John A Tures/Missouri Independent:
How the GOP’s expected red wave crashed on the rocks of the insurrection
As of the writing of this column, the Democratic Party is likely to lose a fraction of the House seats they were projected (even after gerrymandering), will keep the Senate and is poised to gain in governor mansions.
While some conservatives are crowing about any GOP electoral success, others in the party are becoming aware of the precarious position they are now in. And what’s likely to have contributed to converting the red wave into little more than a ripple was Jan. 6.
Richard L Hasan/Slate:
I’ve Been Way More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now
In all of the swing states, the election denialist candidates lost for governor or secretary of state. In Michigan, Democrats took back control of the state legislature, making state legislative action impossible to try to steal a 2024 election victory for Trump in the state if he loses the vote. Democrats may take control of the state House in Pennsylvania, blocking an avenue there, too.*
Mike Pence is finally, belatedly, speaking out about how Trump endangered him and his family by egging on the rioters who were trying to get him to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes for Biden and throw the election to Trump. And now the lame-duck session of Congress is poised on a remarkably bipartisan basis in the Senate to pass a set of reforms to the arcane 1887 Electoral Count Act that Trump tried to exploit to turn his election loss into victory.
How did we make such progress? The same election deniers that pleased Trump and the Republican base repelled enough sane Republicans who oppose stolen elections to hold back their votes. The New York Times reported Monday that Trump had told U.S. Senate candidate David McCormick, running in the Pennsylvania Republican primary, that “If you don’t deny it, you won’t win.” McCormick didn’t deny it, failed to get Trump’s support, and lost the primary to Trump-supported Mehmet Oz by fewer than 1,000 votes. Oz went on to win the Republican primary but lose the general election to Democrat John Fetterman.
Ben Jacobs/Vox:
Kevin McCarthy is so close to being speaker — and yet, so far
Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker of the House, briefly explained.
Tuesday’s initial vote will allow both McCarthy and his critics to put their cards on the table — and allow for nearly two months of wheeling and dealing.
The narrow Republican majority gives McCarthy’s critics a lot of leverage; he needs their votes to become speaker and it gives them the power to make demands of him.
Most of those opposed to McCarthy are in the Freedom Caucus, which will have roughly three dozen members in the next Congress. Their demands largely involve a variety of changes to House procedure that would weaken the speaker and empower rank-and-file members.
Going back to John Boehner’s tenure, rank-and-file right-wingers have griped that establishment Republicans in leadership have ignored them to reach bipartisan deals that have been insufficiently conservative. The dissidents in the Freedom Caucus want to change the rules to prevent this from happening in the future.
The most freighted proposal offered by conservatives is changing the House rules on who can offer a motion to vacate the chair — essentially, who can trigger a vote to remove the speaker and hold elections for a new one.
Bill Scher/Washington Monthly:
Democrats Meddled in Republican Primaries. Good.
The New York Times, plenty of pundits, and even some Democrats clutched their pearls and condemned the practice as unseemly. It wasn’t—and it worked.
In Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, Democrat Hillary Scholten lost in 2020 to Republican Peter Meijer, who broke party ranks and voted to impeach Donald Trump. Merciless Democrats boosted Meijer’s GOP primary opponent, the election denier John Gibbs. With Meijer out of the way this year, Scholten ran again and beat Gibbs by 13 points last week.
Okay, so it worked out this time. But wasn’t it morally wrong? Didn’t it undermine the Democrats’ credibility as defenders of democracy if they were willing to risk election deniers being nominated and elected?
It wasn’t, and it shouldn’t.
…
Democrats, led by dramatic speeches from Biden and Barack Obama in the campaign’s closing days, made the case that “democracy is on the ballot.” Why? Because there were many Republicans on the ballot who were openly not committed to democracy. Some election deniers tried to scrub their past, such as Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Arizona. During the Republican primary, Masters said in an ad, “I think Trump won in 2020.” In the general election, he tried to pivot with “Joe Biden is absolutely the president. I mean, my gosh, have you seen the gas prices lately?” This pirouette was a flop. Masters was too extreme for such gymnastics to work.
So was it abortion, Trump or Jan 6 that hurt Republicans? The answer is yes.
Sahil Kapur/NBC:
Did Trump hurt Republicans in the 2022 elections? The numbers point to yes
Analysis: Trump loomed large in the minds of voters and dragged down his party’s candidates — nationally and in states with key Senate races, according to exit polls.
Trump loomed large in the minds of voters and dragged down his party’s candidates — nationally and in key swing states with Senate races — despite being out of power. In many cases that blunted the impact of Biden’s unpopularity, and widespread economic pain, helping Democrats defy political gravity and hold their own.
Nationally, 32% of voters in 2022 said their vote was “to oppose Joe Biden.” But 28% said their vote was “to oppose Donald Trump,” even though Trump was out of office. That suggests Trump’s continued dominance over the GOP made the 2022 election, in the minds of voters, almost as much about a defeated former president as it was about the current president and party in power.
“It was a Trump problem,” a Republican operative involved in the 2022 election told NBC News, speaking candidly about the de facto leader of the GOP on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Independents didn’t vote for candidates they viewed as extreme and too closely linked with Donald J. Trump.”
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The quiet vindication of Liz Cheney
But on a deeper level, Cheney’s basic theory about this moment in U.S. and GOP politics, to some degree at least, might be proving correct.
The underlying premise of Cheney’s past year holds that there exists a meaningful sliver of swing voters — including GOP-leaning independents and Republicans alienated by Trump — who could be influenced by a focus on election denialism and MAGA extremism.
In this theory, keeping up a months-long drumbeat of revelations about Trump’s effort to overturn U.S. democracy, while steadily arguing that GOP candidates who play footsie with election denialism are fundamentally unfit for public office, wouldn’t just be civically healthy. It might also have real electoral consequences, even if only on the margins.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells/New Yorker:
The Republicans’ Post-Midterm Reckoning with Donald Trump
Will the era of Stop the Steal—and the G.O.P.’s overt challenges to democracy—finally start to recede?
The specific gripe that these Republicans have with Trump is not of a moral or a legal nature. The problem, in their eyes, is that Trump effectively handpicked the candidates who underperformed in some of the country’s most crucial races. Many of these duds had won Trump’s favor for only one reason: fealty to a lie. As Chris Christie put it, “The only animating factor [for Trump] in determining an endorsement is ‘Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen or don’t you?’ ” This loyalty test led Trump to back a huckster doctor (Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania); a foggy ex-football star who supported a nationwide ban on abortion yet allegedly pushed former paramours to have the procedure (Herschel Walker, in Georgia); and a young venture capitalist who proved susceptible to dorm-room musings about the wisdom of the Unabomber (Blake Masters, in Arizona). On the morning after the election, Trump reportedly lashed out at people in his circle who he says advised him to back the likes of Oz—including his wife, Melania. What a guy.
Oh, and that announcement?
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