Early risers on the east coast of the United States on Tuesday could look up at the sky and, because of a lunar eclipse, behold a blood-red moon. The omens were obvious: even the moon had become a red state. That day’s midterm elections were going to be a bloodbath for the Democrats.
Yet, near the end of the day, shortly before the last polls closed, Donald Trump was giving an interview in which he was asked how much credit he believed he deserved for any of the more than 330 Republican candidates he had endorsed in state and national races.
“Well,” he said, “I think if they win, I should get all the credit. And if they lose, I should not be blamed at all, okay?” Behind the unintentional humour, there was an obvious discomfort.
Trump already sensed that there might in fact be a lot of blame coming his way from disappointed right-wing commentators. He was also looking over his shoulder at the emergence of a real rival for control of the Republican Party: the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who not only romped to re-election but destroyed the Democrats throughout the state.
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It was, from Trump’s point of view, especially ominous to hear the slogan being chanted on election night by DeSantis’s jubilant supporters: “Two more years!” His gubernatorial term is four years: the barely coded suggestion was that DeSantis would serve only two because, in 2024, he will be elected as president.
In the mafia boss style that comes naturally to him, Trump openly threatened to blackmail the would-be usurper of his own crown: “If he did run, 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.” The thuggishness cannot conceal Trump’s anxiety.
What happened this week is, in many ways, less important than what did not happen. These midterm elections were supposed to be the beginning of Trump’s political resurrection.
Instead, they have left him in the condition of the undead. Trump continues to stalk the land but he looks more and more like a vampire who will suck the blood from the Republican Party to keep himself alive.
The midterms were, of course, about many different issues. But alongside the politics, there was also a metapolitics: this was an election about the meaning of elections – specifically the one that Trump lost to Joe Biden two years ago.
That defeat – and the failure of the attempted coup of January 6th, 2021 – made it necessary for Trump to construct an alternative reality in which, as he put it, “We didn’t lose. We lost in their imagination.”
This insistence has existential implications for democracy in the US. It crosses the line from reactionary populism into outright autocracy.
To embed the big lie as a political “reality”, Trump needed to establish election deniers as the dominant force in Congress and in gubernatorial mansions. He needed Tuesday’s vote to appear as an endorsement, by way of his sycophantic proxies, of the toxic fiction that he is the real president of the United States.
Some of Trump’s camp followers did indeed win. JD Vance’s victory in Ohio, for example, could rightly be claimed as a triumph for Trump, a demonstration of his continuing ability to get Republican hopefuls to grovel before him.
In 2016 Vance posted his thoughts on Facebook: “that Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.” Having since crawled on his belly before his Fuhrer, Vance surfed Trump’s continuing popularity among white working-class voters to become the senator for Ohio.
Some other election deniers also won. Kay Ivey romped home as governor of Alabama. Likewise Kristi Noem in South Dakota.
But for the most part, Trump’s hangers-on had a bad night. In Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano, who was a central figure in trying to overturn Biden’s victory in the state, was roundly thumped in the gubernatorial election. Tudor Dixon, who claimed that Trump won Michigan in 2020, was likewise handily defeated in her effort to become that state’s governor.
Dan Cox, who helped to organise the notorious “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, lost by almost two to one in Maryland, a state where the previous governor was a moderate Republican. Paul LePage who claimed that 2020 was “clearly a stolen election” lost by 12 percentage points in Maine.
Perhaps the most disastrous setback for Trump was in Pennsylvania’s senatorial race. Mehmet Oz, a slick celebrity doctor who was his personal choice to replace an outgoing Republican, lost to John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke and was visibly struggling with cognitive difficulties during the only televised debate between them. Fetterman beat Oz, not comfortably, but nonetheless decisively.
These defeats were a large part of the reason why Democrats – and perhaps democracy – survived the midterms. They took plenty of hits, but successfully limited the damage.
Biden is not a popular president. The Democrats have done a terrible job of selling even his very real achievements.
His signature Inflation Reduction Act delivers serious benefits to Americans in relation to healthcare, infrastructure and climate change. But, as one pollster put it, “voters don’t know a ton about the bill or what was in it.”
This is an almost inexplicable failure, and it set the Democrats up for an almighty fall. It is a given that, when inflation is high and voters are very worried about the economy, the party of an unpopular president will be savaged in the midterms.
Even Democratic presidents more popular than Biden experienced this backlash. Harry Truman lost 55 seats in the House of Representatives in his first midterms; Bill Clinton lost 53; Barack Obama lost 63.
And yet, when the dust has settled, it is likely that the Democrats net losses in the House will be somewhere around a third of those figures. This is not a victory but, in the context, it is a remarkably limited loss.
Three big things explain this relative failure for the Republicans. They are obviously closely related to each other, but they can be thought of separately.
The first is abortion. Anyone who has lived through events in Ireland over the last 40 years could have told the Republicans that their dream victory – the overturning by a very right-wing Supreme Court of Roe v Wade – would be pyrrhic.
Democratic candidates concentrated very heavily on the abortion issue – so much so that it had become conventional wisdom in the last weeks of the elections that they had made a huge mistake by foregrounding a question that many voters did not care about.
Conventional wisdom was wrong. In the four states where there were referendums on the issue – Vermont, Michigan, California and Kentucky – voters opted to protect a woman’s right to choose. Kentucky, it should be noted, is a deep red state.
Abortion mattered greatly in itself. But it also helped to motivate Democratic voters who might otherwise have felt the usual midterm blues and stayed at home.
There is an irony here: abortion was a much better political weapon for right-wing Christian politicians when Roe v Wade was still in place. They could campaign on what they were against.
But now they have to say what kind of abortion bans they are for – and as we know all too well in Ireland, defining those limits becomes well-nigh impossible. The religious base will never be happy with anything other than extreme positions. But most voters will never be happy with such totalitarian anti-abortion laws. This is a trap the Republicans have set for themselves.
Secondly, and not coincidentally, young women voted overwhelming against the Republicans. CNN’s exit poll suggests that 72 per cent of women aged 18-29 voted for the Democrats. Given the extreme tightness of so many races, this may have been a decisive factor.
It is also worth noting that this young vote may explain another outcome of the elections that defied conventional wisdom. Many progressive and non-traditional, including gay or bisexual, candidates did very well. The “war on woke” is not going well.
And thirdly, there is the excruciating dilemma of Trump. What these elections showed is not just that there are limits to the power of the lie that he won in 2020. They showed that he cannot win in 2024.
There is little doubt that what Rupert Murdoch and the Republican hierarchy would now like to do is to dump Trump in favour of DeSantis – who was hailed as a hero by Murdoch’s Fox News and New York Post. The Florida governor can give them the far-right policies they want but without all the obvious madness.
But they have a big problem: Trump will not go away. The midterms were, in this regard, a nightmare for the Republicans. For what they show is that Trump is both too weak to win in 2024 and too strong to be ditched without a potentially devastating war.
Trump is that thing he himself most despises: a loser. But he is a loser with a vast fan base, a huge war chest and an incentive (in the form of multiple criminal investigations) to stay in the game. The next thing to turn red will be the ground on which he and DeSantis have a vicious knife fight.