🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Even though Republicans still have a good chance to narrowly capture the House of Representatives, the midterm elections should be seen as a total and stunning rebuke of the GOP's extremist candidates and behavior. An electorate dissatisfied with the state of the economy, with the president and with Democratic control of Congress has almost certainly returned the Senate to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and kept the outcome of the House in doubt as of this writing. Perhaps more importantly, Democrats won critical gubernatorial and secretary of state races that will make it substantially harder for Republicans to rig the 2024 election.
For the future of democracy, last night's biggest victories were keeping Democratic governors in the Electoral College firewall states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. While Arizona's gubernatorial race is too close to call, Democrat Katie Hobbs looks more likely than not to beat her MAGA opponent, Kari Lake. Republicans nominated weak, out-of-the-mainstream candidates in most of these races, and it appears to have cost them dearly. And because Democrats have probably kept the Senate, it is far likelier that at least 10 Republicans will be able to withstand the pressure from MAGA maniacs and join Democrats to pass a game-changing reform of the Electoral Count Act.
The history-defying performance of Democrats nationally should also help retire a number of illusions. The first is the idea that the GOP can nominate a slate of objectively radical conspiracy theorists who speak openly of imposing forced-birth gender tyranny on the country and not pay for it. The sticker price last night was the most pitiful performance by an out-party in a midterm election since 2002, and one of the most embarrassing outcomes for the opposition in decades. Since WWII, the president's party has bled out an average of 26 seats in the House and four in the Senate—and those trends have only gotten more dramatic during the polarization era that began in 1992. Not this year.
Election lies were not the only ones to go over poorly in this election. We also learned that voters did not then and do not now think that Covid restrictions generally went too far. Statewide Republican candidates in purple states ran hard on the message that the lockdowns should never have happened, but it did them no good.
We also learned that the electorate is far less receptive to despicable fear-mongering about trans people and critical race theory than the average Republican candidate thinks they are. Many Republicans in tight races also either endorsed their party's radical position on abortion or failed to meaningfully distance themselves from it.
All of this dross stepped on the party's core messages about inflation and crime, and allowed the in–party to define the terms of the election rather than the opposition.
Republicans are also going to face the reality that the end of Roe v. Wade is only going to get worse for them as the reality of forced birth in red states sinks in for everyone. It's not a coincidence that Democrats easily won gubernatorial races in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan in an environment that normally would have been challenging for them. Voters in Kentucky, of all places, soundly rejected an anti-abortion state constitutional amendment.
In the next two years, more Americans are going to hear about a friend or loved one who couldn't get an abortion, or whose pregnancy care was compromised by red state doctors terrified of going to jail. The polls didn't pick up on the Dobbs v. Jackson effect during this summer's primaries and special elections, and they didn't really pick up on it heading into last night either. And it will continue to haunt the GOP as Democrats figure out that having any abortion measure on that ballot virtually anywhere will be a net benefit.
Speaking of polls, we can now retire for good the idea that polls always overestimate Democratic performance in state and national elections. Polling errors that benefited Republicans in 2014, 2016 and 2020 didn't show up this year, and that's not just good for Democrats. It should also help everyone to remember that Republicans are not secretly more popular than we think they are.
It means we can trust public opinion data showing that Americans: hate the Dobbs decision; oppose discrimination against LGBTQ folks' don't care what bathroom a trans person uses; are turned off by the bizarre moral panic about "grooming" in American public schools; and don't retroactively wish we had just let millions of people die rather than shutter businesses for a few weeks at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Partisan Republican pollsters like Trafalgar lost a lot of credibility last night, and hopefully their efforts to game the polling averages will meet with less success in 2024.
Yet it's not all good news for Team Blue. Overperforming expectations in the House was probably not enough to actually keep it, and President Biden will now deal with two years of harassment and lunacy from the reactionary election denier caucus that will be in the driver's seat in presumptive Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) majority.
Most gallingly, had Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) agreed to abolish the Senate's ridiculous filibuster bill to pass a bill banning partisan gerrymandering, Nancy Pelosi might still be the speaker in January and the party would have two more years to govern the country. Instead, we will be treated to two years of ugly budget standoffs as the Democrats' popular social policy agenda twists in the wind. That's what happens when you prioritize norms and civility instead of going for the jugular, as Democrats did when they boosted unelectable MAGA extremists in the GOP primaries and then crushed them last night.
Nevertheless, Democrats are waking up happier than expected this morning for the first time since 2012. That's good for them, and even better for the country.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
