So how did I do? Pretty poorly. Yesterday, I predicted that the GOP would hold the Senate and maybe pick up a seat or two. In particular, I said that I thought bizarro candidate James Talarico would lose to Ken Paxton in Texas and that Abdul El-Sayed would lose to Mike Rogers in Michigan. Wrong and wrong again.
I thought Susan Collins would prevail in Maine – somehow, she always had – but the former logger Troy Jackson crushed her by nearly 10 points. I understood that the party apparatchik Sherrod Brown was likely to best Jon Husted in Ohio, but I thought that Husted might pull it out. No such luck. Then there was Alaska. That race is still undecided as I write. I think the one and only Dan Sullivan will prevail – he’s ahead by a hair – but who knows?
Trump and his MAGA confrères will continue their counterrevolution to resuscitate the American Dream
The unhappy bottom line is this: that I predicted the GOP would win all five of those races, “with the possible exception of Ohio.” How’s that for getting things completely wrong? And just to add to the obloquy, I should admit that I privately thought it inconceivable that the GOP would lose Senate seats in Iowa and Kansas. But it did.
Then there was the House. As of this writing, it looks as if the GOP will lose 30 seats. I thought they would lose fewer than 20, and even held out hope that they would hold it or even lose by only a handful of seats. Thirty seats is not the “shellacking” that Barack Obama suffered in 2010 when he lost 63 seats. It is not even the 54-seat loss that Bill Clinton suffered in 1994. In fact, the average House loss by the incumbent party is about 30 seats, or more if the president’s approval rating dips much below 50 percent (Trump’s is 39 percent now).
Moving over to the governors’ mansions, things are not any better. I was particularly surprised that Greg Abbott lost in Texas and Vivek Ramaswamy lost in Ohio. Overall, the GOP lost four seats, bringing its number of governors down to 40.
So were the pundits right that this was a “cataclysmic” defeat for the GOP – a no good, horrible, just downright devastating loss? The respected election watcher Henry Olsen predicted such an eventuality, warning that “a terrible night awaits the GOP, and even that might be an understatement.”
It was indeed a bad night for the GOP. But here’s a bit of tepid if not chilly comfort, or at least context. It looks like the Dems will have 54 seats in the Senate for the next two years and something like 240 seats in the House. In his last two years, Obama got by with a Senate that was 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 2 Democratic-caucusing Independents: basically the same configuration that Trump will soldier on with in his final two years in the Oval Office. The House in 2015-2016 had 247 Republican seats and 188 Democratic seats. In 2016, when Trump won the presidency for the first time, professional racialist and Trump-hater Van Jones thundered that the election was a “whitelash.” The excitable talking head has a penchant for such colorful language. Reacting to the election results last night, Jones crowed that “If You Join A Cult, Eventually They Take You To Jonestown.”
Cute. What does it mean? More to the point, was last night’s election a referendum on the MAGA movement in general and Donald Trump in particular? In part, perhaps. The war in Iran is not popular – at least the higher gas prices it has entailed have been a thorn in the side of the GOP, notwithstanding the fact that gas prices and inflation were higher under Joe Biden than they are now. But long memories are not a characteristic of the electorate.
Stepping back, I would say this: people on both sides of the aisle like to talk about “the American Experiment.” What was the nature of that experiment? It was an adventure in enlightened self-rule. Is that what we had last night? I predict that we will see many people of my political coloration quoting Benjamin Franklin in the coming weeks. In 1787, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Franklin was asked by a prominent socialite, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously replied, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”
There is a lot more to say about all this. Is America about to go the way of the EU – the way, that is, of socialist inanity, low or no growth, censorship and overbearing bureaucratic nannydom until the forces of third-world immigration, Islamic triumphalism and Chinese expansionism finally destroy it? Possibly. I somehow doubt it, though.
It’s not just that, as Adam Smith wrote to a despairing Brit during the American Revolution, “there’s a deal of ruin in a nation.” (“Especially this nation,” my friend John O’Sullivan once said to me when I quoted Smith to him.) There is also that great seat of political potency: the White House.
In the last years of his administration, Barack Obama had control of neither the Senate nor the House. But he went on to wield his pen and his phone to push forward his agenda. I expect Donald Trump and his lieutenants to do the same. There will be more chihuahuas yapping at their ankles in the next couple of years. Possibly, Bill Kristol will become chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America. Maybe Mitt Romney, Mike Pence and Liz Cheney will start a Beautiful Losers club and lecture each other about how wonderful they all are. But Trump and his MAGA confrères will continue their counterrevolution to resuscitate the American Dream and keep the country on the road to enhanced national security, economic prosperity and personal liberty. What if the El-Sayeds and Talaricos and Bernie Sanderses and Elizabeth Warrens of the American left prevail? What if there is a Democratic sweep of the presidency and both Houses in 2028? I do not expect that to happen. Then again, I did not expect last night’s results. If it does happen, it would mark the end of the American Experiment. That would be sad – not only for America, but for the world. I suppose it would be some consolation to reflect that 252 years was a pretty good run.
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