A man wears a MAGA tie as he campaigns for Mark Ronchetti, New Mexico's Republican candidate for governor, on election day in Albuquerque. Photo / Adria Malcolm, The New York Times
ANALYSIS:
All the conditions were there for a wave, but in the end Republicans appeared to have generated no more than a red ripple.
At the end of a campaign in which the fundamental conditions for Democrats seemed dire — inflation at a 40-year high, an unpopular president — Republicans could do no better than to end the evening still scratching here and there for the seats they needed to win control of the House, the minimum they could call a victory.
All indications were that they would end up at best with one of the weakest performances in decades by the out-of-power party against a first-term president’s party, a stark contrast to Republican gains of 54 House seats against President Bill Clinton in 1994 and 63 seats against President Barack Obama in 2010.
So America leaves these midterms much as it entered: a fiercely divided country that remains anchored in a narrow range of the political spectrum, unhappy enough with President Joe Biden to embrace divided government but unwilling to turn fully to the divisive, grievance-driven politics promoted by former President Donald Trump.
The very polarisation of the country functioned as a check, as the passions of one side offset the other.
In the first national test of the political environment since an assault on the Capitol that upended assumptions about the peaceful transfer of power, a pandemic that unsettled society and a Supreme Court decision that took away a long-established constitutional right to abortion, voters produced a stalemate — an outcome that for Democrats was tantamount to a victory.
They rebuked Biden with a light touch. Yet they also showed a limited appetite for the burn-down-the-house approach that Trump has spread throughout the Republican Party.
Democrats cast the election as a referendum not on Biden’s record but as a verdict on the state of US democracy, an opportunity to reject the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen.
But from the earliest days of their primary races to the final moments of the campaign, Trump and his party remained steadfast in their devotion to the false premise, promoting their baseless assertions relentlessly and intimating that they would reject election results that left them defeated.
In a reflection of how deeply the lie became embedded in the party, more than 200 election deniers will take office at the national and state level in January. And Florida, which has emerged a Republican power centre during the pandemic, turned out big margins for the party, with traditionally Democratic counties including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach flipping red.
Yet for a third time, after 2018 and 2020, voters displayed the limits of their tolerance for the pernicious strain of Trump-era politics that appears at times to accept or even incite violence and that challenges a core tenet of democracy: voters cast ballots and politicians accept the results.
Some of the figures who benefited most from Trump’s backing — such as Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania; Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania; and Don Bolduc, the party’s Senate candidate in New Hampshire — were defeated. (Others, such as J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, won their races.)
Hillary Scholten, the Democratic candidate in a western Michigan House district, beat John Gibbs, a Republican recruited by allies of Trump to primary Representative Peter Meijer, who was targeted by the former president after voting to impeach him.
In New Hampshire, Representative Chris Pappas, a moderate Democratic candidate, defeated his hard-right Republican challenger, Karoline Leavitt. And in a surprise victory in the Raleigh, North Carolina, suburbs, Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, beat Bo Hines, a Republican seen as a rising star by some in the Trump wing of the party.
Candidates such as John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat who built a following for his blue collar populism, were able to defy the gravity of Biden’s underwater approval rating by the strength of their own political brands.
“We held the line,” Fetterman said after a victory in a Senate race in which he outperformed Biden’s margins in much of the state. “I never expected we were going to turn these red counties blue but we did what we needed to do.”
Even in the final days, Republicans said they could expand the map, making incursions into deep blue terrain from Rhode Island to the Pacific Northwest. They captured at least one big win in traditionally Democratic territory Tuesday night, defeating Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the head of the Democratic campaign arm in the House.
“In blue states, there is an element of governance gone wrong,” Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, said just before Election Day. “It’s Covid mismanagement, it’s strange policing policies, it’s schools that stayed locked down for far too long and it’s economic malaise.”
Yet, Democrats staved off deep defeats, at least in part by transforming the race from a referendum on an unpopular president into a choice between democratic norms and an extreme right-wing alternative.
Gone were the sweeping messages of structural change around issues of economic and racial inequality from the party’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Few candidates offered bold policy promises.
Instead, the Democrats touted the more incremental progress born out of their razor-thin majorities: improving highways, jump-starting semiconductor manufacturing, a gun safety law, aid for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and capping the cost of some prescription drug prices and insulin for Medicare recipients.
They tried to promote a sense of progress in addressing the problems voters felt acutely in their daily lives — concerns about crime, rising prices and student debt loads, among others.
Democrats and their allies spent more than US$450 million (NZ$765m) on ads supporting abortion rights. Democrats promised to try to codify the constitutional right embodied by the now-overturned Roe v Wade decision — a feat that would require not only keeping control of Congress but also winning the necessary support to get around the Senate rules requiring 60 votes to pass most legislation. But other than that, they offered only limited plans in the face of an abrupt shift that affects more than 22 million women living in states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.
In the end, the Democratic strategy was largely to draw a contrast to a Republican majority that they cast as out of the mainstream on issues such as abortion rights, protecting Medicare and Social Security and taxing corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Abortion proved to be the motivator Democrats believed it would be, helping to boost a number of Democratic candidates who leaned into the issue, including Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro, who won the governor’s race in Pennsylvania, and Senator Patty Murray of Washington.
Voters in Michigan, Kentucky, California and Vermont were on track to preserve or expand abortion rights through votes on ballot measures.
And in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republicans fell short of state legislative supermajorities that would have allowed the party to pass partisan priorities such as abortion bans, overriding the governor’s veto.
Exit polls indicated that overall, the economy and inflation were weighing most on their minds, and they favoured Republicans to fix the economic uncertainty. But abortion was a strong driver as well, with 27 per cent of voters saying abortion was the most important issue to their vote.
The 60 per cent of voters who said they were dissatisfied or angry about the overturning of Roe overwhelmingly supported Democrats. Voters who said they were dissatisfied but not angry were more split between Democrats and Republicans.
Biden will still likely face the tribulations of a Republican-led House eager to launch investigations and even impeachment proceedings. But it will become easier to avoid the second-guessing of his party, which for months has quietly questioned his political strength and fitness to serve a second term.
For Trump, the results could reshuffle the dynamics of 2024. He has made it clear that he plans to announce a third presidential bid next week. But his mixed record in the midterms contrasts with that of his leading Republican competitor, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who not only had a double-digit win in his reelection race, far outpacing the performance of the national party, but also flipped Democratic strongholds in south Florida.
“Freedom is here to stay,” DeSantis told a cheering crowd at his victory rally on Tuesday night.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lisa Lerer
Photographs by: Adria Malcolm, Brittainy Newman, Adam Perez and Ruth Fremson
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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