The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion The expected red wave looks more like a puddle

Associate editor and columnist|
November 9, 2022 at 8:41 a.m. EST
A supporter of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake reacts during her election night gathering on Tuesday at the Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
4 min

Political forecasters had it wrong. Again.

Although votes are still being counted in many of the most closely watched races, with control of the House and Senate unclear, it is already apparent that the expected Great Red Wave of 2022 turned out to be a messy puddle.

Yes, the most powerful winds all seemed to be blowing the GOP’s way: The curse of history that says a first-term president gets a comeuppance in the midterms, President Biden’s listless approval rating, roaring inflation, an economy that appears to be on the edge of recession, an alarming crime rate, record numbers of migrants coming over the border.

But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) had it right back in August, when he said that, especially in Senate races, “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.” By Wednesday morning, only one Senate seat had flipped, and that was in the direction of the Democrats, with Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, despite suffering a serious stroke, beating celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz.

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Voters, it would appear, saw this midterm as something more than a referendum on the party in power; with Republicans putting forward a host of extreme, election-denying candidates and little by way of an agenda, it became a choice between two drastically different paths forward.

And while abortion was not the silver bullet that some Democrats had thought it might be, it helped. Just under 3 in 10 voters cited the issue as their highest priority in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade — only slightly less than the number who named inflation — and they swung hard for Democrats. By comparison, only about 1 in 10 voters cited crime, immigration and gun policy as their most important issues.

In the House, it appears that Republicans still have a good shot to take control, but not with the hefty majority many had expected. Where House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was confidently predicting a year ago that his party would gain upward of 60 seats, Republicans were still struggling early Wednesday morning to nail down even the single-digit number they need for a majority.

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This suggests that even if McCarthy finds himself holding the speaker’s gavel in January, he is going to face a significant management challenge. With fewer members from purplish districts than anticipated, it will be the hard-right Freedom Caucus calling the shots for his fragile, fractious majority.

Meanwhile, embattled Democratic incumbents such as Rep. Abigail Spanberger (Va.) and Sen. Maggie Hassan (N.H.) won by working hard, establishing a credible (and moderate) political identity separate from their party’s national image and benefiting from the fact that their opponents were MAGA extremists.

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Today’s Republican Party is not exactly awash in self-awareness, but these outcomes might prompt it to reconsider the wisdom of relying on Donald Trump to anoint its candidates or allowing him to remain its de facto leader. (On Tuesday, the former president’s super PAC sent around a memo reminding everyone: “Trump-endorsed candidates for U.S. Senate were 21-0 in primary elections during the 2022 election cycle.”)

The inescapable conclusion is that Trump — who has indicated he will soon announce he is running again for president in 2024 — is a drag on a party that has received a majority of the national popular vote only once since 1988, and has to rely on the quirkiness of the electoral college to win at all.

No one quickens the collective pulse of the Republican base like Trump, but he is a massive turnoff to independent voters. Yes, they still exist, and the expected sharp rightward shift in the independent vote was one of many places where polls went wrong in the final weeks of the 2022 campaign. Preliminary voter polling from AP VoteCast indicates that independents accounted for nearly one-third of the electorate and split nearly evenly between the two parties.

Though Democrats managed to avert disaster, they, too, should see in the election results a need for reassessment. Democratic candidates who managed to win against the odds offer an example for 2024 and beyond. Pragmatism, moderation and — most of all — maintaining a deep connection to the people who go to the polls add up to a formula that is hard to beat, even when the political environment has stacked the deck against you.