2022 midterms

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump, accidental Paul Revere

Is he a stone cold loser? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not to mention its owner Rupert Murdoch, certainly appear to think so. The verdict on Thursday was crushing: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.” The “he” in question is, of course, Donald J. Trump, or, as President Joe Biden likes to put it, the former guy. Except that he isn’t really. So far, the Trump balloon has failed to pop, at least in the GOP, propelled ever upwards by fresh injections of helium, or, more prosaically, cash from an obedient base. The conundrum that Trump presents has long been that the only thing worse than him serving as leader of the GOP might be him not heading it.

Roger Kimball

Republicans need to figure out mail-in voting

I have been thinking about the phrase “the fix was in.” What it means is that a certain result was predetermined. It carries with it a suggestion — but only, I think, a suggestion — of something, if not quite illicit, then at least not quite above board. Why have I been thinking about that pregnant phrase? If you said “the midterm elections,” go to the head of the class. I have no idea whether there was anything corrupt or underhanded about the election, notwithstanding the Caligula’s horse moment of John Fetterman’s election to the United States Senate. It was odd, no doubt, that the people of the great state of Pennsylvania elected a mentally incompetent trust-fund leftie who never saw a dead baby he didn’t like.

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Batya Ungar-Sargon

The normie election

Since Tuesday’s shocking midterm results started trickling in, the chattering classes have scrambled to make sense of yet another election we forecast so very poorly. The media promised a red wave of epic proportions; instead, President Biden had the best midterm elections of any US president since 2002, despite his dreadful approval ratings. In the lead-up to the vote count, poll after poll found that Americans’ top issues were inflation, the economy, crime and immigration — kitchen table issues on which the Democrats have performed abysmally in recent years. Everything pointed to a very bad night for the president’s party. So why didn’t voters send a clear message to Democrats about their misplaced priorities, as we in the media were so sure they would?

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Matt Bilinsky

The battle for Los Angeles drags on

On the surface, the contrast between the two candidates in the Los Angeles mayor’s race couldn't be starker. Rick Caruso – a white, family-friendly mall impresario with a sparkling tan and pristine suits — against Karen Bass — a black female nurse-turned-community organizer-turned congresswoman. Yet, when Bass and Caruso were asked at the closing of their initial debate, “What is one word to describe the state of Los Angeles?” they both had the same answer: “Crisis.

Amber Duke

J.D. Vance was practically destined to win Ohio

Republican J.D. Vance wiped the floor with Democrat Tim Ryan on Tuesday night. It was a surprise for all the professional pundits only because the Ohio Senate race had been obscured by all kinds of white noise. The mainstream media worked overtime to paint the contest as a toss-up and the Democrats insisted they were going to flip the seat. Just a couple of weeks ahead of the election, multiple polls had the race at a statistical tie. Vance ended up winning by seven points. Several Republican consultants told me that they never believed the race would be close. Ohio, they pointed out, was ground zero for the working-class realignment that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Trump won the state again by eight points in the 2020 presidential election.

John Pietro

Massachusetts Republicans pay the price for Trumpism

Massachusetts voters are known to be pragmatic. Despite being one of the most liberal states in the country, Massachusetts has had only one Democratic governor between 1991 and 2022. Yet the state’s Republican Party is anything but pragmatic. Hence the inevitable defeat of Republican Geoff Diehl in the gubernatorial race against Democrat Maura Healey. For those not from Massachusetts, there are a few things about the state’s political dynamics that need to be understood. First, it is overwhelmingly Democratic — the GOP holds three out of 40 seats in the state senate and 29 of the 160 seats in the state house. Before the midterms, Democrats controlled every statewide office except for the governorship, and now they control that too.

Wednesday

Ben Kew

Pro-lifers were the midterms’ biggest losers

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in favor of the overturning of Roe v. Wade back in June, thus ending a woman's federal right to an abortion, the pro-life movement was jubilant. The decision was the culmination of decades of campaigning by conservative and anti-abortion activists to send the issue back to the states. Republican-controlled legislatures across the country moved immediately to place restrictions on abortion, and for the first time in decades, the pro-life movement finally felt like it had the upper hand. Fast-forward five months to the morning after the midterm elections and much of that optimism must have dissipated.

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Matt McDonald

Georgia gets ready to runoff… again

Atlanta, Georgia Here we go again. For the second time in as many years, Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock is headed to a runoff. Neither he nor his Republican opponent Herschel Walker has secured 50 percent of the vote in Georgia, the state office confirmed Wednesday afternoon. The pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Heisman Trophy-winning running back will face off again for the US Senate seat on Tuesday December 6. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jolt newsletter made clear on Wednesday morning, “split-ticket voters” were the key to pushing the Senate race to a runoff.

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Paul du Quenoy

At Mar-a-Lago as the red wave died out

It was a dark and stormy election night at Mar-a-Lago, former president Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club, which is the marquee residence of our island resort community of Palm Beach. In the world outside American politics, Tropical Storm Nicole was gathering strength and bearing down on us. Earlier in the day, the Island (always with a capital “I,” unless you’re not really a resident and don’t know any better) was placed under a hurricane warning. About an hour before the party started, the town issued a mandatory evacuation order to take effect at 7 a.m. the following morning. All this was forgotten as euphoric Republicans gathered inside the gates, snugly out of the gusts and downpour.

Ben Domenech

The winners and losers of the 2022 midterms

In every election, there are the winners and losers, but there are also winners and losers away from the ballot box, which oftentimes are more important and have a longer tail than the vote-getters. In the 2022 midterms, here are the winners and losers as I see them. Loser: Donald Trump Well, this one is obvious. The former president weighed in with all his political energy behind multiple candidates in this cycle, particularly in divisive primaries and statewide races where he often chose outsiders over more experienced candidates. The Trump fatigue factor was clearly a problem this time around, with his choices in some races utterly rejected by voters.

Stephen L. Miller

Time to cancel Trump’s Political Apprentice

Donald Trump did not emerge from the wonkish world of conservative politics and policy. He was a product of the national media and international entertainment industry, and he brought that unique swagger to the White House in 2016, after several years of flirting with the idea in interviews. He honed his image of a savvy know-it-all billionaire businessman on NBC’s The Apprentice. The show was number one in the network television ratings for several years, as Trump plucked C- and D-list celebrities to compete for his affections. But the success of the over-the-top WWE showman persona that put Trump in the White House has not rubbed off on the political candidates whom he's selected over the course of the last three elections — 2018, 2020 and now 2022.

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Roger Kimball

How did I get the midterms so wrong?

How wrong can you be? About as wrong as I was about the character of the midterm elections. I thought there would be a red wave, fueled in part by high-octane orange fuel. Clearly I was wrong. It is no consolation to know that I was hardly alone in my assumptions. Nor is it much consolation to hear from Donald Trump that it was a “GREAT EVENING” because there were “174 wins and nine losses.” I didn’t check his math, but even if accurate it is obvious that there was no red wave. Several of his high-profile candidates lost, most conspicuously Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The fact that he lost to a man who is ostentatiously a mental incompetent added insult to injury.

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Matt Purple

Why didn’t Democrats pay a price for their extremism?

The modern political pundit is a voice in the wilderness, a self-styled beacon of truth against a pampered and bought-off establishment. Yet to cut against the trend: I was wrong about last night's midterms. I thought it was going to be a Republican rout. Even after the Dobbs decision came down and Democrats saw a boost in the polls I still didn't think abortion would ever trump inflation and crime in the minds of voters. And while 2022 didn't see a blue wave, it sure didn't see a red wave either. Instead the scene this morning looks a lot like the status quo. If current vote totals hold, then the Senate will remain 50-50 with Kamala Harris breaking the tie, while Republicans haven't flipped enough congressional seats to retake the House.

Ron DeSantis
Oliver Wiseman

Donald Trump is an albatross around the Republican neck

Donald Trump spent the days immediately before the midterms teasing and threatening his biggest Republican rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. At a rally in Philadelphia, he coined the nickname Ron DeSanctimonious. Then, on the night before the election, flying in his 757 from Ohio to Florida, he said that he thought a DeSantis presidential run would be a “mistake,” that “the base would not like it” and that “if he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.” DeSantis said nothing. Instead, he let the voters do the talking. And their voice was heard very clearly last night.

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David Marcus

Another blue day for red New Yorkers

Lee Zeldin’s fairytale run for governor of New York fell short on Tuesday as he lost by roughly five points to incumbent Kathy Hochul. The race began months ago, and at first seemed out of reach for the Long Island congressman. But a strong campaign focused on crime pulled him to within striking distance before petering out. To put the race in perspective, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, whom Hochul replaced after his resignation in 2021, won the governorship by twenty-two points in 2018, and most prognosticators saw a similar romp in the cards for Hochul when the 2022 cycle began. But in the end, though he captured the imagination of the nation, Zeldin could not capture the governor’s mansion in Albany.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Trump calls for McConnell’s ouster on eve of election

Former president Donald Trump called for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to be replaced by Senator Rick Scott during a rally in Ohio late Monday night. Cockburn is not terribly surprised that the former president would choose to attack his party a day before what promises to be a Republican wave — after all, he's aligned with the voices on the left who consider the GOP "the Trump Party." Trump branded McConnell a “lousy leader,” saying he “has been very bad for our nation” and “very bad for the Republican Party.” He also praised Scott as a “very talented guy” who is the “likely candidate” to replace McConnell.

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Cockburn

Rich, scared celebs back pseudo-Republican Rick Caruso for LA mayor

Nothing brings people together quite like crazy, violent homeless people destroying your city. So it is that a hodgepodge of Hollywood types — Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian, Elon Musk, Gwyneth Paltrow, Katy Perry, Chris Pratt, Maria Shriver, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and billionaire Robert Kraft and his wife — are publicly supporting Rick Caruso, the former Police Commission president, Republican-turned-Democrat running for Los Angeles mayor against Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass. Caruso’s campaign message is one that resonates in a rundown city rife with crime.

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Ben Domenech

Get ready for the return of Covid if Republicans win

If all indications are correct, Election Day will see a massive red wave, sweeping Republicans into power in the House, Senate, governorships, and statehouses across the country. The mood will be grim for Democrats — the night is dark and the knives are long — but there is hope right around the corner in the form of a tool they have long had at the ready: the return of Covid. Understand, there will be no actual return of Covid in anything resembling its initial offering. It is unlikely to kill more people than it has in recent months. But what will change is Democratic acceptance of the idea that Covid is over, or that it can no longer be used as justification for emergency steps and massive spending packages.

Amber Duke

Is Ted Budd cruising to victory in North Carolina?

Raleigh, North Carolina Congressman Ted Budd might soon be the winner of the quietest swing state Senate race in the country. When North Carolina senator Richard Burr announced he would not seek re-election in this year's midterms, Democrats saw the seat as a potential pick-up to expand their Senate majority. Instead, Budd is polling ahead of his opponent, former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley, by more than six points. Budd closed out his campaign Monday night with an intimate rally at GOP headquarters in Raleigh. It was clear that he had worked long and hard on the trail — he appeared to have dropped a significant amount of weight since his announcement and was on the verge of losing his voice.