know he’s a pathological liar.
I hear you. AND I think that the Democratic Party’s insistence against all evidence that Joe Biden had no cognitive decline makes many feel lied to.
I guess I think it’s time for the Democratic Party to figure out how to reach voters for whom Trump’s vision of the future was more compelling than Harris’. We can’t win at the polls without a majority of voters trusting and believing in our candidates.
It boggles my mind that people forgot 2016-2020 – it was just a few years ago. He used child separation as a deliberately cruel policy to stop immigrants from coming here. He placed two justices on the Supreme court who he knew would overturn Roe v. Wade. I have zero respect for any voter who says he won’t do what he says he’ll do because they are either stupid or lying. (Oh, and he incited a mob to storm the Capitol in order to overturn a fair election and only believes elections are fair when he wins them – but whatever!)
^^ This
Although this is a conversation specific to the politics of your country, I hope you let me give my opinion and forgive me if I give another perspective, from Southern Europe.
As a European, what worries us is what will happen in the event of armed conflict. Being a member of NATO does not ensure that the organization will protect you. Our main concern, today, is Ukraine, and then the Baltic states and Poland. Of course there’s also that little thing about tariffs.
That’s why I think most people outside the United States wanted Harris to win, although it seemed, because of the closeness of the polls, that anyone could win.
Having said that, I’m of the opinion that we in Europe should have taken our defense more seriously years ago, instead of relying on changing American politics. At the end of the day, the politician has to make the potential voters happy, their fellow countrymen, and not those from abroad. If the voter perceives that you put other countries before the interest of your own, he or she is not going to vote for you.
Looking at the data, it’s not so much that Trump won, but that Harris lost. Let me explain. 74.22 million people voted for Trump in 2020 and again in 2024. There are no new voters, no old ones are lost. But 81.28 million voted for Biden in 2020 and 70.35 for Harris in 2024. She is the one who lost, an improvised candidate who, from the few interviews I have seen with her, does not sound particularly brilliant. I could be wrong, as I have seen only snippets of her interviews. Playing not to lose, makes you lose in the end. Again, I could be totally wrong, listening to someone give a speech or an interview in a language that is not my mother tongue.
What I ask myself is not why people vote for Trump but what the Democrats have done in these four years so that 10.82 million voters have stopped voting for a Democrat candidate. What has the Biden administration done to lose voters.
Excuse me if I have offended anyone, because it’s not my country and there are many things that I ignore. So I could be completely wrong about the facts.
And to answer your question. Personally, I don’t need hugs for politics either in my country or abroad. When I was born, my country was under a dictatorship, and we know that being emotional does not solve anything. It’s useless suffering. As I see it, politicians of any colour rejoice in our suffering, and our divisiveness, as they can use it for their agendas. At least that’s what happens in my country, as recent events has widely shown.
Very interesting Thanks for sharing.
The voting data is pretty clear–every group except for white men and women went for Trump in greater numbers than they had in 2020.
It is my personal belief–shared by many–that the Democratic party has, for some time now, misread the room. As Maureen Dowd says in the NYT today:
I agree with Nicholas Kristoff:
The elites are, comparatively, doing well in America’s economy. Working class people, especially men, are not. As Kristof points out:
It’s easy to see why voters, feeling poor, ignored, and afraid, went for the promises of Trump. Will it turn out the way those voters hoped? I doubt that strongly. But I do believe that unless the Democrats can tell a story that reaches the non-elites, they’re continue to lose the country.
Focusing on social issues isn’t a bad thing and, to be honest, anything that pushes back on the blatant transphobia and racism that keeps happening is good. They need to do that AND cater to economic issues. Also the notion that any campus protests RE Palestine were antisemitic is blatantly false, outside of a number of outliers. It’s not antisemitic to be antiZionist.
To be frank, Harris made the mistake of trying to cater to Bush-era Republicans with the Liz Chaney stuff and they weren’t going to vote for her anyway.
I agree, but the elephant in the room is that the US isn’t ready to elect a woman. when Biden pulled out I told my family that I didn’t believe Kamala was electable in the current political climate. I wanted to be wrong, but what we’ve seen is an even greater surge of open misogyny. Right now there are boys/young men in schools taunting girls with “Your body. My choice.” Not only has the past decade opened my eyes to how much we haven’t yet accomplished in racial or LGBTQ equality, but how much less headway our country has made actually changing grassroots attitudes towards women than I thought.
I think it’s important to not dismiss the results as only racism and sexism. The gender gap in this election was smaller than that of 2016 and 2020. Non-whites voted for Trump in big numbers. This is not to say that racism and sexism doesn’t matter or isn’t real but to say that binary framings of social issues aren’t working the way Democrats hoped and thought they would.
I think they should’ve run her four years from now. Vance does not have the Clutch Cargo personality cult that Trump does, and when he dies, the Q anon nonsense dies with him.
We’ll see. I think we underestimate Vance at our peril.
Agreed. Trump is all about Trump and will say and do whatever he needs to to get what he wants. But Vance is a ‘true believer’ and much more dangerous. I will be surprised if he isn’t president by this time next year.
Oh, I know he can do a lot of damage – history will tell.
Same. I told my family we could not win with her as the candidate. Democrats seemed to believe that you could run anyone against Trump. He is so repugnant to them that they figure voters would choose anyone over him. Some would, but clearly, the majority don’t agree.
Voters wanted change, they wanted a story that valued them, they wanted to overthrown the status quo. Harris was, despite her gender and race, a status quo candidate.
What bothers me most is that the Democrats seemed to learn nothing from 2016. They seemed to feel the country did a total course correction in 2020, and they didn’t prepare at all for the idea that the future was shaky and that we needed to solidify the ground we held. It’s not like these elections are spontaneous — they’re on a freaking schedule! We should have started prepping who was going to run in 2020. Instead, we had that last-minute fiasco. I think voters wanted economic change, but I think many people wanted an end to change and even a rollback on some of the changes the culture has made. Many feel they live in an America that doesn’t value the American Dream. They are offended that the narrative they grew up with – of brave European white settlers building a shining, prosperous land – has been forcibly replaced with the truth that this is stolen property, their wealth was built on the backs of slaves, and we have a history of abuse of women, Indigenous people, and minorities of the brown/black skinned variation. They want their narrative taught in schools – the American dream is alive and well and beautiful. And I get that – we need to find a narrative that reflects that America has done a lot of good things while still acknowledging the whopping wrongs in our history.
I’d agree that the vision you paint of America and the one revered by those who voted for Trump are fundamentally at odds. And, unless Democrats can win at the ballot box, the view of the majority of Americans who voted red is going to reign.
I agree with this assessment, Dabney. Democrats used to be the party of the blue collar workers, and they’ve lost their roots and have become elitists.
Yes. On both economic and social issues, the well-educated, blue Washington-focused, coastal well off elites who have been setting the language and policies of the Democratic party have inexplicably written off the complaints and concerns of the working class, many men, and many Black, Asian, and Latino voters. To win them back, we’ll have to listen, compromise, and make policies most Americans will vote for.
Clear statement of the situation, Dabney. When you look at a map with the red and blue states shown, it’s a clear and precise picture of dear old “Fly-Over America” writ large. The Democrats simply must wake up and see how they have let down that whole section of America. America, as I tell Brits when we talk about this, is NOT California and New York. It’s Idaho, Nebraska, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, etc.
Well, disdain is never a winning election strategy.
What kind of compromises would be possible on certain topics? There was a decent bipartisan border bill that got killed deliberately by Republicans so that Trump could run on how Scary Illegal Immigrants Are Killing Your Cats and Eating Them. Jobs, economy, cost, housing and education are what need to be focused on.
I agree that is what the Democratic party should be focused on.
I agree that the Democrats played to the coastal elites, but the irony is that the Democrats actually were the ones who passed bills under Biden that improved the lot of the working class: more subsidies for health insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act, more manufacturing jobs under the Inflation Reduction Act, more construction jobs through the infrastructure programs, increased funding to the IRS to get the ultra rich to pay their fair share. Republicans say they are for the workers but lest we forget it was the Republican-run Department of Labor during Trump’s first term that tried to impose a policy where restaurant tips belonged to the restaurant owner, not the workers. It was Republicans who made it harder for unions to organize. The list goes on, but if you look at actual programs and not just rhetoric, the Democrats came through more often than the Republicans.
Exactly! The Democrats didn’t ignore the working class; the Republicans just said they did. The Republicans have done nothing for working class people except to tell them what they want to hear and convince them to vote against their own interests.
^^ Ding Ding!
Democrats have to figure out how to make the majority of Americans who have now put the other party in charge of all three branches of government vote for the Democrats. Unless they figure that out, all their good intentions are useless.
^This^. I have listened to Dems blame each other (pundits: we’re too woke! No, We’re not woke enough!) for the past week but the simple fact is we lost the election by losing percentages of our key demographics. Whether it’s a messaging problem, a platform problem or an image problem (I think all three) we lost. We need to figure out how to win.
“The Real Majority,” by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, is a book by two Democratic party operatives who explained what was costing Dems elections back in 1970. No one listened but the NY Times says it applies as easily to this election as to many others. I was saddened, distressed, and sickened by Harris’s lost but not the least surprised. But I am scared. Very scared.
I read your analysis with interest, Bona, and found it very acute indeed. Though born in the US (California), I have lived in the UK for 40+ years. I am no longer a US citizen so the last election I was able to vote in was in 2016 so I did not have a dog in this race.
There was an election in the UK in July. One of the things that I see to be in common with the two elections is that the traditionally right-leaning parties (e.g. Republicans and Conservatives/Reform) seem now to be more likely viewed as the parties of the “working man” – despite what Sir Kier Starmer and his chancellor say – and the more left-leaning parties (e.g. Democrats and Labour) seem to have gravitated somewhat more be woke, condescending (e.g. telling, not showing) and more likely to push identity politics when they have traditionally been seen as the parties of the “horny-handed working man”. Once commentator I read this week remarked that Hollywood celebs making a supportive splash for Harris did not help as many voters are not remotely interested in them nor the lifestyle they represent and find this sort of thing offensive in “telling the little people” what is right according to those with money, fame and fortune when the “little people” are the ones struggling with every day living, costs of gas/petrol, food, clothing, worried about their kids, etc. (So do shut up George Clooney and Opra Winfrey, etc.) Frankly, I think Trump is a lot of bluster and that he won’t want to jeopardise his legacy too much as the next 4 years are the last for him. Harris worried me because I could not identify any real policies she wanted to promote other than on abortion and she seemed a complete novice with regard to foreign affairs. The one to watch, IMO, in all of this is the new VP. I read his book with interest and will be curious as to how his term unfolds. Things are likely to be less bad than feared and may even be more good than expected. We will see.
With the authors of Project 2025 at his back, I am not at all optimistic that he’ll “soften” his rhetoric. These groups have been playing a long game in American politics for over 40 years, using abortion (which most churches including the Southern Baptist Convention were not strongly opposed to initially). They got the idea to use abortion to turn American conservative christians into one-issue voters, and it’s worked. I was still involved in churches in 2016, and I heard so many people say they really didn’t like Trump, but he was going to end abortion and that’s the only thing that mattered to them. These people got Reagan into office from behind the scenes, but have been emboldened this go ’round to step into the light and flaunt their regressive beliefs. He’s already promised to follow their recommendations in getting rid of the EPA, the Dept of Education, and cutting back on federal disaster relief.
I do think Trumps advisors will caution against the tariff because they will tank the economy and there are midterm elections in two years! (Although Elon Musk is pushing for the tarrifs and we all know how Trump loves to be praised by powerful men.)
Maybe. I could not say for certain and who truly knows the machinations behind a lot of what goes on. However, one thing does strike me and that’s that the old “States Rights” issue is not dead and buried. My father always used to joke: “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South will rise again”. It’s eye opening to look at the USA from abroad on the issue of abortion and another hot-button issue, Assisted Dying. The latter is about to be debated in Parliament in the UK and, though I am in favour of this in broad terms, I don’t think it will pass. But looking at the USA, there are some very, very liberal laws on it and, for example, drug legalisation, abortion, etc, in some states. There is such a wide variation. Personally, if I lived in a state that outlawed abortion, I would pack my bags and move to another one that did allow it. I do realise, of course, that’s not always an option especially for women without money or means. I cried tears of frustration and anger when Roe v Wade was overturned but I don’t think I can agree with you that it is so invasive on such a large scale in US politics. The cash in the pocket book, “the economy stupid” and prices at gas pumps are more relevant to most folk.
I think the Trump administration will have tension between the States rights approach–popular with much of the US–and Federalism. I have a hard time seeing that Trump would push to overturn abortion for the nation–but there will be people in his administration who will do so. Who will win? It’s very hard to say. I do think that Vance is far more supportive of Federalism than Trump at this point in his career.
I’m talking about how conservative christianity moved their constituents farther right, and believe me, it was all about abortion! I was part of these churches from the 80’s to about 10 or 12 years ago. Abortion was a huge and super frequent topic in every church, conference, etc. They landed on abortion as an issue in the late 70’s, founded the MOral Majority around this issue, and the push to hyperfocus christians on abortion took shape. I can’t tell you how many christians, including my dearest friends, told me in 2016 they had to vote for Trump even though he was obviously a terrible man because “He is going to stop abortions.” The focus on abortion was a huge factor that gradually led churches to pick up the far-right banner of Trumpism as a whole. I’m not saying it was as big a factor in this election. I’m saying the focus on abortion in the past 4 decades in Christian churches was huge in making them the far-right institutions they are now.
“But what happens in the 1970s is, first of all, with the passing of Roe v. Wade, you see a spike in the number of abortions. And that causes many Americans, not just evangelicals, to kind of rethink is this what we wanted? But I think more importantly, you have the rise of second-wave feminism and, in conservative, white, evangelical spaces, a real backlash against feminism. And over the course of that decade, abortion becomes linked to feminism. And so you see the sentiment start to shift so that in 1979, when political activist Paul Weyrich identifies abortion as a potential to really mobilize conservative evangelicals politically, to help build the Moral Majority, then it is a very effective mechanism for doing so. And from 1979 on, that’s when you see a real kind of shrinking of space within conservative evangelicalism to have any view on abortion that isn’t strictly and staunchly pro-life, life begins at conception.”
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097514184/how-abortion-became-a-mobilizing-issue-among-the-religious-right
Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come is a short, easy read on how evangelical churches that formerly focused on social issues like poverty were moved to the right by abortion. Daniel Willian’s God’s Own Party shows how racism and sexism are both the true underlying factors for the shift, with abortion being the bogey man they hide behind. Jesus and John Wayne is another great look at these issues. The shifts and changes in theology have happened during my life time and I have watched things change with horror, until I am at a point where I don’t even recognize Christianity anymore.
I forgot to add that tax issues are a huge factor. Christian schools were the last stand of segregation, and when they were threatened with tax penalties, abortion suddenly became an issue.
I was raised in this kind of environment, and yep.
Musk saying the economy needs to tank so they can reform it is definitely A Thing.
Frankly, I think Trump is a lot of bluster and that he won’t want to jeopardise his legacy too much as the next 4 years are the last for him.
Sadly I think this is willfully naïve. I mean, look at who the new boarder czar is.
Harris worried me because I could not identify any real policies she wanted to promote other than on abortion and she seemed a complete novice with regard to foreign affairs.
This reminds me of my father’s take on the election. Unfortunately he thinks that his Medicare and Social Security won’t be cut. Because he voted against Harris without bothering to look up her policies but hasn’t read a thing about P2025.
Things are likely to be less bad than feared and may even be more good than expected.
Tell me, do you have any transgender friends? Know any women in their 20s, 30s or 40s? I do. I don’t think it’s going to be ‘more good for them than expected.’
I have a kid who has racked up millions of dollars in medical costs (pre-insurance). We paid only thousands, thanks in part to Obamacare. I am scared that they’ll roll back the ACA and his medical treatment will become prohibitive. If that happens, we will likely move to another country.
I think the likelihood that medical costs go up for everyone is great. Many MDs I know are very worried.
I’m so sorry for your worry. Right now my (adult) kids either have insurance or are part of our hospital system’s financial aid network, so we’re ok. But if they get get rid of the pre-existing conditions mandate we could all be in trouble. I mean, after a while everything is a pre-existing condition.
This is what frightens me most.