Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano walks past talk show host John Fredericks’s bus before the start of a campaign event in Newtown, Pennsylvania, November 7, 2022.
The wave never made it to shore.
True, Americans really didn’t feel good about the economy. But Americans also really didn’t feel good about Republicans, either, and certainly not about the crackpots and tin-pots who’d gone Q or Full Trump or Life Begins Two Weeks Before Conception. As I write, it’s not clear that the Republican majority in the House will be much larger than the wafer-thin majority the Democrats currently enjoy. It’s not clear that there will even be a Republican majority in the Senate.
To be sure, the networks’ exit poll showed that Republicans outnumbered Democrats in this year’s electorate by 36 percent to 33 percent, and that voters preferred Republicans to Democrats on four of the five issues on which their party preferences were solicited: inflation, crime, immigration, and foreign policy. (In all four cases, though, those preferences were by nearly identical mid-40s to low 50 percent margins, suggesting that respondents were really just saying which party they preferred generally.)
On the fifth issue, abortion, they preferred the Democrats. But when asked about issues themselves, as distinct from which party’s positions they preferred, clear majorities supported issues that the Republican base and politicos oppose. They approved of stricter gun controls and President Biden’s cancellation of student debt; they agreed that racism remains a serious problem and that immigrants help, rather than hurt, the country. Overwhelming majorities said that climate change is a serious problem, and by a 2-to-1 margin, that they support abortion rights. The only social change statement with which they disagreed (by a 50 percent to 26 percent margin) was that “society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better.”
In fact, the measures of party preference in yesterday’s electorate are all over the map. Forty-four percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Democrats, while 44 percent also have a favorable opinion of the Republicans. Fifty-three percent said they viewed Democrats unfavorably; 52 percent said that about the Republicans. Considering this comes from an electorate in which Republicans outnumbered Democrats by three percentage points, that suggests there was ample room for Democrats to win close elections in which the Republicans put forth candidates who appeared to be warming up for their Thanksgiving crazy-uncle performances.
Some of the grotesqueries of the Trumpian right—New Hampshire Senate candidate Don Bolduc, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels (who promised if elected that no Democrat could ever win Wisconsin again), Maine gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage, and lest we forget, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, whose Christian nationalist rhapsodies probably helped sink Mehmet Oz—clearly underperformed. In Georgia, Herschel Walker has been compelled to extend his malaprops into a December 6 Senate runoff.
By contrast, unfortunately, our pre-eminent sober-appearing fascist, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, won re-election by a 20-point margin, racking up supermajorities in the land of retired whites and red-scared Latinos. DeSantis carried Miami-Dade—Florida’s largest county, which is 70 percent Latino and long the state’s foremost Democratic bastion—in a startling first for Republicans, and by an astounding 80,000-vote margin.
Republicans have a couple of hard-to-eradicate problems: their base, and their leader.
As national exit polls showed that Latinos voted for Democrats over Republicans by 60 percent to 40 percent—which is admittedly nothing for the Democrats to write home about—the Miami-Dade vote has to be viewed as an outlier. Republicans have been successful in convincing immigrants from Communist countries, like Cubans in Miami, or Vietnamese in California’s Orange County, that Democrats who advocate for Scandinavian-style social democratic safety nets are really undercover Leninists plotting to storm the Winter Palace. Never mind that it was Trump’s legions who actually stormed the Capitol, and that it’s Tucker Carlson and his ilk who champion actually existing authoritarians. This is a niche market, but one in which Republicans thrive. (In Little Saigon in California, Michelle Steel, who ran one of the most nakedly red-baiting races in history against Navy Lt. Commander Jay Chen, looks like she will win a narrow victory.)
But if yesterday’s election demonstrated anything, it’s that Republicans have a couple of hard-to-eradicate problems: their base, and their leader. With Donald Trump’s encouragement, Republican primary voters have descended into a dangerous antipathy to reality, to facts, and support candidates who share that antipathy, usually very loudly. This is not a foolproof electoral strategy, as yesterday’s elections saw numerous certified fools going down to defeat.
Fascism always requires a heavy dose of fantasy—“We had fed the heart on fantasies,” wrote Yeats, “the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” Trump will doubtless seek the 2024 nomination as a fantasy-spouting fascist. His likely primary opponent will be DeSantis, whose preferred form of fascism is more a grim seizure of power. Let it not be said that Republicans don’t have a choice.
