Midterm elections in the United States are where the hopes and dreams of governing parties go to die. Since 1932, the party in power has lost on average 28 seats in the House of Representatives and four seats in the Senate. In 2018, two years after taking the White House and both Houses of Congress, Republicans lost 40 House seats and control of the chamber. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats. In 1994, it was 54 and eight Senate seats. Every two years, after electing a new president, voters, generally speaking, go to the polls with buyer’s remorse.
But not this year. In a truly stunning outcome, Democrats reversed the historical trend lines and, at least for the time being, protected American democracy from the worst excesses of the Donald Trump-led Republican party.
While all the votes still need to be tabulated, it appears that Democrats will keep control of the Senate and have an outside chance of maintaining their narrow majority in the House of Representatives. At the beginning of the year such a scenario was virtually unimaginable. Democrats were facing not only historical headwinds but also rising inflation, a teetering economy and an unpopular incumbent president. Traditionally, these are the kinds of political dynamics that portend a Republican-wave victory in November.
But then in June the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, removed a 50-year constitutional guarantee protecting reproductive health rights and virtually overnight turned American women into second-class citizens. Over the summer, congressional Democrats achieved a host of notable legislative successes and President Biden announced billions in student loan forgiveness, fulfilling a promise he’d made during the 2020 presidential campaign.
By the autumn, the political winds shifted in the Democrats’ direction – and no issue loomed larger than abortion. In August, a referendum in ruby-red Kansas, which would have made it easier for Republicans in the state legislature to outlaw the procedure, lost by a whopping 18 points.
Democratic campaign advisers took their cues from Kansas and made abortion the centrepiece of the autumn campaign. And in the states where Republicans’ victories could have led to potentially greater abortion restrictions, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrats won decisive victories. In suburban districts, the new linchpin of the Democratic coalition, white female college graduates, outraged by the supreme court decision, propelled House Democratic candidates to victory in toss-up races.
Republicans compounded the problem by nominating a host of Trump-endorsed first-time Senate and gubernatorial candidates. The closer a Republican was to Trump, the worse they did on Tuesday.
Indeed, for months, political commentators had portrayed the 2022 election as potentially the end of democracy in the US. In state after state, election deniers, parroting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, appeared poised to take office. Yet across the board they lost. On an even more positive note, while Trump still refuses to accept that he lost the presidency to Joe Biden, his enablers and sycophants in the GOP (“grand old party”) refused to follow the same script. Virtually every Republican who lost their election – including the election deniers – has conceded defeat, in the best sign for the strength of American democracy in quite some time.
That’s the good news, but like everything these days in American politics it’s virtually impossible for us to have nice things. While Trump is arguably the biggest loser of the 2022 campaign, his stranglehold over the Republican party is not ending just yet. This week, he will announce his third bid for the White House and, while plenty of Republican leaders wish he would go away, a great many rank-and-file Republicans don’t feel the same.
It’s easy to criticise Trump for his lousy record of endorsements, but it’s not as if he held a gun to the collective head of Republicans and forced them to vote for his preferred candidates. These are still the types of politicians that Republican voters want and there is little reason to expect that they are prepared to jettison Trump.
What makes matters even worse for Republicans is that no matter how the presidential nomination contest turns out, it’s a no-win situation. Democrats have won the past three US elections, in large measure by running against Trump. If he is again the Republican nominee there is no reason to expect that 2024 would play out any differently.
What if Trump loses? That might actually be a worse outcome because if there’s one thing we know about the former president, it’s that he is a thin-skinned narcissist who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. If he loses the GOP presidential bid, say to the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who just won a landslide re-election victory, one can expect that he will not respond well. There will not be a moment at the Republican national convention with Trump and DeSantis, their hands clasped together in party unity. Instead, Trump will handle himself probably no differently from the way he did after losing to Biden – again claiming fraud and denigrating DeSantis to his supporters. Indeed, Trump would probably prefer Biden wins re-election than watch DeSantis accomplish a feat that he could not.
But beyond all that, the final numbers in the House and Senate tell a crucial story. Democrats will probably either maintain their 50-50 edge in the Senate or add one seat (the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, is the tie-breaking vote in the Senate). In the House, the most likely result is an incredibly narrow Republican advantage – somewhere between one and three seats. Governorships could be split evenly 25-25.
America is almost perfectly divided between Democrats and Republicans and neither party can cobble together an effective majority. The 2022 midterms are, on the surface, a win for Democrats, but from a deeper perspective they have simply ratified the status quo of the US as a divided and divisive country.
• Michael Cohen’s most recent book, co-authored with Micah Zenko, is Clear and Present Safety
