The GOP offered rage and Trump. The country said no.
WASHINGTON >> Republicans misread the mood of the country, and many political analysts went along. Young voters backed the Democrats, and enough voted this year to make a big difference. Americans are quite capable of being angry about the state of the economy without letting their unhappiness push them into the arms of extremists.
And for the Republican Party, Donald Trump is a stone cold loser.
The red wave so many anticipated in this year’s midterms proved to be a chimera. The reliable polls did say it would be close. Many prognosticators preferred precooked conclusions.
The United States remains a deeply divided country, but a substantial majority (58 percent in the national exit poll) dislikes the former president. This majority saved one Democrat after another from defeat. President Biden had one of the most successful midterm elections of any chief executive in history, not because he enjoyed high approval ratings (he doesn’t) but because nearly half of the voters said he was not a factor in their choice. They backed Democrats by a 3-to-2 ratio to oppose the far right, Trump and the election deniers — and to support abortion rights and gun control.
Biden understood this and was willing to take grief for avoiding most of the competitive contests. He did not ask for the electorate’s endorsement. He insisted instead that they look at the alternative.
“This election is not a referendum, it’s a choice,” he declared at a Philadelphia event in late October that helped boost Democrat John Fetterman to victory in Pennsylvania’s pivotal Senate race. Biden repeated himself to drive the point home: “It’s a choice. What direction you want to see this country go in? … What do you think Republicans are for?”
The last was a challenging question because Republicans failed to put forward anything that could be considered a governing agenda.
The consensus seemed to be that the GOP had run a very disciplined campaign focused on inflation and crime, with attacks on Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) layered in to fertilize discontent.
It didn’t work, partly because Republicans offered nothing in the way of solutions to the problems they were bemoaning. They also fudged what was supposed to be an issue of high principle, fleeing in horror from the abortion question once they realized how much anger a right-wing Supreme Court had inspired by overturning Roe v. Wade.
Their evasion didn’t help them. Exit polls showed that three-quarters of voters who cast ballots on abortion backed Democrats. And the GOP’s inability to specify what the party might do with power undercut Republicans on the issues that were supposed to be their salvation.
The Associated Press’s VoteCast exit poll found that nearly half of the electorate listed the economy and jobs as the most important issue facing the country. That should have been good news for Republicans, but roughly one-third of these voters backed Democrats, who also won nearly 4 in 10 among those who said crime was their driving concern.
This pointed to another, often ignored, aspect of what was happening on the ground. Democrats won much criticism, often from within their own ranks, for not having a coherent national “message” on the economy. But in contest after contest, Democratic candidates pointed to what they had done and would do about the economy, highlighting their achievements on infrastructure, investments in new technologies and efforts to fight climate change, as well as attempts to reel in prescription drug costs.
The weakness of the Republican showing was brought home by some of their pickups, particularly in Florida and New York, where the results came as much from the redrawing of district lines as any change in voter sentiment.
It’s probably too much to hope that Democratic success will tamp down warfare between the party’s progressive and centrist wings. But both sides would do well to acknowledge a core fact of political life: Democrats win only when they can unite the left and the center. Democrats needed the turnout and the 88 percent vote share they won from the slightly more than a quarter of the electorate that described itself as liberal. But they also needed the 54 percent they won among the one-third of voters who said they were moderate.
For all the good news for Democrats, the fact remains that the outcome of this election is up in the air. Many House seats and the decisive Senate seats remain undecided. Republicans could yet emerge with very narrow control of the House and possibly the Senate. A Republican Congress would make governing hell over the next two years.
But even if it does gain a share of power, the GOP will have to reckon with how its fealty to Trump and trafficking with extremists is lethal, and how voters demand more from their politicians than rage. After six years of bowing, scraping and blustering, you wonder if Republicans have any capacity for introspection left in them.