What makes America great
Since 4pm on Wednesday, I have written three different versions of this column while the results of elections for the United States Congress teetered one way then the other, as if great themes could be extracted from the distribution of a few votes in a Nevada county.
At the time of writing, we still don’t know if the Republicans will take the House of Representatives. Democrats could hang on to the Senate. This is remarkable. The Democrats were predicted to get wiped out.
But the red wave never came. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called it the Republicans’ ‘‘Red Wedding’’. If they can’t deliver a blow to the Democrats in a mid-term election (always bad for incumbents) with an unpopular president and 8% inflation, when can they?
The horse race of politics is exciting, but doesn’t make for a good column. I’m happy for others to keep counting. I want to understand what’s going on for voters. In this case it’s personal.
My Polish stepmother lives in Atlanta and votes Democrat, but was once tempted by the decent Mitt Romney. My youngest brother and his family pay little attention to politics. Too busy raising a family and getting to work. Then there’s Uncle Skip and Aunty Riba, not related but adored by my kids. Staunch Republicans. Born and bred in the South. They voted for Donald Trump but ‘‘don’t like the way he talks about people’’.
For them, politics is about their lives, and the starting point is thinking about how government affects them.
We don’t know enough yet about how people voted. Some trends are emerging.
This was meant to be a referendum on President Joe Biden. It ended up a referendum on Trump. He loomed over the election. Biden stayed in the background.
Candidates selected for no reason other than personal loyalty to Trump did worse than average. Nearly all the Republican candidates for governor who refused to say they would have certified Biden’s 2020 election win in their state, lost.
So perhaps the greater epochal conclusion is that, when voters had democracy itself on the ballot, they chose the quality that makes America great. Most don’t want to be ruled by insurrectionists and crackpots.
I’m cautious about the conclusions to be drawn from election results decided by a couple of percentage points.
The Democrats did better than expected but lost some battles. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis won big in Florida. The state used to be marginal. Florida is now the Democrats’ ‘‘Red Break’’, and Ron DeSantis the presidential frontrunner.
Democrats will have to work harder if Republicans learn the real lesson from Trump’s win in 2016. He won not by being ‘‘Trump-ey’’, but by shifting the party to the left economically, and responding to the thing that voters said was the thing – American jobs. If he’d been a decent human being, the Republicans might have done even better in 2016, won in 2020, and had their red wave in 2022.
Ron DeSantis isn’t Trump, which makes him a bigger risk for the Democrats in 2024.
Doing what’s popular wins elections. The Democrats were worried they’d focused too much on abortion rights and the fight for democracy, when the biggest issues for voters were inflation and crime.
Turned out taking people’s rights away mattered. Three in 10 voters said that abortion rights were their reason for turning out to vote, about the same as said inflation.
A president’s party normally does badly in the midterms because people are worried about overreach, and want checks on incumbents. This time, the overreach came from the Supreme Court.
People are exhausted by the nastiness of politics. The Democrats did better than expected in states like Ohio where celebrity author and Republican JD Vance was always tipped to win. Tim Ryan showed how Democrats can be competitive by doing what voters want you to do, and with a message that brings people together.
‘‘You want culture wars?’’ he asked in a TV ad, while throwing darts in a bar. ‘‘I’m not your guy. You want a fighter for Ohio? I’m all in.’’
He is proudly local, advocates for government spending in his state, and high-quality jobs. He came close to winning. Proof that the central task for Democrats is not so much ‘‘curbing inflation’’, but by what commentator Matthew Yglesias called ‘‘unlocking abundance’’ in the places where people live.
My stepmother is hosting Thanksgiving this year, and family and friends will gather. They won’t talk politics. Or if they do, it’ll be to echo Tim Ryan’s message to voters in Ohio. ‘‘We have to love each other, we have to care about each other, we have to see the best in each other, we have to forgive each other,’’ he declared when he won the Democratic Senate primary in May.
Happy Thanksgiving.