The New Yorker:

Voters in Missouri tend not to give Democrats a second look. No member of the Party has won statewide office since 2018, and in last week’s election the Republican senator Josh Hawley, who had raised a fist to encourage the January 6th crowd at the Capitol, cruised to reëlection by about fourteen points. But on that same ballot Missouri’s voters enshrined the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. And they passed Proposition A, which will institute a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage over time and guarantee paid sick leave to workers. (Voters in the red state of Alaska approved a similar hike in the minimum wage, and a successful referendum in Republican-heavy Nebraska will now require employers to provide sick leave.) The Missouri measure was opposed by the state’s Chamber of Commerce, a bulwark of the Republican coalition. And yet Proposition A won by a bigger margin than Hawley.

This is the kind of result—a couple of ballot measures in a smallish, distant, and deeply red state—that tends to register mostly with policy wonks, winding up on the third page of election memos sent to politicians. But it should resound more broadly, among politicians of both parties. The red-state minimum-wage and sick-leave measures are a helpful instance, in the midst of a momentous election, of voters revealing not just who they are aligned with but what it is they want. And their success suggests a little bit about how much the field of politics has, in the past decade, shifted.

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