The midterms’ results showed the limits of “Team Crazy,” in the words of Representative Peter Meijer — one of many harsh judgments coursing through a demoralized Republican Party.
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Supporters of Don Bolduc at his election night party in Manchester, N.H. After the primary, he tried to walk back his claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
It’s a storied American ritual: Two years in, a president whose party just got shellacked hauls himself before the White House press corps to confront his accusers.
President Biden, Houdini-like, escaped that fate on Wednesday with a jaunty news conference before heading off for a planned trip to Indonesia. “It was a good day for democracy,” he said, “and I think a good day for America.” Hours earlier, White House aides were gleefully sharing a clip from Biden’s meeting in January 2020 with the editorial board of The New York Times, in which he declared: “I ain’t dead, and I’m not going to die.”
Instead of Democrats, it is Republicans who are now discussing a reckoning — an outcome few expected on Monday. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the would-be House speaker, once predicted that the G.O.P. would pick up 60 seats. He must now explain to his disappointed colleagues why he fell well short of that goal, even if Republicans could still retake the House and impair Biden’s agenda.
“This was no way, shape or form a resounding victory for Democrats so much as just a horrific thumping for House Republican candidates who thought that base turnout was the only thing that matters,” said Representative Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Meijer should know: He lost his seat this year in a fierce primary battle against John Gibbs, a far-right Trump superfan who went on to lose to Hillary Scholten on Tuesday.
The voters, Meijer said, showed convincingly that they preferred “Team Normal” over “Team Crazy.” He pointed to centrist governors like Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado, and Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, who “had a proven ability to manage and find solutions to the problems that their constituents were facing.”
Democrats would be foolish to interpret the outcome as an embrace of Biden’s policies, he added.
Then there were Republican candidates like Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, who tried to walk back his claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump and who spent his campaign’s precious final days arguing with reporters over a hoax story about kids using kitty litter boxes in schools.
As for them, Meijer said, “It turns out when you start off on Team Crazy, it’s a lot harder to make the argument that all the things you were saying passionately for months and months and months were really just — don’t pay any attention.”
Steady as she goes at Mar-a-Lago
If a reckoning is coming, it doesn’t seem likely to sink in with the man many Republicans blame for Tuesday’s debacle: Trump.
In an interview before polls closed on Tuesday, he made this remarkable observation: “Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
Who Will Control Congress? Here’s When We’ll Know.
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Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:
The House. The Needle suggests the House is leaning towards Republicans, but the G.O.P. is nowhere close to being called the winner in several key races, where late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count these ballots.
The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to four states: Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.
How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. While we wait for more results, read our five takeaways and analysis of why this “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.
A day later, the 45th president was reportedly blaming his wife for suggesting he endorse Mehmet Oz — all while taking ALL CAPS swings on social media at the Republicans he argued should have hugged him more tightly.
Assessing the outcome on Truth Social, he wrote, “While in certain ways yesterday’s election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal standpoint it was a very big victory.”
Few other Republicans shared that view, and the harsh judgments came fast and furious.
Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush during his presidency, called the outcome “a searing indictment of the Republican Party” that demanded “a really deep introspection look in the mirror.”
When Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, was asked for his reaction to the election results, he said, “I don’t deal in feelings.” But Scott Jennings, one of his former deputies, tweeted what many assume McConnell thinks: “How could you look at these results tonight and conclude Trump has any chance of winning a national election in 2024?”
2022 Midterm Elections: Live Updates
Updated Nov. 9, 2022, 6:46 p.m. ET
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- Here’s where the midterms mattered most for abortion access.
The Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, warned Trump to stay out of the Peach State. “I can’t imagine anybody would think Donald Trump would be a tailwind to Herschel Walker’s campaign in a runoff scenario,” he told CNN. “I can’t imagine anybody doing that calculus, except for one person, and that would be Donald Trump.”
Conservative pundits found succor in Ron DeSantis’s rout of Representative Charlie Crist in Florida, or Gov. Brian Kemp’s easy dispatch of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, or Gov. Greg Abbott’s defeat of Beto O’Rourke in Texas. Even DeWine, a 75-year-old war horse of Ohio’s wheezing Republican establishment, had his admirers.
The conservative news media quickly chose sides. A banner headline on Redstate.org, the grass-roots Republican watering hole, read, “I’m Sick of Losing, I Hope You Are Too.” Matt Drudge reveled in “TOXIC TRUMP IN MAGA MELTDOWN,” while The New York Post, increasingly weary of Trump, led its front-page wood with “DeFUTURE.”
The National Review’s Jim Geraghty, in a blistering article headlined “The Red Splish-Splash,” called DeSantis “far and away the strongest candidate” and complained that Republican voters had “nominated clowns” in many races.
“Americans are tired of the circus, the freak show, the in-your-face, all-controversy-is-good, Trump-influenced wannabes,” Geraghty concluded.
ImageDonald Trump at his election night party at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. He has a history of repeatedly defying those who said he was finished.Credit…Josh Ritchie for The New York Times
A wounded Trump
Suddenly, Trump’s pre-Election Day warning that DeSantis “could hurt himself very badly” if he runs in 2024 appears a lot less menacing.
But Trump has his own Houdini-like bag of tricks, and a history of repeatedly defying those who said he was finished — after countless failed business deals, court judgments, two (!) impeachments and a 2020 wipeout he never accepted as defeat. When Republicans like McCarthy rebuked him for stoking the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, he forced them to crawl back into his good graces.
That pattern of survival has left many on the right disinclined to proclaim the demise of Trump or Trumpism just yet.
So even as Ross Douthat, of New York Times Opinion, tentatively anointed DeSantis as the G.O.P.’s new 2024 front-runner, he ended his column with an asterisk. “Nothing about the G.O.P. has been normal since Trump descended that escalator in 2015,” Douthat wrote,” so I won’t be claiming anything so definite.”
Meijer, likewise, would not hazard a firm prediction about where the Republican Party was headed after Tuesday’s big miss.
“Is the Trump fever breaking?” I asked him.
“If I had a nickel for every time I had someone ask or, you know, theorize about a ‘fever breaking,’ I mean, I think—” he paused, before adding. “Oh, I don’t know.”
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What to read
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Control of Congress is still in play. See the full results so far.
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President Biden declared that American voters sent “a clear and unmistakable message” that they wanted to preserve democracy and abortion rights but acknowledged frustrations with inflation and governmental dysfunction. Read more about Biden’s remarks from Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker.
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Where election deniers lost: Three critical battleground states rebuffed Trump-backed election deniers for offices with sweeping authority over voting, three of our politics reporters write.
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Where they won: As of Wednesday morning, more than 210 Republicans who questioned the 2020 election won seats in the House and Senate and state races. Our graphics department lays out who they are.
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Take a look at our graphics and maps to see where the elections mattered most for abortion access.
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Source: nytimes.com
