After the Midterms

Election Day (duly preceded by Election Week and/or Election Month) has come and gone (although in some places, as always, the counting continues). The insufferable TV ads will end now. Even here in New York, where contested races were few and far between, tasteless and often offensive campaign commercials have been endlessly repeated for weeks. (At least we have been spared Ohio's amazing experience of the worst, most morally disgusting political ad in recent memory!)

Dreadful ads notwithstanding, there is still something special about the electoral process and about the popular ritual of Election Day, as in Norman Rockwell's famous image from the 1940s. There is indeed something special about the spectacle of ordinary citizens lining up to cast their vote. It is the ultimate civic drama of democracy.

And then we wait! I am usually an early-to-bed person. I stay up on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and - depending on the year - Election Night. This was a year to stay up!

So what has happened?

For Democrats, the waiting has paid off. As expected - and better than expected - Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate. They will have a comfortable majority in the House - comfortable enough for the new Speaker (presumably NY Congressman Hakeem Jeffries) to be able to lead without being subject to the mischief-making of the extreme far-left wing of the party, the way his Republican predecessors have been constrained by the so-called "Freedom Caucus." Speaker Johnson has had to work with a tiny, three-seat majority. Speaker-to-be Jeffries may well have a majority of as many as 240 (or more).

In the Senate, which will now be able to stop President Trump's judicial and other appointments, the Democrats won at least 54 seats, including North and South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and Maine. Some of these were wins we scarcely expected to see again in my lifetime!

Texas proved especially gratifying. Not only did James Talarico take the Senate seat, Democrats captured the governorship and other statewide offices. (The last Democratic Senator from Texas was LLoyd Bentson. The last Governor was Anne Richards. At 37, Talarico wasn't even born the last time Texas elected a Democratic senator!) Likewise in Georgia, Democrats swept statewide races, not only re-electing as expected John Ossoff to the Senate but also electing Keisha Lance Bottoms Governor, the first Democratic Governor in decades. Her election was an early harbinger of the night to come. Kansas, which already had a Democratic Governor, elected its first Democratic Senator on almost a century, Pastor Adam Hamilton, while Ohio returned Democrat Sherrod Brown to the Senate and chose Democrat Amy Acton over Vivek Ramaswamy.

Here in New York, Governor Hochul and the state ticket swept the state-wide offices as expected, and Democrat Cait Conley ousted Republican Mike Lawler in one of the few seriously competitive congressional races.

Democrats won as well in the particularly problematic races in Michigan and Maine. In Michigan, controversial candidate Abdul el Sayed won with 52% of the vote. In Maine, veteran Republican Susan Collins' career was finally ended by Troy Jackson, who won 53% of the vote.

While attention has largely focused on the change in congressional control, the election of so many Democratic Governors will impact the 2028 presidential race (both in terms of potential candidates but also and very importantly in terms of preventing Republican gerrymandering and ensuring election integrity) and the all-important redistricting that will follow.

So what does all this mean?

Watching the returns, I could not help remembering 1966. I was only 18, but the election was memorable. Two years after LBJ and the Democrats had won one of the biggest landslides ever, the Republicans roared back - ending the Great Society and setting the stage for the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era. In 2024, President Trump put together a successful coalition that won him both the presidency and the popular. vote as well as control of both houses of Congress. That coalition is already shattering and, for the time being at least, has virtually collapsed. Meanwhile, the Democrats have regained ground in places and among constituencies they had thought they had lost.

Why?

Trump did this! In so many respects this was a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism. In his victory speech, Georgia Senator John Ossoff said, "In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck president, Donald J. Trump." This was, perhaps, most dramatically obvious in the repudiation of specifically Trump-favored candidates - e.g., Ken Paxton, Vivek Ramaswamy, Darline Graham.

If "it's the economy, stupid," as James Carville famously claimed, then the Trump-induced economic distress due to Trump's tariffs and Trump's unwanted war have resoundingly registered with voters. In part, Trump was re-elected in 2024 as a protest against Biden's inflation and because of rosy recollections of the good economy in Trump's first term. Now, it was Trump's turn to be blamed for economic distress - distress exacerbated by the sense that the issues salient to voters were simply being ignored in favor of Trump's personal priorities (e.g., his redecoration of Washington, DC) and the apparent enrichment of himself and his family. 

Tariffs, war, and ICE! Trump delivered on his promise to secure the border, something broadly desired and favored by voters. His administration's overreach on domestic immigration enforcement, while it should have been expected, seems to have been unexpected by may Trump voters - including many Latinos - who displayed their disapproval in this vote.

Having next to nothing to offer the voters, the Republicans resorted to tired culture-war tropes, which obviously didn't work. Perhaps, what we have developing is a new kind of culture war -  the politics of anger, resentment, bullying, harassment, performative cruelty, and exclusion vs. a politics of hope. aspiration, community, and "Love-your-neighbor" inclusion.

What next?

it is a tired truism that the 2028 Presidential primary campaign commences today. The victorious Democrats will have a good number of attractive potential candidates to consider a presidential run. That campaign can be the stage on which will be played the intensifying ideological battle within the Democratic party between the more "progressive" and more mainstream Democrats. The only reason the Democrats will have a congressional majority is the election of "moderate" mainstream candidates like Roy Cooper, John Ossoff, James Talarico, Adam Hamilton, Josh Shapiro, etc.

The ideological civil war within the Democratic party will also be fought in Congress. As noted above, the size of the Democratic majority may diminish the ability of the ideological extreme to hold the rest of the party hostage as the "Freedom Caucus" was able to do to the Republicans. In the Senate, it is possible that Senator-elect Sayed may become the Democrats' disliked version of Ted Cruz. Time will tell.

President Trump has already threatened to use his veto, but. he has also sent signals of willingness to deal with the Democratic Congress. How effectively - dysfunctionally - Trump uses his lame-duck status remains to be seen. Here too time will tell.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is also danger here for the Democrats. The first, more obvious danger is that they may misinterpret a successful electoral outcome too favorably. That is what President Biden and Democrats allegedly did in 2022. That year the Democrats over-performed, but the vote was almost certainly not an endorsement of the Biden Administration. Yet that was how Biden and the Democrats apparently interpreted it. 

A second danger is that voters have rejected Trump and the Republicans because they have governed so badly. They have handed Congress over to the Democrats wanting them to do better. But can they? Do they have a coherent enough policy agenda to address voters' real concerns, and can that policy agenda actually be implemented? Will they even try, or will they fritter away their control of congress in intra-party squabbles and endless publicity stunt investigations or (even worse) impeachments? “Don’t be impeaching anybody,” Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois recently said. “Let’s just get back to work.” That sounds like good political advice.

Photo: Election Day, Norman Rockwell, The Saturday Evening Post, 1944.