Republicans

‘No Republican blowout’: our panel reacts to the initial US midterm resultsMoira Donegan, Cas Mudde, Robert Reich, Bhaskar Sunkara, LaTosha Brown and Ben DavisWhile much remains unclear about Tuesday’s elections, we know that Democrats did much better than expected 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.Midterm elections 2022: Democrats hold on in several key races but Republicans surge in Florida – liveRead moreIt’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
TopicsUS newsOpinionUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDemocratscommentReuse this content More

Democrats are doing far better than expected. How come?Matthew YglesiasThere was no Republican ‘red wave’ after all. And abortion might be the reason why Many known unknowns remain in the US congressional elections, including the critical question of who will hold the majority in the Senate.But it’s already clear that Republicans are going to perform far worse than the typical out-party in a midterm election. Democrats appear to be on track for a result that, while certainly not spectacular if viewed in isolation, is the best midterm performance for any incumbent party since 2002. There’s nothing like the massive “wave” elections of 1994, 2006, 2010 or 2018 here, or the steady opposition gains of 2014. In 1998, Democrats did break with precedent and actually gain seats in the House and Senate, despite holding the White House. But that was a question of shrinking existing Republican majorities.Midterm elections 2022: Democrats hold on in several key races but Republicans surge in Florida – liveRead moreThat leaves 2002 as the only real example on record of a more successful midterm defense.For those who remember it, that was a bizarre midterm year. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 just over a year before the voting hung heavily. George W Bush’s approval ratings shot up to a stratospheric level. Criticizing the incumbent administration was seen as dangerous and potentially even unpatriotic. Yet Bush and his political team were merciless in milking the “rally round the flag” effect for partisan gain.Of course, 2022 is not going to go down as that year’s equal. But Democrats’ more modest success is nonetheless, in some respects, more puzzling. The 2002 outlier is easily explained by Bush’s freakishly high approval ratings. Of course, a wildly popular president is going to be hard for the out party to deal with. Biden’s approval rating, by contrast, is literally the worst on record for any postwar president at this point in his term, according to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.How could a Democrat like Abigail Spanberger survive in a swingy district in Virginia in a climate like that?Biden carried her traditionally Republican seat by a decent margin in 2020, but it swung back hard to the right in 2021 and voted to elect the Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor. Democrats never gave up on re-electing Spanberger, but it was clearly going to be an uphill fight the whole way, given she had been a reasonably loyal political ally of the unpopular president. And yet win she did. Michael Bennet romped home in a Colorado Senate race that been projected to be close. Maggie Hassan not only held her Senate seat in New Hampshire but, like Bennet, ran stronger than Biden did two years earlier. Those results weren’t replicated nationwide, but they were certainly visible across large swathes of the country – much larger than you normally see in a presidential midterm year.It’s genuinely hard to know what would explain such a paradoxical result, but a good guess is that Democratic party campaign tactics worked. The Democrats raised lots of money and spent lots of money on running lots and lots and lots of ads, mostly about abortion.This abortion-heavy strategy prompted a fair amount of naysaying and skepticism, for the very solid reason that most voters said it wasn’t the most important issue for them in the race, with inflation and the cost of living clearly taking the crown. But the logic of the abortion-first strategy’s advocates was that even though inflation mattered more, there wasn’t much Democrats could say or do to move voters on that topic. By contrast, driving up the salience of abortion really did change minds in Democrats’ ad-testing experiments.So they tried it, and it seems to have worked – an inference further bolstered by the fact that Democrats seem to have held their own particularly strongly in places with large numbers of secular white people.Of course, that’s not a strategy conjured out of thin air. What made it possible was the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, a fairly predictable consequence of recent appointments but one that still seems to have shocked many Americans out of a sense of complacence.It’s unusual for a party with concurrent governing majorities to face a policy setback on the scale of the Dobbs decision. But that unusual quality is likely why this election broke the pattern of midterms past. As one friend who works on reproductive rights quipped to me repeatedly this fall, “Dobbs is our 9/11” – a shocking and traumatic event that can suspend the laws of political gravity.The Dobbs effect is also noteworthy in Florida, where Republicans did very, very well. Their statewide candidates Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio romped against well-funded opponents, and all the down-ballot races went their way too.Florida as a whole has been drifting more conservative for years, but the strong rightward break in a year when that didn’t happen elsewhere was striking. More than one factor was surely in play. But it is also noteworthy that even as DeSantis has attracted a national reputation as a pugnacious culture warrior par excellence, he trotted a very moderate course on abortion – backing a ban at the 15-week mark that would leave upwards of 95% of actual abortions untouched. That’s a good way of defusing reproductive rights backlash. And an interesting question for DeSantis’s future is: can he continue to hold that line while remaining a conservative darling, or will the base he’s courting for a potential presidential run want to see him go further?But outside of the Sunshine State, Republicans have mostly been less cautious, and it has generated results for Democrats that are almost shockingly good given the state of the economy. That’s a testament to Democrats’ tactical savvy, and also a reminder of the huge political risks Republicans are running if inflation subsides over the next couple of years.
Matthew Yglesias is a political commentator. He runs the SlowBoring Substack
TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More