Don't fool yourselves, the Left lost
on the bright side, the political Right did worse.
If the prognostications are correct, the GOP will have elected enough candidates to the House to have a majority in the next Congress. But, just barely enough. The guess is the Republican will win 219 seats…maybe 220 or 221. For the uninitiated, it takes 218 seats to control the House of Representatives; so 219 seats is not particularly helpful for Speaker-want-to-be Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
And trying to corral the Trumpist faction (60% of the GOP Caucus were elected in 2016 or later), old guard conservatives, and the moderates who saw no sense in trying to decertify Biden’s 2020 election (it’s about 4 dozen or so Republicans) means that McCarthy will resemble a cat herder more than a Gingrich, Hastert, or Boehner.
Especially when Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA), who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, was reelected.1 Yeah, he’s part of the GOP’s likely razor-thin majority.
Plus, it shouldn’t be dismissed that political experts expected the GOP to net 5 seats as a result of decennial redistricting. So going into election night, the Democrats were looking at a majority of 218 based on redistricting changes alone.
On the Senate side, due to a potential loss by Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) (she is trailing but ballots that have yet to be counted are from Democratic leaning areas), the balance of power will come down to Georgia in a runoff between incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and former NFL star Herschel Walker on December 6.
The victory by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D-PA) against well known New Jerseyan Mehmet Oz for the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania was a stroke of luck; but without Masto getting reelected in the Silver State, the balance of power comes down to convince libertarian voters2 not to support a CTE-affected wife beater who isn’t afraid to oppose abortions for women who are not his mistresses (Walker).
Had the ground games in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia been better, the Democrats might be looking at a rosier picture than simply hoping for the status quo in the Senate.
The Democrtas appear to have flipped three governorships, but it doesn’t take much of a realist to see victories in strongly Democratic Massachusetts and Maryland are not so much flips as returns to the political norm there.
Kari Lake, noted MAGA Republican and election denier, did not help herself in Arizona at all and has likely lost, so the Democrats have a net gain of one governorship effectively.
The Political Right, though, lost “bigly” as Donald Trump would say.
Trump’s endorsements have proven to be below average to poor.3 So much so that both FoxNews and Rupert Murdoch (he owns the NY Post, Wall Street Journal, among other things) called out Trump as being responsible for the losses.4 Much of the GOP establishment chimed in as well.5
Donald Trump predictably counter-attacked.
The truth is that the GOP got hoisted by its own petard by trying to game the midterms narrative with fake, rigged, and faulty polls and then believed their own B.S.
The above gambit was upended even more by early voting, the realism that the Dobbs ruling was driving a blue wave among women, and Generations Y and Z pushed close to being 30% of the vote (they vote about 70% Democratic).
MORE ANALYSES COMING OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3723502-dan-newhouse-house-republican-who-impeached-trump-wins-reelection/
Libertarian Oliver won over 81,000 votes in GA. Warnock led Walker by about 35,000 votes on November 8th. The battleground is moving about 6-12,000 libertarians into Warnock’s column on December 6th.
https://www.politico.com/2022-election/results/trump-candidates-endorsements-11-8-22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/politics/trump-republicans-midterms.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/politics/trump-republicans-midterms.html