Red ripple
The red wave wasn’t to be. As I write, control of the Senate and the House both remain up for grabs. It looks likely that the Republican Party will grab control of the House while John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania gives Democrats the upper hand in the battle for the Senate.
The ramifications of a disappointing night for Republicans will be wide-ranging. To name a few, the results underscore the need for the party to move on from Donald Trump (more on that below), call for a rethink to the GOP message on abortion and leave House minority leader Kevin McCarthy with a much more complicated route to the Speaker’s chair.
I was at what was supposed to be a raucous victory party thrown by McCarthy in downtown Washington last night. But things didn’t exactly pan out that way. Nervousness gave way to disappointment. It was 2 a.m. before McCarthy, who had been expected to deliver a victory speech well before midnight, took the stage. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, we will be in the majority, and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority,” he said, feigning excitement at the results.
What about the president? Needless to say, Biden and his team are very pleased with the results. He has avoided an Obama and Trump style shellacking. Biden didn’t quite dodge the trend of first-term presidents being punished in the midterms (let’s not forget that the Democrats are in all likelihood going to lose united government in Washington). But this looks set to be the best first-term midterm performance by the president’s party since the 2002 rally-around-the-flag election.
Many expected Biden to spend the early hours of Wednesday contemplating his political future. In the weeks leading up to the election, it felt as though his party was quietly preparing to move on from him before the next election. Discussion of his age and faltering public performances was growing more frequent and a bad night Tuesday would have ensured simmering frustration spilled over into a messy fight over 2024 and the party’s future.
But that isn’t what happened. Rather than a lonely evening wondering whether he should run again, the president made calls to dozens of Democratic candidates in tight races, congratulating them on their victories. Biden will take particular pleasure from the Fetterman win. Pennsylvania is a quasi-home state for the president and, more to the point, he campaigned there on the eve of the election.
Talking to Semafor’s Steve Clemons, White House chief of staff Ron Klain noted a “strong night for the president and his party. A rejection of a U-turn and MAGA extremism. When the president called candidates last night to congratulate them, so many said they were proud to run on the achievements of the past two years. But everyone recognizes that we need to make more progress on inflation and the cost of living. The president leaves for a big foreign trip tomorrow night with the wind at his back.”
Maybe so, but Biden and his party will have to be honest about how disaster was averted. Victory for Democrats among those voters who somewhat disapprove of the president (see polling data below) points to a good result achieved largely in spite of, rather than because of, an unpopular president who most voters, including most Democrats, do not want to run again.
Trump’s no good night
Donald Trump spent the days immediately before the midterms teasing and threatening his biggest Republican rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. At a rally in Philadelphia, he coined the nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious. Then, on the night before the election, flying in his 757 from Ohio to Florida, he said that he thought a DeSantis presidential run would be a “mistake,” that “the base would not like it” and that “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, who is really running his campaign.”
DeSantis said nothing. Instead, he let the voters do the talking. And their voice was heard very clearly last night. The Florida governor secured a stunning victory: with more than 95 percent of the votes counted, he has won reelection by more than 1.5 million votes. In the race four years ago, he won by just 30,000 votes.
But the early good news for Republicans failed to materialize across the rest of the country. Handed an old and unpopular Democratic president and a favorable environment on most of the big issues, Republicans failed to meet the high expectations they set for themselves. Several factors explain this underperformance, but a big one is Donald Trump. If it wasn’t already obvious, the former president is an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party. He had the run of the primary and the pick of the candidates, but his slate of Republicans look like they have failed to deliver.
Was the MAGA-ish Don Bolduc really the candidate best suited to deliver a Republican victory in New Hampshire? Did the combination of unpopular carpetbagger Mehmet Oz and nutso stop-the-steal hardliner Doug Mastriano really maximize the party’s chances in Pennsylvania? Is gratuitously insulting John McCain and asking that his supporters leave your campaign events, as Kari Lake did, a sensible strategy for a Republican in Arizona? And does the most prominent Republican in the country spending the days leading up to the midterms insulting other Republicans help or harm candidates’ prospects in that vote?
The answers to all these questions are obvious. And the lesson, to anyone who wants to hear it, is clear.
Florida looks set to be the exception in this election. And that Florida exceptionalism will be impossible for Republicans considering their 2024 options to ignore. Prior to the election, Trump called for a “humiliating rebuke” of Biden, but it is Trump himself who will be licking his wounds this morning. It is hard to imagine how last night could have gone much worse for the former president. Now he’s left wondering what to do on November 15. His aides had teased the date for the announcement of his presidential bid, presumably expecting to take credit for the red wave that had swept the country. Now, with Republicans more interested in finger pointing, will he dare announce so soon?
The important difference between Trump and DeSantis is less ideological and more dispositional. As my colleague Ben Domenech writes this morning, “The nation clearly wants a more populist conservative agenda, that’s not wrong — Ron DeSantis and a number of under candidates who won easily exemplify this. But they also want something else: a sense of seriousness and normalcy, not chaos. The Trumpian candidates for the Senate were often more chaotic than serious and sensible.”
Trump and his acolytes look more and more like an unserious distraction. DeSantis, meanwhile, seems laser-focused on the future. “I have only begun to fight,” he said in a victory speech Tuesday night, delivered with a national audience in mind. “Two more years,” chanted his supporters. DeSantis smiled. “DeFuture,” splashed the late edition of today’s New York Post. It certainly feels that way.
‘Stop the steal,’ RIP?
Was Tuesday the night that ‘stop the steal’ finally died? Doug Mastriano went down in flames in Pennsylvania. Kari Lake tried to relaunch the grievance narrative with a complaint about the “cheaters and crooks” trying to suggest that her campaign had anything other than ““big day.” There will be losers claiming they won. But I suspect the GOP will be far less willing to indulge those fantasies after this election.
*** Sign up to receive the DC Diary in your inbox here ***
Pro-Choice activists make post-Dobbs progress
Tuesday night offered the fullest picture yet of the politics of abortion post Dobbs. And the picture is a cheering one for pro-choice campaigners. Not only does abortion appear to have been a factor in Democrats outperforming expectations in House and Senate races, voters also backed measures designed to safeguard abortion access in Michigan, California and Vermont. In Kentucky, voters appear to have rejected a ballot measure that sought to remove the right to an abortion from the state constitution.
What you should be reading today
Ben Domenech: Why the red wave never crested
David Marcus: Another blue day for red New Yorkers
Matt Purple: Democrats fail to pay a price for their extremism
Jesse McKinley, New York Times: Tough NY election holds lessons for Republicans and Democrats alike
Brian McGill and Chad Day, Wall Street Journal: How different groups voted in the 2022 midterms
Price St. Clair, the Dispatch: Primary meddling pays off for Democrats
Poll watch
President Biden job approval
Approve: 42.1 percent
Disapprove: 54.6 percent
Net approval: -12.5 (RCP Average)
How did voters who ‘somewhat disapprove’ of Biden vote?
Democrat: 49 percent
Republican: 45 percent (NBC News Exit Poll)
