The Message of the Midterms

By Yuval Levin

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

 

If you’d looked in on American politics at most points in our history, you would have found a majority party managing a complicated coalition and a minority party struggling to grow its appeal. Now and then, a realignment would transform a longstanding minority into the majority of a new era so that the parties would switch roles. There was one long stretch — from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s — when we had something more like two overlapping majority parties, with Republicans winning seven of ten presidential races and Democrats controlling Congress nearly the entire time.

 

But since the mid-’90s, we have had two minority parties. Both are unpopular, each only wins by highlighting the other’s weaknesses, and neither is doing much to expand its appeal. At first, this meant that power would swing back and forth, leading each party to think it was on the verge of a long and grand new era of dominance after its victories, only to see it all fall apart just two years later. But now, it feels more like we are stuck in the middle, with a genuinely 50–50 politics. The last two presidential elections have come down to a few pockets of votes in each of a small number of states and each could easily have gone the other way. The last two years have seen the narrowest congressional majority in the history of our country. And although it won’t be entirely clear for some time, it sure looks like Tuesday’s midterms will result in majorities roughly as slim. Nominal control of one or both houses may shift, but nobody won power in this election. The public said “no” to what both parties offered, again.

 

It would be easy to assume that the reason for this polarized deadlock is that there are almost no winnable voters left, and that Americans aren’t willing to split their tickets anymore. But this is just not true. When the parties don’t go out of their way to repel voters, they can win decent majorities. The reason such majorities have become rare is that both parties have worked hard to become repulsive to the median voter.

 

This is probably a bigger problem for the Democrats in the long run, because they face the challenge of becoming the party of an intensely unpopular elite in a populist time. Swing voters don’t like much of what the Democrats increasingly stand for, and that won’t be easy for the party to change.

 

For Republicans, it should be clearer than ever that they have trouble reaching potentially winnable swing voters because of the unhinged appearance and revolting character of the party’s Trump-era incarnation. It is easier to see how that could change, though that does not mean such change will be easy to pull off.

 

The pattern of Republican wins and losses on Tuesday was not random, and its message is not hard to discern. It presents itself as a blinking, blaring, screaming sign that reads “Republicans: Trump is your problem.” In Georgia and in Ohio, Republican candidates for governor who were not closely associated with Trump ran far ahead of Republican candidates for Senate who were. Many voters were clearly willing to split their tickets. It is painfully evident that Republicans would have had a far easier time winning Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and elsewhere if they had not chosen the Trump-endorsed candidate in the primary.

 

The relatively disappointing result for Republicans has a clear cause, and maybe it will finally move Republicans to abandon the ridiculous notion that Donald Trump is an electoral advantage for the party. Sustaining that view has always required painful contortions — the (implausible) view that Trump’s exceedingly narrow win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the only way any Republican could have beaten the most unpopular political figure in 21st-century America; the (bizarre) notion that Republican setbacks in 2018 were a function of Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan not being Trumpy enough; the (delusional) claim that Trump didn’t actually lose the presidency in 2020.

 

By persuading themselves of all this, many Republicans have become convinced that narrow, tiny wins are the only possible victories in contemporary American politics. They think doing better isn’t possible. They have forgotten what a real winning majority actually looks like. Here’s a hint.

 

It is far from clear that Republicans will take the hint, and will finally grasp that Trumpism isn’t only terrible civics (which is reason enough to reject it) but also terrible politics. Missing the obvious is a common political vice, as both parties keep proving. But they do have less and less of an excuse.

 

Republicans: Trump is your problem. Wake up.