I am not going to prevaricate. I was nervous on Tuesday. I tried to not get emotionally invested in the midterms. I did all the tricks one does when they are trying to not let things they don't control control them. I didn't follow the races very closely; I didn't look at a single poll or prediction model; I told myself that some of the Democrats were no great shakes either. And it kinda worked—I went through large stretches of the days preceding the election without thinking about it at all—but it kinda didn't work too. I would still hear about individual races (how could I not?). James Talarico and Jon Ossoff would randomly pop into my brain, I would see an ad for Roy Cooper, and I would reflexively get my hopes up, as one thing I did pick up on is that the Dems were favored to win and win big. And then about noon Tuesday afternoon everything came to a head, and the pit of my stomach filled with anxious energy.
I muddled through the rest of the work day. Then I went for a walk and listened to Paul Simon Graceland for the first time in decades for some reason.* Then I came home ate dinner and started following the election returns on my phone. I went to The New York Times home page for the first time in weeks and clicked on the infamous needle. It was tilted slightly into the blue for both branches of Congress, mirroring the aggregate polling data, as the actual results were still out in most places. The minutes ticked by, and the needle started moving into the darker blue. Georgia was called almost immediately for Ossoff; North Carolina for Cooper; Annie Andrews was smoking Darlene Graham in South Carolina—South Carolina?! So-called "toss-up" races for the House were being won handily by the Dems up-and-down the East Coast. We put the election coverage on the TV and watched Steve Kornacki break down the stunning results: Dems +30 in districts Harris only won by 5; Dems +5 in districts Trump won by 15; +0 races in districts Trump won by 30. The needle moved to >95% for a blue House and nearly 90% for a blue Senate. It was only 9:30.
*It's an excellent album, which I guess is a very good reason to listen to it. "The Boy in the Bubble" might be my favorite song on it. I love how it starts out like it's a Weird Al polka party song, and then the drums kick in, and it's like, Oh shit! This actually rocks!
I stayed up and followed the returns from the middle of the country and the West Coast. Abdul El-Sayed won his high profile race in Michigan. Sherrod Brown flipped Ohio. There were going to be Democratic senators in Kansas, Iowa, and maybe even Mississippi. Mississippi?! WTF?! Not only did James Talarico win a Democratic senator seat in Texas for the first time in nearly 40 years, he won by nearly 13 points! And it wasn't just congress. Statewide races went overwhelmingly blue as well. Democrats netted five new gubernatorial seats—including Georgia where Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black female govern in US History—and seven new state legislatures. When I finally crawled into bed around 12:30 in the morning, S half woke up, and we had the following exchanging.
Her: What happened?
Me: The Dems won.
Her: Which races?
Me: All of them.
Every election people use the results as vindication of whatever they believed before the election. The far left is using AES's victory as a rebuke of the idea that "Squad" types can't win in swing states, while the centrists are pointing out that their preferred candidates ran way ahead of the DSA/DSA-adjacent candidates. But I believe there is one thing on which everybody can agree: This was a complete and utter repudiation of Donald Trump. It's a decade too late—if this had happened on Election Day in 2016, as I thought (and hoped) it might, we could have saved ourselves a lot of headache and heartache—but better now than never.
I believe there are three things voters want their politicians to deliver to them—well, way more than three, but three main ones: 1) peace, 2) prosperity, 3) the feeling that they're being respected and heard. If you can get people those three things, you will win elections and be very popular, even if you fall short in other areas. But Trump completely failed on all three of these this election cycle—to a staggering degree. On 1), he started an unpopular, unnecessary war with Iran, and he wrought violence in our streets by turning ICE into Gestapo Lite, a move as Un-American as it is cruel. On 2), his war drove up prices on fuel, and his tariffs—driven almost completely by personal animus, not sound economic policy—drove up prices on almost everything else. Meanwhile, he and his family rake in millions in shady crypto deals. On 3), he hasn't responded to public concerns in anything close to an adequately manner, even to those people who voted for him. He still insists the war was the right call, and it will be over soon anyway (the same thing he said six months ago), and prices will fall then, but actually they don't need to fall, because high prices are a hoax, and hey you can't trust the lunatic left, and look at this magnificent flooring of my new ballroom.
By handpicking many of the candidates himself, Trump made it virtually impossible for them to untether themselves from his brick-like influence on this midterm. I don't know if less MAGA candidates would have won any of these races, but I have to think they would have. It would have been difficult for them to do any worse, that's for sure. It's like Trump made a list of the people most likely to repel voters and chose exclusively from it: Vivek Ramaswamy, Darlene Graham, Ken Paxton, Roger Marshall (maybe the worst), and so on. Could you find a human being more off-putting to the general public than this lot?
Actually, yes, yes you could.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment