What’s bigger and more devastating than a tsunami? A Category 5 hurricane? A meteor strike? Whatever it is, it hit Donald Trump and the Republican Party Tuesday. Wednesday dawned on a transformed United States—indeed, a very different world.
Why did this happen? It’s overdetermined, probably. Democrats benefited from every factor you can name, from Trump’s insistence that his party run weak candidates for the Senate in key states to higher fuel prices stemming from the war with Iran he started.
But that doesn’t quite capture the gestalt of an election in which the polls were wrong again—this time because they badly underestimated the Democratic margin, rather than, as in previous years, the latent strength of GOP voters who don’t answer surveys.
This landslide—in which Democrats won back both the House and the Senate by sweeping margins—wasn’t just a rebuke of Trump. It was a repudiation. Whether because 2024 Trump voters turned against him, or just sat this one out, his vaunted “base” all but evaporated. His opponents, by contrast, were energized. Preliminary exit polls showed that 62 percent of voters disapproved of his performance as president, 53 percent “strongly.” Most damning, 62 percent said they think their president puts his own interests ahead of the country’s.
Six Thoughts About a Big Night for Democrats and Democracy
Before the election, two strategies were being debated among Democrats: expand the party by moving to the center, or mobilize the base by doubling down on progressive policies. Turns out neither was proven wrong or right. All it took to win was running against Trump. These midterms had the feel of a country rising up and saying “enough.” People were fed up with high gas and grocery costs, yes. But they were also tired—disgusted, maybe—by Trump’s nasty, rambling, one-man show. The allies insulted and snubbed. The dictators embraced. The people gunned down because untrained ICE agents panicked. The cruel notion of a public execution. Half the White House reduced to rubble and a pharaonic victory arch overshadowing Arlington National Cemetery. The murky deals in crypto and real estate for family and friends. The insults and vulgarity, spouted at rallies and tweeted in all caps at midnight.
F-bombing Democrats take note: Voters seem to have had their fill of indecency masquerading as “authenticity.”
Yesterday’s blue tide swept away political conventional wisdom—right and left.