Moira Donegan: ‘It wasn’t meant to be this close’

It was not supposed to be this close. Midterms are always hard for the party in power. In the past, when Democrats have faced a midterm election when they controlled both the White House and Congress, the Republicans had a blowout.

In 1994, during Bill Clinton’s first term, Republicans gained huge margins in the house. In 2010, it was even bigger. Joe Biden has proved to be a president with little of his own constituency and few legislative achievements to show for his first two years of unified government, thanks in no small part to how narrow Democrats’ majorities were in Congress in 2020. Meanwhile, inflation is at roughly 8%. It was supposed to be a blowout night for the Democrats, the kind of humiliation that sent the Biden administration a firm rebuke. It wasn’t.

It’s not that there were no disappointments. There were some painful losses for Democrats: the odious Peter Thiel acolyte JD Vance has won a Senate seat in Ohio; candidates that perennially capture the imagination and hope of national democrats, like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, lost.

But Republican margins are narrow, and even when the party had the wind at their back. Trump-backed, election-denying candidates did poorly; so did those who most vocally oppose abortion rights. The Republican party is in disarray, unable to quit Trump, but unable to thrive while anchored to him. If they do end up winning a majority, they will do so weakened and vulnerable.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Cas Mudde: ‘No red tsunami’

Much remains unclear at the time of writing this, but we know the following: first and foremost, there is no red tsunami. The Republicans are doing better than in 2020, but far less well than was expected just a few months ago.

Second, while the Dobbs abortion ruling did not bring the blue wave that Democratic operatives had promised, the pro-choice counter-mobilization has definitely mitigated Republican wins.

Third, while Joe Biden comes out of the midterms relatively unscathed, this cannot be said of Donald Trump. Several of his hand-picked and personally endorsed outsiders might have achieved shocking primary victories, and some might even still win their elections. But still: the vast majority clearly underperformed in comparison to more traditional Republican candidates in the same states.

The much-watched state of Georgia provided perhaps the most embarrassing result for Trump: Brian Kemp, the candidate he campaigned hardest against, was comfortably re-elected governor, while Herschel Walker, his hand-picked Senate candidate, polled almost 5% behind Kemp and is probably facing a highly uncertain runoff against Raphael Warnock.

Fourth, Trump’s main rival within the Republican party, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, not only convincingly won re-election, but polled almost 2% ahead of Senator Marco Rubio and gifted his party three new, gerrymandered, House seats.

All of this means that, even if the Republican party does seize control of the House and/or Senate, it is facing a very uncertain period in the run-up to the 2024 presidential elections. It is now overly clear to everyone that Trump is both a necessity in the primaries and a liability in the elections. Everyone but Donald Trump, that is.

• Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia

Robert Reich: ‘Democrats didn’t do too badly’

Let me focus on four ways today’s election was unique:

1. Compared to previous midterm elections when the party that occupied the White House took a major drubbing (Clinton lost 54 House seats; Obama, 63; Trump, 40), Democrats didn’t do too badly – even though, when the dust settles, they are likely to lose control of the House.

2. Compared to the amount of money spent on previous elections, this one was staggering. Total spending on federal and state races could exceed $16.7bn, according to estimates by Open Secrets.

American billionaires will have spent an estimated $1bn, mostly on Republican candidates and causes. (Peter Thiel alone sunk $30m into the Senate campaigns of JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.) That’s 44% higher than billionaires’ total spending during the 2018 midterm cycle, according to a report published Thursday by the group Americans for Tax Fairness.

What will the super-rich get back on their investments? Republicans won’t have the votes to override Biden’s vetoes, so they’ll likely try to weaponize raising the debt ceiling (as they did in 2011) to force Democrats to agree to more tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks for their wealthy patrons.

3. Compared to other elections in which Russia has denied seeking to affect the outcome, in this one, Russia, in the form of a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, openly boasted of such interference.

4. Finally, compared with what’s been at stake in previous elections, the stakes in this one are especially high for the future.

Last June, half of Americans lost the constitutional right to an abortion, courtesy of the Trump supreme court, and Republicans in Congress have threatened to ban abortions nationally. Meanwhile, more than half of Republican candidates in today’s election sided with Donald Trump in denying that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

What’s decided today in races for Congress as well as for state offices will affect the trajectory of both issues – the future of abortion rights and of democracy – including Trump’s presumed effort to become America’s first dictator.

• Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Tonight is a wake-up call’

Tonight should be a wake-up call for Democrats. Yes, the worst has been avoided for the party, but their dominant midterm strategy simply didn’t work.

Of course, circumstances conspired against them – midterms are always difficult for incumbent parties. Add to that an unfavorable set of seats up for grabs, inflation and general concerns about the cost of living, a crime spike since 2019, and it’s hard to imagine how Democrats could have maintained the House of Representatives this cycle.

But there were opportunities that could have been exploited in the US Senate that were thwarted by the rhetoric and priorities of the party. Bernie Sanders’ October op-ed right here in the Guardian reads like prophecy: “You can’t win elections unless you have the support of the working class of this country.” Abortion was a crucial issue galvanizing millions of people, many of them workers, to vote. Yet Sanders was right to say that it was “political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered”.

Consider the strong performance of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who at the time of writing looks poised to win and Tim Ryan in Ohio, who outperformed Biden’s 2020 mark despite coming up short against JD Vance. They ran campaigns with clear economic focused messages and focused on everyday concerns. There’s no reason more candidates like them couldn’t have been put forward.

Biden has a relatively strong policy record as president so far, but his and the Democratic leadership’s inability to win on the economy and present themselves as the party of working people hurt them tonight. No matter how low expectations were, a loss is a loss: millionaire-funded NGOs can’t again be allowed to dominate the rhetoric and priorities of the party.

• Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: the Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities

LaTosha Brown: ‘Trump can still win in 2024’

One thing is clear: we are not in a post-Trump world. We are in a Trumpian era. It is not far-fetched that Trump could rise to power again. In fact, we’ve seen many candidates who share his values capture seats in this election.

The Democratic party needs to do far more to reach out to Black voters. In Georgia, where Stacey Abrams lost to Brian Kemp, we didn’t see an investment on the ground as we saw in previous cycles.

This was the largest election since a slew of voter-suppression bills were signed into law, and we are dealing, in part, with the legacy of that. The political landscape has shifted, and we need a multi-racial, multi-generational pro-democracy movement to respond to that.

We are a country that is deeply divided, and Democrats have a long way to go still to win people to their side.

• LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter

Ben Davis: ‘This should have been a Republican blowout. It wasn’t’

This has been a weird and contradictory electoral cycle, but one thing is clear: this is the best midterm for any administration since the 2002 election when the country was gripped by the war fever of 9/11.

Democrats will probably lose seats: perhaps no one “won” this election. Some states look like they have shifted to the right (Florida appears to be lost to Democrats forever) while some seem extremely strong for Democrats. This year has been confused, because the government is confused.

While the Democrats control the actual elected federal government, the primary transformative policy change that has happened came from the hard right, overturning Roe v Wade. It certainly hasn’t felt like the Democrats have power over the last two years. The big takeaway so far is there is no red wave and there is no systemic bias in polling toward Democrats.

The first term of a Democratic presidency with Democratic control of the Senate and House, high inflation, and most of the country disappointed in the direction of the country should be a Republican blowout. As of the time of writing, it looks likely the Republican party takes back the House and there’s a real chance they take back the US senate, depending on the results of some razor-thin races.

But it’s hard to call this a win for the Republicans or a loss for the Democrats and the Biden administration. If this were a first midterm wipeout like in 2010 or 2018, the Republicans could claim victory. Instead, they have underachieved nearly everywhere.

Two things have happened: Donald Trump activated turnout that won’t go away, and the Dobbs decision further polarized the electorate along culture war lines. Once people get in the habit of voting they rarely stop, and Donald Trump activated so many people on both sides that dreary midterms are a thing of the past.

• Ben Davis works in political data in Washington. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign