The Midterms: Everybody Lost!
No big red wave, but "our democracy" still hangs by a thread
But he’s a fighter! That’s the MAGA crowd’s retort to any criticism of Donald Trump. And they’re right. Trump does love a fight. But there’s something else: Trump’s also a loser. True, he did manage to squeak past the mediocre and unloved Hillary Clinton in 2016. But it was all downhill from there. Trump led the Republican Party to defeat in the 2018 midterms. Then in 2020 he lost the presidency to Joe Biden, a doddering old fool who barely left his basement during the campaign. Then, in the course of his misbegotten attempt to overturn the election results, he saw to it that the GOP lost two Senate seats in Georgia. And finally, in the 2022 midterms, his hand-picked MAGA candidates managed to blow numerous races, giving away winnable House seats, Senate seats and governorships. For this year’s red wave that wasn’t, Trump is largely to blame. So yeah, he fights. So did Napoleon—and look what happened at Waterloo.
Democracy defended! Democrats and progressives have been chanting that slogan since Tuesday night. But has it been defended? Florida, once a winnable swing state for Democrats, went full fascist, reelecting those notorious Brownshirts, Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio, by double-digit margins. Down the ballot, the Dems were simply wiped out: Florida is now as red a state as Wyoming. And Republicans did flip the House of Representatives, albeit by a narrower margin than anticipated. When all is said and done, they might also flip the Senate. New York, now considerably less blue, will be sending eleven Republicans to the next House of Representatives. So sorry comrades, but it looks to me as though democracy is still in danger. Citoyens! Aux barricades!
Money talks! And losers like Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, Charlie Crist and Val Demings walk. So how much did Democratic doners pay to have these hapless candidates to lose three governorships and a Senate seat? $100 million, $77 million, $18 million, and $70 million, respectively. The measly total for Crist suggests that Dem doners are not absolute dolts, but otherwise—! What’s remarkable is that Abrams and O’Rourke—the latter especially—were proven losers going into this year’s elections. Yet between them they hoovered up nearly $180 million, money that would have been better spent elsewhere. But the Great Blue Hope mirage is a powerful inducement to throw good money after bad. I exempt from this criticism Val Demings, who by comparison with the usual Democratic Party parade of horribles was a decent candidate. One can see why Demmings for Senate seemed like a good investment. But it was her misfortune to run in a state where all the fundamentals were against her.
Down for the count! What’s the problem in Arizona, anyway? Do they draft toddlers to tabulate election results? Here it is Thursday and we still have no idea who won the races for governor, Senate, and other offices in the Grand Canyon State. As of this writing Trump-endorsed Republican Kari Lake is trailing her opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs, by less than one percentage point. The Senate race is less close but with hundreds of thousands of ballots still to count, the issue remains in doubt. Compare this sorry performance to Florida’s efficient and timely ballot processing. Lake has pledged to reform the state’s election law if elected, but her proposed changes would slow down the process even more. The people of Arizona deserve better. Come on, people—it’s really not that complicated!
Investigation nation! Here we go again. With every transfer of power, there are pledges by the incoming party to investigate the hell over those crooks and reprobates on the other side. And the party on the receiving end squeals that it’s all a distraction from “doing the business of the American people” or some such thing. In reality, of course, oversight is a congressional responsibility—though not all investigations are created equal. I myself am considerably less interested in Hunter Biden’s laptop than I am in the Afghanistan debacle and the politicization of the Justice Department and the FBI. The Biden Administration’s jihad against “disinformation” also deserves some scrutiny: What about the First Amendment, Brandon? Have you repealed it or something? Yes, I know, such investigations are of their nature exercises in partisan politics. But that didn’t stop Democrats from giving the Trump Administration a deep and searching anal exam. Now that it’s their turn the Dems should just bend over and grit their teeth. The defense of “our democracy” sometimes demands painful sacrifice.
Well, you lost! :)
The Trump review is half-true. There wasn't much of a blue wave in 2018 either. What Trump brought to the table was a set of long suppressed issues that the establishments of either party swept under the rug and spent some effort in getting everyone to ignore. His movement also arrived when liberals themselves went into disarray when the assault of the highly illiberal "woke" movement began to undermine confidence in cultural and other public institutions.
Without COVID, it's likely that Trump would have been re-elected in 2020. The pre-COVID economy was doing better, especially for workers of modest means, than it had in 50 years. His 2020 vote picked up more support from every demographic -- except middle-aged to older white males. It was the swing of the latter to Biden that undid Trump.
Some of this trend is still with us, apart from lower voter turnout than in 2020. There's COVID anxiety as well. Trump-endorsed and Trump-charged and Trump-adjacent candidates might have done well in Republican primaries. But in general elections, mostly, these associations were negatives.
The Trump issues will be with us for the rest of our lifetimes, and the Democrats will get more and more desperate in distracting voters, but much of it no longer works. The man Trump is likely to be a has-been by the end of next year. The polls show clearly that even a lot of Republicans are tired of the wacky MAGA personalities. That's how a brain-damaged Democrat could win in Pennsylvania. Oz might have won in a more conventional circumstance. But the Trump association, working to his advantage in the primary, was definitely a negative in the general.
Thomas, some of what you say about Trump is true, but you’re missing a big part of the picture. Trump is a transformational figure in an important (and I think) positive way. Trump not only instigated the process which turned the GOP from the party of business elites into the party of working Americans, he is also responsible for enticing tens of millions of African-American and Latino voters to consider the GOP as a reasonable vehicle for their political aspirations.
Its no small feat that isn’t diminished by the fact that it received a major assist from Democrats who abandoned the working class by warmly embracing the interests and values of overly-educated elites.
My prediction is that decades hence, Trump will be considered to be as transformational a figure as Teddy Roosevelt. Like Trump, Roosevelt was only elected to one term (though he served almost two as a result of McKinley’s assassination). Like Trump, Roosevelt lost his re-election campaign, though not as a Republican candidate. Roosevelt was as divisive a political figure as Trump. His decision to run for the Presidency as a third party candidate handed the election to Woodrow Wilson. Sadly, we still suffer from the consequences of Wilson’s election, even today. Mainstream Republicans were as incensed at Roosevelt in the early 20th century as they are at Trump in the early 21st century.
It is absolutely true that the GOP suffered from the weak candidates that Trump endorsed. But the abortion decision was a major problem that the GOP could not overcome. Married men and women voted for Republican candidates by reasonably large margins. Unmarried women voted for Democrats by enormous margins. It was simply unrealistic to expect that the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would not have enormous political consequences in the short-run. At some point, the GOP will need to figure out a more compelling message on abortion than the one they’re selling now that isn’t even working in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana let alone Michigan and California. As importantly, to maximize the impact of new GOP voters recruited by Trump, Republicans will have to harmonize the conflicting perspectives of NatCons and more traditional constituencies represented by the likes of Mitch McConnell. It should surprise no one that this will take time.
If the GOP takes the House, they will have a small majority but it will be as robust as the majority enjoyed by Nancy Pelosi over the past two years. The GOP did not get the red wave they anticipated but on the bright side for them, they already have two straight elections in which they’ve added House seats. The number of seats they won this time may be smaller than expected, but adding House seats while losing the Presidency two years ago is also out of the ordinary. How did they do it? They added new voters who never considered the GOP before thanks to policies articulated by Trump. As for the Senate, the Republicans had to defend far more seats than the Democrats; two years from now the positions will be completely reversed.
You’re criticism of Trump is fair as far as it goes, but there’s a bigger picture that you’ve neglected.