With the successful reelection of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Democrats capped an extraordinary cycle—gaining a true majority in the Senate while leaving House Republicans clinging to their own majority by less than a handful of seats.
Here are several quick and dirty takeaways, most of which are gleaned from a couple recent pieces penned by CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein.
1. Swing state suburbs continue to trend Democratic
Generally speaking, the combination of densely populated metro areas and their diverse, highly educated suburban counterparts overpowered a sizable midterm turnout in deep-red rural areas. Whether that suburban trend from 2018 and 2020 continues as a response to Trumpism or it's an actual Democratic-leaning realignment is open to interpretation. But it's now clear that Trump himself doesn't have to be on ticket for the ghost of Trump to haunt Republicans.
Campaign Action
Perhaps no race personified that better than Arizona's gubernatorial contest where the highly polished, media-savvy Republican Kari Lake lost suburban-rich Maricopa County to the understated, sometimes underwhelming campaign of sitting Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Hobbs appeared to ride the suburban backlash to Lake's audacious election-denying rhetoric straight into office, winning the sprawling suburban plots that make up Maricopa 51%-49%. Hobbs ultimately won the state by just over half a point.
The flip side of that equation is that strong Democratic incumbents trounced Republicans in the suburbs, building on Democrats' numbers from 2020 and even 2018 in some cases. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, for instance, more than doubled Joe Biden's 2020 margin in Maricopa, winning it by nearly 100,000 votes.
Democratic Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tony Evers of Wisconsin outperformed both Biden and their own showings in 2018 in key counties such as Kent and Oakland in Michigan and Madison-based Dane County in Wisconsin. In other words, suburban voters moved even closer to Democrats this cycle in many of these pivotal battleground races, with the notable exception of Georgia, where voters issued a split decision of sorts between the state and federal statewide races.
2. Abortion absolutely crushed Republicans in the Rust Belt battleground states
Voters who believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases accounted for roughly 63% of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and in each state they voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Over 80% of pro-choice voters backed Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won nearly three-quarters of abortion rights voters.
That's about as emphatic a statement as it gets that constituents in these states are telling Republicans to take their puritanical social agenda and shove it. It’s also a sentiment that might extend to a range of social issues on which the GOP has overreached, including censoring books and teachers, attacking transgender youth, encroaching on parental rights of people raising transgender kids, and regulating other areas of reproductive freedoms such as contraception.
3. Republicans will repel independents for the foreseeable future if Trumpism leads the party
Independents and independent women pretty much despise Trump. In exit polling cited by Brownstein, fully two-thirds of independent voters viewed Trump unfavorably, as did 69% of college-educated independents and 72% of independent women.
Overall, Democrats won independents in the national vote for the House by just 2 points, 49%-47%. But the fact that Democrats won independents at all is shocking in a year with high economic discontent overseen by a Democratic president whose job approvals were barely breaking 40%.
Democrats' relative good fortune with independent voters quite simply comes down to Trump, according to strategists and operatives on both sides of the aisle.
“There’s a huge lesson here, which is if you talk like Trump or remind voters of Trump, particularly at a personality level, it’s pure poison to independent voters,” John Thomas, a GOP consultant, told Brownstein.
TargetSmart CEO and data cruncher Tom Bonier added that the stench of Trump will likely follow Republicans for years.
“I have a hard time seeing the Republican Party escaping the grasp of Trump with or without him on the ballot anytime soon,” Bonier predicted.
4. The long shadow of Trump is likely to hover over the GOP right into 2024
Given that the anti-Trump coalition forged in 2018 and 2020 largely carried over into this midterm and even gained strength in many battlegrounds, Democrats will begin the 2024 cycle with a distinct advantage. That would be true even if Republicans were in the process of adroitly rebuilding what's left of their party in a post-Trump era. But they aren't doing that and there's nothing "post-Trump" about the GOP.
Instead, Trump is still the de facto leader of the Republican Party, he's announced for 2024, and Republicans are once again dodging questions over what should be a really simple question of democracy: Do you support Trump or the U.S. Constitution? Even if Republicans somehow manage to nominate someone other than Trump, his political DNA is now a staple of the Republican brand and will be for the foreseeable future.
So the coalition that defeated Trump will be the natural jumping off point for Democratic organizers as we round the corner into the next presidential cycle and look to build on our successes.
“I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” said Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair of Wisconsin. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.”
Trump and his MAGA extremists are not going anywhere, but neither are we. Chip in $5 to help Daily Kos fight to defend democracy and all progressive values.
