Dems win big

Those who were afraid that the opinion polls were somehow overstating the public’s hostility to Donald Trump need not have worried. If anything it was the other way around: the Democrats over-performed their polls, winning big majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

I had suggested in Tuesday’s preview that a 55-45 Senate was on the cards, but even that was too conservative: I was quite wrong to say that Mississippi was “clearly out of reach.” In fact the Democrats lead in Mississippi by some 1,850 votes – still too close to call, but if it holds up (together with Alaska, which looks more secure) that will be a majority of 56 to 44, a gain of nine seats.*

The House has more seats undecided but the basic picture is just as sweeping: at the moment it looks to me like 255 to 169, with 11 too close to call. That will be a Democrat majority of probably between 80 and 90 seats, almost certainly the biggest majority for either side since 1990, when the Democrats led 268-167.

In terms of overall strength in both houses, this is the biggest shift since 1994, when the Republicans won both houses after many years in the wilderness. (The Republicans did better in the House in 2010, when they picked up 64 seats, but they were unable to win the Senate.) It’s the biggest shift to the Democrats at least since the post-Watergate election of 1974, when they gained 48 House seats and five senators.

The shift at state level is equally dramatic. Going into the election there were 26 Republican governors as against 24 Democrats; the Democrats have gained another six – Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas – making it 30-20 (assuming they hold Kansas, where they lead by about 7,000 votes). Even more remarkably, they will govern 14 of the 15 most populous states, and in the sole exception, Florida, the Republican scraped in with just 50.7% of the two-party vote.

So the headlines for once do not exaggerate: this result is a massive repudiation of Trump, his agenda and his party. The media are playing up the element of surprise (it’s not really true, for example, that no-one thought the Senate was in play until a couple of months ago), but they’re right about the significance of what’s happened. Trump may have two more years in office, but he can no longer make any credible claim to popular support.

The Republican Party now has to work out what to do next, and somehow lay the groundwork for a non-Trump future. It conspicuously failed to do that after the midterm elections in Trump’s first term, with consequences that are all too familiar. But then, although it lost 41 seats in the House, it held its ground in the Senate; it could tell itself that the electorate’s patience was not yet exhausted. And this time, of course, there is no Trump candidacy in the future.

Finally, one more point about 1994. As I said the other day, their midterm triumph then did the Republicans no good for the presidency two years later. But they were facing Bill Clinton, a politician of rare skill, who knew how to learn from his setbacks. And even then, the result did mark a permanent change: prior to that, Republicans had been uncompetitive in the House for more than thirty years, but for the last thirty years they have mostly held the upper hand.

Whether yesterday’s result will have a similarly lasting impact is impossible to discern as yet. The Democratic Party is more than capable of throwing away the advantage it’s been given. But for America and the world, it’s at least become possible to see a more hopeful future.

.

* I’m using the figures at RealClearPolitics; different sites will typically give slightly different numbers, but the differences are unimportant.