Silver linings?
Silver linings from Tuesday’s election won’t be easy to find if, as seems likely, the Democrats maintain control of the Senate. Regaining control of the House (which now seems very likely) can be viewed as a silver lining, or at least a consolation prize. However, it’s hard to take satisfaction from House results in which the GOP ends up holding at least a dozen fewer seats than most observers expected.
What about longer term benefits from the GOP’s poor performance? John Sexton offers one. Democrats, he says, will be held more responsible for the coming mess (e.g., recession) than they would be if the GOP controlled the Senate.
Dan McLaughlin finds a history-based silver lining. The GOP had a disappointing midterm election in 1998, yet won the presidency two years later. By contrast, the GOP crushed the 1994 and 2010 midterms, only to fall short two years later in the presidential elections.
I suggest two silver linings. First, Donald Trump’s significant contribution to this year’s poor results might finally open the eyes of most Trump supporters to the reality that the former president has become a toxic loser.
There are two caveats, though. First, we don’t know yet how deep the erosion of Trump’s support will be. There’s no doubt that Ron DeSantis will gain on Trump thanks to the midterms, but will DeSantis eclipse Trump? It’s hard to say.
Second, as at least one commenter here at Ringside has observed, Trump probably is willing do what he can to destroy Republican prospects in 2024 if GOP voters reject him. There is no silver lining if Trump causes yet another defeat for the party.
But this is a fight that needs to happen. The 2022 results make it more likely than before that anti-Trump forces can win the fight, and do so resoundingly enough to relegate Trump to the fringe or (a man can dream, can’t he?) cause him to withdraw altogether.
The second silver lining is that the Democrats, having come out of these midterms in okay shape, will keep doing what they’ve been doing across the board. Joe Biden has said this is how he plans to proceed. There will be no recalibration or “triangulation.”
That’s bad for the country in the short term. However, it should boost the GOP’s chances in 2024.
But not unless the GOP solves its Donald Trump problem.
Do you think this is a silver lining: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/11/10/republicans-have-won-6-million-more-votes-than-democrats-in-house-races-but-relatively-few-seats/
Here are silver linings: Pending final vote counts, Republicans appear to have surged in California, Florida, and New York, while Democrats only made major gains in Michigan. The California results are obscured by the fact that Democrats were so far ahead to begin with that Republicans can make major gains without winning many seats. This still cuts deeply into the Democrats' margins and makes future Republican victories possible. In LA County, for example, several Democrats in Hispanic-plurality seats have under sixty percent of the vote, though their margins do tend to mysteriously increase as mail-in votes arrive. In New York, the Republicans did better than they have since 1994. Schumer imploded, barely winning reelection as he lost Nassau, Suffolk, and Rockland Counties; this is an earthquake. For the past thirty years Republicans did not win any of Brooklyn's twenty Assembly seats; they are now leading in three. No Republican has won an Assembly seat in Queens in twenty-eight years; they are leading in one. Moreover, there are 5 or 6 more Queens seats in which Democrats received less than sixty percent; again, this is an earthquake.
The common element between California and New York is that Republicans surged among people of Asian and Hispanic ancestry. These are both enormously broad categories, and Republicans won votes among many subcategories.