As the first polls closed in the midterm elections on Tuesday night, with many voters still nervously waiting in lines, Republicans and Democrats shared an expectation that the basic structure of U.S. politics was about to change, probably in a red wave, if not a tsunami. The night’s first meaningful results, in Florida, suggested that might be happening: the Republican Ron DeSantis won his race for governor by twenty points, a stunning margin. He won not just in rural Florida but in the big metro areas—Tampa’s Hillsborough County, and Miami-Dade. The sheer magnitude of the Florida results alone suggested that a tidal change was under way.
But that early breakthrough quickly gave way to uncertainty. As tallies were added up in other parts of the country, where, exactly, was the wave? Not in New Hampshire, where Republicans failed to beat the incumbent senator, Maggie Hassan. Not in suburban Virginia, where the Democratic representatives Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton held on. Not even in rural Pennsylvania, a symbolic heart of Trump country, where the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman ran so strongly that he was declared the winner early Wednesday morning. As midnight passed, Republicans still looked on track to take control of the House of Representatives, though by a smaller margin than many politicos had recently thought, and control of the Senate was still up for grabs. Given what has come before, that qualifies as a medium-sized stunner itself. The Democrats lost sixty-three House seats in Barack Obama’s first midterm, and fifty-two in Bill Clinton’s. The change this year will be far smaller. And this, even though the public broadly disapproves of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President, and even though inflation is running at eight per cent, and the economy, broadly, is teetering. How could it be that the turn away from Biden was not more decisive than this?
There was a little clue very early in the evening. The voters interviewed across the country for CBS’s exit poll disliked Biden plenty: forty-three per cent approved of him, and fifty-four per cent disapproved. But they disliked Donald Trump even more: thirty-seven per cent viewed him favorably, and sixty per cent unfavorably. The Republican plan had been to run on the economy, and to offer themselves as an alternative to a status quo that the public seemed ready to reject. But that is harder when a conservative Supreme Court has just made the unpopular decision to overturn the abortion protections of Roe v. Wade. And it is particularly hard to do when Trump is still integral to the political news, saying crazy things, as he did at a Monday rally in Dayton, like drug dealers ought to be summarily executed. If Americans broadly think things are going badly, then conservatives are still part of the reason.
Overnight, many elections remained very close. Early votes, mail-in votes, day-of votes, each with their own delicate relationship to past votes, were still so entangled that no one could conclusively say where many of the highest-profile races stood. In Georgia, Raphael Warnock (about the best candidate running about the best campaign that Democrats could muster) and Herschel Walker (about the worst candidate with about the worst campaign that Republicans could conceive) were running close to a dead heat, and seemed headed for a runoff. Voters in states whose Senate seats Democrats had once harbored hopes of winning (Ohio, North Carolina) decisively rejected them. In Democratic-held states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) and Republican-held ones (Texas, Georgia), the governors’ races seemed to broadly favor incumbents. In the contested Western states that may decide control of the Senate (Arizona, Nevada), the results were too tentative to say much at all. The paradox of this election is that voters have so despaired of the status quo. And yet something very much like the status quo is what the voters will, in the end, have delivered.
But, if no partisan tide seemed in motion on Tuesday night, there were a few interesting signs of a generational one. Biden himself cut a diminished figure during this campaign; many of the most endangered members of his party did not even campaign with him. If the Democrats could feel as if they had done better than they’d feared, Biden hadn’t obviously had much to do with it.
The effect was starker on the Republican side. On the eve of the election, reports were circulating that Trump would declare his 2024 candidacy imminently; Trump himself teased a “very big announcement” on November 15th. A sitting Republican senator told Politico’s Jonathan Martin that no more than five of his party’s fifty senators actually wanted to see Trump run. When Trump gave an interview to five reporters aboard his plane on Monday night, he sounded peevishly trapped in the past. (“I was disappointed with Bibi because no one did more for Israel than me, and he was the first to call Joe Biden and congratulate him,” Trump said, of the newly reëlected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) More tellingly, the ex-President went out of his way to undercut DeSantis, his party’s rising right-wing star. “I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering—I know more about him than anybody, other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said. “I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly.”
It is a little harder, on Wednesday morning, to take Trump’s mobland insinuations as a sign of strength. In building his margin of twenty points, DeSantis swept the state of Florida, running up margins even in areas where he’d lost four years ago. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis crowed, from the stage at his victory celebration. The longer the night went on, the more singular DeSantis’s achievement came to seem. It was DeSantis rather than Trump’s handpicked candidates, Walker or Mehmet Oz, who delivered the signature Republican victory. The dust hasn’t settled yet, but it is beginning to look like the midterm elections both have and haven’t changed politics. The same basic red and blue states, the same partisan deadlock. But maybe some different faces. ♦
