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Republicans invited this monster into their house, and he doesn’t want to leave.
The 2022 midterms should have been a blowout for Republicans. Inflation is at its highest level in 40 years, President Biden’s approval rating is about 12 points underwater, and historically there tends to be a backlash against the party that previously flipped the presidency. Indeed, Biden’s numbers are much worse than either Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s during their first midterms, when their party got obliterated.
Instead, it looks like it’s going to be a virtual tie. Republicans could still win control of both the House and the Senate depending on how remaining races go, but outside of Florida where Democrats got flattened, this will be because of rigged maps in Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, and a combination of maps and flattening in New York.
We’ll be reporting on the results here at the Prospect more over the coming days. But one factor must be part of the explanation: Donald Trump, and the lunatic extremism that follows from his domination of the party.
The weak Republican result is especially remarkable given the benefit they got by cheating. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state’s district boundaries violated an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative, but the GOP-dominated state legislature simply ignored them. Federal courts struck down blatantly racist gerrymanders in Alabama and Louisiana, but the right-wing Supreme Court intervened to preserve them. Meanwhile, conservative Democrats on the top New York state court, appointed by disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, didn’t allow Democrats to fight back with a counter-gerrymander in that state. This act alone may have handed Republicans the House.
As my colleague Harold Meyerson points out, Trump’s handpicked candidates whiffed all over the place. In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro beat Trumpers Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano in the Senate and governor’s races, respectively, and may have won the state House for the first time in decades. In Michigan, Democrats won a smashing victory—winning control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship, also for the first time in decades. In Wisconsin, incumbent Gov. Tony Evers fended off a challenge from Trump-endorsed Tim Michels.
There were down-ballot implosions for some Trumpy candidates in the House too. For example, there’s the fall of J.R. Majewski, who lied to voters about his military record, in a Trump district in Ohio, and John Gibbs, who said women’s suffrage was a tragedy for the country, in northern Michigan. In Colorado, mini-Trump Rep. Lauren Boebert was on the brink of defeat at time of writing, and that’s after her district was redrawn to be more conservative than in 2020.
These defeats are downstream of a party that has infected itself with Trump’s shamelessness and derangement, from top to bottom. A sane political party that lost the popular vote in 2016—only sneaking into the presidency thanks to the idiotic rules of the Electoral College—got wiped out in 2018, and lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020 would have trimmed its sails. Clearly something about their platform and messaging is repelling a majority of voters.
The weak Republican result is especially remarkable given the benefit they got by cheating.
Instead, Republicans doubled down. They concluded from Trump’s 2016 win not that they won a lucky fluke election by a whisker, but that they could gleefully indulge all their worst instincts without consequence, and kept at it even when he lost in 2020. Trump’s Big Lie that Biden stole the election became dogma among more than half the party—including nominees for most swing-state election oversight posts this cycle. Trump’s endorsements and the fact that the Republican primary electorate almost always prefers the craziest possible candidate produced a flood tide of loony behavior. Mastriano, for instance, didn’t feel the need to run any TV ads until the final month of the race, possibly because the sword-wielding prophet he hangs out with told him he was chosen by God. Republicans like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) openly mocked Nancy Pelosi after a right-wing fanatic cracked her husband’s skull with a hammer.
The reactionary Supreme Court majority, half of whose membership was appointed by Trump, didn’t even wait until after the midterms to strike down Roe v. Wade. This produced an enormous backlash—one exit poll found that abortion was in second place among top issues for voters (at 27 percent, as against inflation at 31 percent), and of those three-quarters voted Democrat. State-level abortion protections have won in almost every state where they’ve been on the ballot, even Kansas and Kentucky.
If Republicans had simply nominated bland moderate business types, held their tongue on abortion, and run on inflation and crime, I have no doubt they would have won a smashing victory. But aside from a few outliers—like Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, who won by almost 50 points—they just don’t have people like that anymore. The party is simply crawling with bug-eyed psychos, conspiracy theorists, and gutter racists at every level.
After this defeat, they might dig up some such business types—or at least people who are sort of good at pretending, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—but they’d have to win an inevitable battle with Trump, who wants to be president again to avoid criminal prosecution, and who would probably even be willing to eat a loss if he chose to run a third-party campaign. A Trump-DeSantis primary would result in something that makes “Stop the Steal” look like a tea party. It would rip the party asunder.
Republicans invited this monster into their house, and he doesn’t want to leave. Ejecting him would take a thimbleful of discretion and courage, and I’ll believe Republican elites possess that when I see it.
