When I think back to my early November sense of dread about what the midterm results might be, it’s safe to say that my expectations did not encompass spending the week after the 6th holding off on writing about the midterms as the race for the House stayed too close to call. For that matter, I also didn’t expect to become the New York Times’ House election results page’s most dedicated user, hovering and clicking over the races to be decided, the map of squares gradually abstracting from a vague outline of the United States to dangling bunches of grapes of political wrath, the results slowly ripening to digestible red or blue under the pressure of democracy’s judgement. And I certainly didn’t expect my concerns to move so dramatically from fear of a GOP blowout to agonized recognition as how close the House results turned out, and the reality that Democratic leaders likely gave up prematurely on winnable seats like Oregon’s 5th congressional district.
But with their relative show of strength in the midterms — holding House losses almost to a draw, holding the Senate with the chance to gain a seat in the Georgia runoff, and increasing power in critical states like Michigan and Pennsylvania — the Democrats have gained the country some breathing room in the fight for democracy. GOP gubernatorial and attorney general candidates who lied about 2020 election lost in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan; and the GOP as a whole got a huge wake-up call about the costs of the far-right takeover of the party.
Though I just mentioned Democratic strength in the elections, the actual strength of our democracy was ultimately manifested by the American people, enough of whom shook off predictions of economic determinism, GOP trash talk, and Democratic pessimism to essentially vote for democracy, freedom, and equality over authoritarianism, white supremacism, and religious bigotry. The key tasks now are to study what in particular motivated voters, and to keep the democratic movement energized and growing as we head into the existential stakes of the 2024 elections, in which failed insurrectionist Donald Trump is currently the presidential candidate to beat in the Republican primary.
It does appear that the Democrats’ attacks against the GOP on abortion rights and the more general issue of democracy did break through to voters — or that voters had seen enough to render anti-GOP judgments on them. Indeed, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall observes, it should be clear that abortion and anti-democracy are not really separate issues, but should be seen as parts of a whole:
[T]he election results point to something different that many observers missed in the narrow and perhaps over-literal way these issues were siloed in polls and election commentary: abortion, election denialism and other elements of GOP whackery melded together into a broader fear of Republican extremism that was larger than the sum of its parts.
This is not to say that abortion on its own is not a fundamental right that energizes many millions of American in its defense, but that this energy is even greater because people understand how closely it ties into the GOP’s larger war on democracy.
Yet the threat of GOP extremism remains great, and so, at the risk of striking a sour note, it’s important to note that this election was nonetheless far too close a thing. Some GOP advocates of election lies like gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona were only narrowly defeated by their Democratic opponents (even as there were more reassuring blow-outs in other places, such as Josh Shapiro’s victory over Doug Mastriano in the race to be Pennsylvania’s next governor). The Democrats’ inability and unwillingness to more thoroughly make the case that the GOP, post-Trump and post-January 6 coup attempt, is unfit for power continues to be one of the great frustrations of our time.
And though there are some hopeful signs that important elements of the GOP are beginning to sort of, kind of question Donald Trump’s domination of the party, in light of the sheer number of losers he backed and a general perception that he weighed on the party’s results, Democrats and the general public shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the struggle for democracy and a free society is far broader and deeper than the fight to deny Donald Trump and his acolytes a political future. The great bulk of Republican elected officials are fully supportive of a wider reactionary movement that goes beyond election subversion and anti-democratic animus, to encompass a backwards vision of the United States that sees conservative Christianity, white supremacism, and retrograde gender rules as the preferred state of American society and economy. As Ron Brownstein notes in an important midterms post-mortem, even as Democrats outperformed in some states and voters rejected a conservative cultural agenda, “in red states where Republicans have actually imposed that agenda over the past two years, GOP governors cruised to reelection without any discernible backlash.” Indeed, in the wake of the election, GOP-led state government are set to continue implementing culturally conservative agendas like anti-transgender laws, book bans, and, of course, abortion restrictions.
The clash between a backwards looking cultural movement that places white Christians at the apex of American culture and a more egalitarian vision shared by the American majority underlies the clash between proponents of autocracy versus democracy, as we see the Republicans use their victories in red states to cement their power, via gerrymanders and voter suppression, into an unassailable hold on government which they can then use to further implement a far-right cultural and economic agenda. But though observers like Brownstein see an increasingly deep divergence in the lived realities of freedom in blue versus red states, this split is anything but stable. The logic of this right-wing cultural and political backlash means that it will seek to impose its vision on blue states via national politics; as Brownstein writes elsewhere, “Congressional Republicans, with little notice, have introduced a flotilla of proposals to impose onto blue states the red state social restrictions on abortion and other issues, such as the prohibitions DeSantis championed on teachers discussing sexual orientation particularly in early grades.” And as we’ve already witnessed in the sheer number of Republicans who claim elections are rigged in Democrats’ favor, the GOP clearly sees election subversion and anti-democratic measures at the national level as essential to carrying out their cultural revolution. In other words, the divergence between states does not mean we are tending to a stable equilibrium between GOP and Democratic governance. Rather, the parties’ respective attitudes towards democracy and to fundamental issues of freedom and equality are in fundamental, irreconcilable conflict.
This is all to say that while the Democrats’ ability to more or less hold the line in these past midterms is cause for celebration, the conflict with the authoritarian, white supremacist GOP is far from resolved. Democrats, the media, and ordinary citizens need to discuss and broadcast the pro-democratic meaning of the midterms, so that voters understand the power and breadth of the pro-democracy, pro-freedom movement in this country. But there also need to be proactive efforts by the Democrats and progressive organizations to seek to channel this energy into further pushback against the far-right counterrevolution that proved itself down but not out last week. It should be obvious that efforts to institute national and state-level rights to abortion should be at the top of the list. Every day that goes by with the terrible Dobbs decision still in force is another day that American women are denied a basic right to bodily autonomy and health care in multiple states. This is an affront not just to those women, but to the conscience of the nation. Likewise, Democrats also need to pursue efforts to protect gay marriage, as well as the transgender youth, school teachers, and librarians who have been targeted for particularly vicious treatment by GOP politicians and activists.
Yet, still more so than was true two years ago, the Democrats must also place a pro-democracy agenda front and center in the national conversation and in their own list of political priorities, and be clear that strengthening our democracy is inextricable from fighting a GOP rollback of our fundamental freedoms. This last election should hammer home once again that GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression are key to the party gaining power, particularly in close elections. National legislation banning gerrymandering and setting election standards would not only protect majority rule at the national level, but could help restore democratic governance to states like Texas and Wisconsin, where Democratic-leaning voters have been robbed of their ability to elect the governments of their choosing. Congressional Democrats, and a Democratic president, cannot simply sit idly by while vast numbers of Americans find themselves living in states that are functionally no longer democracies.
At the same time, Democrats have an electoral and moral responsibility to energize and activate American voters to recognize the stakes — politically, economically, and culturally — and to act on behalf of an American majority that communicated in this election that it doesn’t want election subverters in charge of elections, Christian nationalists in the governor’s mansion, and politicians telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. To sharpen a point I made above — there can be no compromise with a GOP that differs from the American majority on so many fundamental issues. The only logical path for Democrats is to continue to work toward building a durable majority that can crush, once and for all, the Republican Party’s misbegotten dream that it can rob the country of its freedom and its democratic destiny.