Democracy survived the midterm elections, just barely, and we have two years to test whether the US will cast aside Trumpist authoritarianism.
Despite predictions of a red wave that would wipe out Democrats in Congress, young voters, particularly young women motivated by the threat to their bodily autonomy, heavily favored Democrats. Despite Republican hopes that women had forgotten about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, young voters of both genders surveyed in Edison exit polls found 80% favored legal abortions, and 49% named abortion as the issue that sealed their vote. Sixty-two percent of women under 45 listed abortion as their top issue, and exit polls showed 72% of women ages 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races, while 54% of young men voted Democratic.
In the pivotal Pennsylvania Senate race, 77% of young women voted for Democrat John Fetterman, helping to secure his victory.
Republicans hoped to unseat 60 Democrats in the House, but they gained just six seats, winning a bare majority of 219 with four races still being counted two weeks after the election. David Daley, writing in The Nation, noted that partisan gerrymandering pushed Republicans into the narrow majority. “An aggressive—and likely unconstitutional—partisan and racial gerrymander demanded by Gov. Ron DeSantis helped provide Republicans with four of those seats from Florida alone,” Daley wrote, adding that maps that likely violated Voting Rights Act (VRA) protections against racial gerrymanders were allowed to proceed in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. Texas enacted a congressional map that reduced the political power of Latinos even as they drove 95% of the state’s population growth over the last decade. Republican-dominated legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio managed to keep maps that produced disproportionate representation for Republicans.
Democrats kept control of the Senate, winning at least 50 seats and possibly a 51st seat if Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) holds onto his seat in a Dec. 6 runoff with former football player and aspiring werewolf Herschel Walker, who was anointed by Donald Trump.
Down the ballot, Democrats flipped three governorships, replacing Republicans in Arizona, Maryland and Massachusetts, but losing in Nevada. Democrats did even better in state legislatures, flipping at least five chambers, with Democrats gaining control of state government in Michigan, Minnesota and Vermont (where the legislature can override the Republican governor’s veto). The Alaska House and Senate and New Hampshire House were still unresolved. Democrats prevented Republicans from gaining full control of North Carolina and Wisconsin. And Democrats defeated six of the seven Republican secretary of state candidates who claimed the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats.
Republicans didn’t flip a single legislative chamber from blue to red, the first midterm election since 1934 that the president’s party hasn’t lost a state-legislative chamber, according to Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee President Jessica Post.
Democrats’ most significant win was probably Michigan, Nathaniel Rakich wrote at FiveThirtyEight. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was reelected, and Democrats took control of the state House for the first time since 2011, and the state Senate for the first time since 1984. Democrats had won the popular vote for the Michigan state House in 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2020 but fell short of a majority each time because of state-legislative maps that favored Republicans, Rakich noted.
“This year, though, Michigan’s new independent redistricting commission drew legislative maps that were pretty fair. In the state Senate, Democrats won the popular vote 50% to 49% and a 20-18 majority; in the state House, they won the popular vote 51% to 49% and a 56-54 majority.”
The new Democratic trifecta could lead to many new progressive policies in Michigan. Rakich added. “Democrats say they want to repeal the state law banning union membership as a condition of employment, strengthen laws against LGBT discrimination and repeal the retirement tax.”
Democrats also gained the majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the first time since 2011, flipping 12 seats. Republicans still hold the state Senate majority.
Democrats’ success can also be measured by the Republican policies that will not become law due to the 2022 elections, Rakich noted. For example, although Republicans secured a supermajority in the North Carolina state Senate, they came one seat short in the state House. That means the party won’t be able to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes. If they had gotten that supermajority, Republicans might have restricted abortions and how race is taught in public schools.
Wisconsin has a similar situation, as Republicans snagged a supermajority in the state Senate but not in the state Assembly, allowing reelected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ vetoes to stand. This will probably prevent Republicans from abolishing the Wisconsin Elections Commission or restructuring it in a partisan way.
Trump took a big hit from the election results, but the credibility of the nation’s political pundits also fared poorly after they used suspicious polls and historic patterns to predict the Republican tsunami, even though Democrats in mid-August had pulled even on the “generic ballot” of which party voters preferred for Congress, and the contests remained close as the election neared.
“So what happened? Political journalists were suckered by a wave of Republican junk polls in the closing weeks of the campaign,” Dana Milbank wrote the day after the election. “They were also swayed by some reputable polling organizations that, burned by past failures to capture MAGA voters, overweighted their polls to account for that in ways that simply didn’t make sense. And reporters fell for Republican feints and misdirection, as Republican operatives successfully created an artificial sense of momentum by talking about how they were spending money in reliably blue areas.”
On Nov. 17, the day after networks confirmed that Republicans had won 218 seats to clinch the House majority, senior House Republicans called a press conference to announce that their top priority next year would be to investigate Hunter Biden. The incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer, R-Ky., and other members of the brand-new majority showed up to make reckless allegations about the presidents only surviving son.
When reporters tried to ask questions about other topics, Comer cut them off. “If we could keep it about Hunter Biden, that would be great,” he said, explaining that “this is kind of a big deal, we think.”
Hunter Biden apparently is a bigger deal than inflation, high gas prices, supply chain problems, the economy and crime. But anyone who thought Republicans were interested in those issues they ran ads about before the election was bound to be disappointed.
With Kevin McCarthy wheeling and dealing to line up the 218 votes to become speaker of the House in January, after 31 extremist Republicans voted against nominating him for speaker at their organizational meeting, there is no telling what other priorities Republicans will be pursuing. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wants to investigate Nancy Pelosi and the Department of Justice over treatment of Jan. 6 defendants. Get ready for showtime. — JMC
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