The surprisingly strong performance by the Democrats in last week’s midterm election has caught most of us, me included, by surprise. I, like a lot of you, believed the polls that indicated that it would be a Democratic bloodbath, a “red wave” as we heard repeatedly, that would fill our state and national governments with election deniers, anti-choice zealots, conspiracy theorists and just flat-out kooks. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to have been wrong in my life.
The prognosticators had good reason to believe the things that they espoused. President Biden currently has an approval rating hovering around 41%. The last two Democratic presidents with similar approval ratings at the time of their midterm elections, Clinton and Obama, lost over fifty seats in the House of Representatives, at least five in the United States Senate and saw governorships in multiple states flip. For only the fourth time in the last century, the incumbent party has maintained control in the Senate (possibly even picking up a seat), kept the losses in the House to single digits and gained governorships. According to CNN, the previous times were FDR’s first midterms in 1934, JFK in 1962 and George W. Bush in 2002. All three presidents had public approval ratings over 60% at the time.
So, what changed? Despite the polling that suggested that Americans would be casting their votes for candidates based on record inflation, gas prices and an increase in crime, they were motivated by the Dobbs decision in the Supreme Court and the reality that democracy itself was on the ballot. Instead of being a referendum on the incumbent president, as midterm elections usually are, it was a referendum on extremism. It was a test of how much “crazy” the American people were willing to take. It was also a referendum on Trump since most of the losing candidates were endorsed by him and parroted his nonsense about having had the 2020 election “stolen” from him. Mitch McConnell said early on that “candidate quality” was going to be an issue for the GOP. He was right.
Trump was a major factor in the choice of candidates on the GOP ballots for national and statewide offices, but Democrats had a hand in it too. In what is really a dangerous game in my opinion, PACs friendly to the Democratic party poured millions into the Republican primaries, backing the most extreme Trump endorsed candidates running. They were betting that the American people would reject people who don’t believe that Joe Biden is really the President, abortion should be illegal in all cases including rape and incest, promised to shut down the government and privatize Social Security. I say that it was a dangerous game because it could have backfired. What if some of these nuts they got on the ballot actually won? Herschel Walker anybody?
With the Democrats holding the Senate and minimizing losses in the House, democracy is safe for the moment, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. The key phrase in that sentence is, “for the moment.” The attacks on legitimately elected representatives and the desire to impose an authoritarian government in this country are not over. Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 candidacy for President this week. While he’s lost some GOP support due to his oversized role in the midterms, make no mistake, he’s got millions of people willing to goosestep right behind him as he tries to drag us into some kind of a fascist dictatorship.
This isn’t over. Democracy is a fragile experiment. We must remain forever vigilant. Actively and consistently participating in government is the responsibly of us all. It can’t just be something that we do every two years when there’s an election. Democracy must be monitored, nurtured and protected. We have to pay attention to what’s going on at all times. If we don’t, that “fragile experiment” could very well end.