The results of the 2018 midterm elections made clear both the promise and the horror of our political moment. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the largest gain for the party since the post-Watergate election of 1974. They also won seven additional governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats, doing much to roll back the catastrophic losses of the Obama years. It is impossible to read this outcome as anything but a repudiation of Donald Trump — yet it also arguably constitutes a clear majority of Americans’ rejection of Republican policies on such vital issues as immigration and health care. It’s a result that rejects any argument that the American public had somehow shifted hard right in the wake of the Obama presidency.
These Democratic gains came in the face of deeply anti-democratic gerrymandering and voter suppression in GOP-dominated states, and against a flood tide of conservative billionaire dollars vectored into hundreds of races. The organization and enthusiasm of Democrats made this victory possible, helping the party overcome deep structural disadvantages.
Some of the disappointments of Tuesday are also not so disappointing as they may have felt in the information overload of election night. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke ended up within 3 points of unseating Ted Cruz in a state that has become synonymous with Republicanism, providing a template for future campaigns and exposing a reality that Americans are more receptive to more progressive governance that the common wisdom would have us believe. The as-yet unresolved races in Georgia and Florida also signal tectonic shifts in American politics, with Stacy Abrams and Andrew Gillum at worst making incredibly strong gubernatorial runs in states not exactly conducive to Democratic success.
But these mixed disappointments open up the door to the darker side of what the midterms tell us. In the Senate, Republicans have retained control, and will have increased their majority by at least one vote when the final votes from Arizona and Florida are counted. The Democrats’ loss of seats in North Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana reflects a growing conservatism in red states that some say means that Democrats will never be able to elect senators from those states, and point to a perpetual GOP dominance of the Senate.
Widespread voter suppression (whether through voter ID laws or voter roll purges) and gerrymandering were also part of the worrisome backdrop of this election, undoubtedly costing Democrats additional house seats in otherwise competitive states like North Carolina (where Democratic House candidates collectively won 48% of the votes cast but only captured three out of 13 seats) and Wisconsin. The Democrats may have won, but such anti-voter measures mean that the extent of public support for the Democratic Party is to some degree obscured by the results — an argument already being taken up by conservatives and mainstream pundits alike seeking to downplay the extent of the party’s success on Tuesday.
But the darkest note of all is that, after two years of the Trump presidency, the electoral pummeling suffered by Republicans was not even more dire; that there was not wholesale rejection of this awful man. This upsetting fact could not have been made any starker than by the president’s ongoing reaction to the election results. Obviously deeply upset by the election results (despite his protestations that the Republicans had in fact achieved a great victory), Donald Trump wasted no time in escalating his attacks on the free press. Not satisfied with belittling and insulting reporters at large at his first post-election press conference, he singled out female African-American reporters for particular scorn, engaging in behavior that is clearly racist. The fun didn’t stop there, though: Offended by his persistent questioning, the Trump administration revoked CNN report Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials, based on a lie that he had struck a female White House aide. To support this claim, the White House endorsed a doctored video: a frighteningly totalitarian twisting of facts. I will keep saying it because it is true, and it is a central fact of our time: attacking reporters for doing their job, with the purpose of creating public distrust of a free press, is authoritarian behavior, the stuff of Russian dictators and Hungarian neo-fascists. For a U.S. president to engage in this behavior is a national disgrace, and a crisis for all decent Americans.
But were these acts against the media merely meant as a distraction from the Democratic wins, or were they what they seemed — an escalation of this presidency’s war on a free press? As so often is the case with this presidency, they were both. But within another 24 hours, even these obscenities were overshadowed by additional dangerous pronouncements from the White House. First, we learned that Donald Trump had fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and installed in his place an unqualified lickspittle whose purpose is obvious: to allow the president to disrupt and derail the investigation of Russian collusion being run by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
This was hardly the end of it, though: it took only another day or two for the president to begin to attack, without any basis in fact, the legitimacy of some of the close races that appeared to be breaking against the GOP as more votes were counted, including in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Against the reality that it can take longer than a day to count all the votes in an election, and that many late-counted votes tend to come from urban districts that favor Democrats, the president has invented Democratic conspiracies out of thin air. It is no excuse to say that we have gotten used to this fear-mongering: it is unacceptable, and indeed impeachable, for a president to groundlessly attack the legitimacy of U.S. elections in the pursuit of his own hold on power.
The distance between America’s two competing and irreconcilable realities could not have been starker: within days of millions of Americans exercising their collective duty to run this country, the president was once again taking actions that assert he is above the law and unaccountable to the American people, that indicate his hatred of a free press, and that he will undermine the legitimacy of our elections when his side loses.
It is difficult to disentangle the president’s purely authoritarian impulses from his need to block all investigations into him at all cost; at this point, they appear to have fused into a singular drive. His need for self-protection validates and impels the authoritarian tendencies past any point of restraint. If he must provoke a constitutional crisis in order to protect himself from the Mueller investigation, then that is what he will do.
But while the president may be the most dangerous embodiment of the authoritarian inclinations arising in the U.S. and around the world, they are continuous with seemingly less extreme behavior by the GOP. Donald Trump’s assertions of conspiracy around the Florida election were backed by Senate candidate and current Florida Governor Rick Scott — a reminder that while the president’s authoritarianism and assertions of being above the law are in some ways sui generis, in that a lawful president is already the most powerful person in the world, there is a line of continuity leading from the web of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter roll purges that enable Republican political power to the president’s claims to be above the law. That these practices make it difficult to constrain an out-of-control president in a time of crisis is argument enough against them.
I suppose what I am getting at it this: the Democratic victory is only meaningful so long as it is part of a sustained and successful push against the anti-democratic tendencies of both the president and the GOP at large — against a politics that favors millionaires over the middle-class, that incites hatred against minorities and women, that puts propaganda over facts, that denies the reality of climate change, that kneecaps the will of the majority through voting restrictions, and that encourages people left behind by the modern economy to resent the success of others and blame immigrants for their situation. The majority must continue its grinding push to take back the levers of political power, but must also engage the more immediate fight of calling out and pushing back on GOP efforts to nullify American democracy.
As some have pointed out, Donald Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud in Arizona and Florida are a dry run for his behavior during a close or even not-so-close electoral outcome in the 2020 election. We must continue to make the case against this authoritarian mindset and its attempts to undermine democracy, even as we fight for the concrete changes that will make our country a better place for all. One of the paradoxes of our time is that there’s a good case to made that we are in a more dangerous place than ever, because now the president is feeling cornered and the GOP vulnerable to electoral defeat despite their best anti-democratic efforts. In his ability to act quickly and grab media attention, the president still has unparalleled ability to undermine our country in ways that threaten to outflank the democratic opposition. Progressives would do well to figure out how to blunt this advantage, and regain the initiative in the face of his un-American impulses.