Analysis: Voters sent a message to Trump and Biden

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze”, Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of a famous racehorse and the “tragic murder of its trainer”. A police inspector asks the detective, “Is there a point you would like to draw my attention to?”

Holmes responds, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night.” “The dog did nothing during the night,” said the inspector.

“That was the curious incident.” It was the dog that didn’t bark – because he knew the intruder well – that helped Holmes solve the mystery. The red wave that didn’t break could help unravel the mystery of what happened last week.

Republicans have not won the midterm victory normally won by an opposition party against a president with a low approval rating.

Democrats have not only retained control of the Senate, but could increase their number by one if Georgia’s current Democrat Raphael Warnock defeats Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff next month. And if Republicans win a majority in the House, it will be by just a few seats.

It was just over a week ago that Republicans thought they would be savoring a landslide victory — and some Democrats were starting to blame each other for what they feared would be a disaster.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker reported Nov. 4 that GOP campaign strategists said their candidates, including those in competitive Senate races such as Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, were “going to general cleaning”. Wallace-Wells wrote, “The word that kept popping up in these conversations was ‘bloodbath.’

The actual results sent some very different messages:

1. Voters worried about abortion rights and threats to democracy

“People sometimes wonder what it will take to get young people to the polls,” wrote Dolores Hernandez.🇧🇷 a freshman at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “Well, after the 2022 midterm elections, they don’t have to guess anymore.”

“Put before us an existential question that can determine our future. Give us the knowledge that we can have a say on issues that affect us with our votes, and we will come out in droves.” Hernandez and his Gen Z friends saw abortion as this kind of existential issue.

At the University of Michigan, student activist Isabelle Schindler noted that the queue of students seeking same-day registration to vote “on election day stretched across the campus, with students waiting for more than four hours. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the campus election. For many young people, especially young women, there was a motivating issue that drove their participation: the right to abortion.”

Nationally, exit polls showed that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 63% to 35%; no other age group has been as pro-Democrat, with voters over 45 strongly pro-Republican.

Ahead of the election, some experts argued that many voters’ anger over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had disappeared after five months, and that inflation would erase most other worries. They also argued that President Joe Biden was out of step with focusing a major pre-election speech on the threat that election deniers pose to democracy. But both questions resonated.

“The abortion rights side was apparently a perfect five-for-five when it came to voting initiatives recognizing a statewide abortion right in Michigan, California and Vermont,” wrote law professor Mary Ziegler. “Kentucky, a deep red state, turned down an attempt to say that the state constitution did not protect the right to abortion. Montana’s abortion measure, which threatened to impose criminal penalties on health care workers, was rejected by voters in Tuesday’s referendum.”

2. Extremism scares voters

John Avlon saw the election as “a repudiation of the electoral lies of former President Donald Trump and at least many of the top candidates who repeated them.”

“Yes, the economy matters – but so does democracy. And in 2022, the message many voters were sending was ‘it’s extremism, stupid’. 🇧🇷

“Consider the milestones of success in a typical midterm election: the opposition party wins an average of 46 seats in the House when the president is below 50% approval, like Biden. While the final number is still being determined, the GOP House earnings will be much smaller than that,” Avlon noted.

“What a relief,” wrote Roxanne Jones. “Finally, it appears that most voters want to re-center American politics away from the toxic, conspiracy theory-based rhetoric we’ve experienced in recent years.”

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Josh Shapiro defeated Republican candidate Doug Mastriano in the gubernatorial race. Mastriano “startled many Pennsylvanians with his brash Trump swagger,” wrote Joyce M. Davis of The Patriot-News, the newspaper that serves Harrisburg. “He inflamed racial tensions, embraced Christian nationalism and once said that women who violated his proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder. On top of all that, he’s an unapologetic election denier,” Davis noted.

“Many voters are worried about rampant progressivism on the left, but they are even more worried about rampant extremism on the right,” noted Tim Alberta in the Atlantic.

“This extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our electoral system, endorsing the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, making jokes and spreading lies about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all that extremism, which so many undecided voters rejected on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.”

3. Joe Biden is a stronger leader than many Democrats thought

When Biden was asked by a reporter on Wednesday what he would do differently in the remaining two years of his term, he replied, “Nothing.”

That might be understandable given Biden’s track record. “The midterm elections make it clear that Biden is a much stronger president than he often believes,” wrote historian Julian Zelizer. “He was underrated and criticized despite having a formidable first two years. The midterm elections should make Republicans nervous as they think about 2024.”

Biden not only defeated an incumbent president, but was “able to move a formidable legislative agenda through Congress, overcoming fierce Republican opposition and even winning some GOP votes along the way. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act stand as a historic triad – a legislative record arguably more significant than any we have seen since the Great Society of President Lyndon Johnson.”

4. Donald Trump Is A Weaker Leader Than Many Republicans Thought

The midterm elections were supposed to “be a beating from President Joe Biden, but it was Trump who got the worst of it,” Frida Ghitis wrote.

“In exit polls, 28% of voters said they chose their House vote ‘to oppose Donald Trump.’ And only 37% said they had a favorable view of the former president, the supposed favorite of the Republican Party, at least before this election. That should alarm the party…”

“Despite his horrific display, Trump plans to declare his candidacy soon. Most Democrats find the prospect difficult to accept, but most Republicans would also like him to focus solely on his golf game,” noted Ghitis.

Conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote: “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent a clear message to all Republican voters Tuesday night: My path is the path to a national majority, and the path of former President Donald Trump is the path to future disappointment and continued suffering.”

“Four years ago, DeSantis won his first gubernatorial race by less than a percentage point. His nearly 20-point victory over Democratic candidate Charlie Crist on Tuesday sent the message that DeSantis, not Trump, can win over the independent voters who decide the election.”

5. Stars on the rise and fall

Some careers were made – and others broken – in Tuesday’s election. Wes Moore, who became Maryland’s first black governor, is a rising star, wrote Peniel Joseph. “A campaign based on advocating for equal opportunity, compassion for the incarcerated, education for all children and hope for the future can not only win, but be contagious enough to spread across the country,” noted Joseph. “Wes Moore’s victory has regained some of the magic that has been lost in our politics in the turmoil of recent years. I hope this is just the beginning.”

Republicans are equally enthusiastic about DeSantis, but historian Nicole Hemmer has suggested there are obstacles to his potential presidential bid. “Before I declare this the dawn of DeSantis, remember: the next few weeks are very likely to be the high point of his presidential aspirations. The spotlight can quickly become the hot spot, and DeSantis has not been tested as a national candidate and Trump’s adversary. Those who see an easy turn from the Trump era to the DeSantis era are likely to suffer another wave of disappointment, both because of the particulars of DeSantis’s victory and the persistence of Trump’s power.”

For Sophia A. Nelson, “the big heartbreak of the night” was Stacey Abrams’ defeat by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp – “a repeat of her defeat to him four years ago, when the two became entangled in what was then a open seat…”

“If Abrams was successful, she would have been the first black woman to become governor of a US state. After its second consecutive electoral defeat, America is still waiting for that breakthrough.”

In Texas, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to Republican Greg Abbott for governor. In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Nicole Russell wrote that after “his third big loss, it’s time for him to stop running for office in Texas. We’ve had enough Beto for one life. … His liberal policies are unwelcome and unwelcome in Texas.”