WHERE’S THE KABOOM? THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A DEMOCRACY-SHATTERING KABOOM!

Or, “My late and unnecessary hot take on the 2022 mid-terms”. Because, you know, blog.

 

PRODUCTION NOTE: Not that you’re wondering, but I’m posting this a month after the election partly because I’ve been too busy to write this, and partly because there were enough outstanding races that hadn’t yet been called that I was waiting for a definitive result first. Which we now more or less have.

 

1. As many have observed, the expected Red Wave didn’t happen. Neither did a Blue Wave, for that matter. In the end it was more or less business as usual – which is to say, another polarized race with the President’s party losing Congressional seats. And they didn’t lose wery many. The GOP will likely end up with 222 seats in the House – which is what the Demos had going in. As for the Senate, the Demos have at least held the status quo, and will gain one seat if Raphael Warnock beats Herschel “The Badge” Walker in the Georgia runoff (which the polls suggest is a real possibility). [Edited to add (6 Dec 2022): He did.]

 

2. There is much speculation on WHY there was no Red Wave. The Left credit the Supreme Court, Gen Z and January 6. GOP stalwarts blame Trump. It’s probably a mix of that, plus the fact that (as I’ve mentioned here a bunch of times before) people vote for all kinds of reasons that may never occur to the hardcore political junkies who follow this stuff like pro baseball and actually understand the issues at stake.

 

For example, it may seem obvious to YOU why the GOP should either lose bigly (they’re Nazis!) or win bigly (they’re cheating Nazis!). But a lot of people don’t vote based on the same information or criteria. They vote on single issues, or they vote because the candidate seems nice or talk a good game or pwns the libs or whatever. Yes, that’s terrible. But that’s how it is.

 

3. That said, I do think Gen Z gets some credit here – apart from the youth vote turning out in reasonably big numbers, it turns out the many young people are not especially big on a party whose platform in 2022 was essentially taking rights away from women, ethnic minorities and LGBTs (especially the Ts, which are the bugaboo of the moment for Republicans). Not to mention the whole election-denial thing. (Which, yes, should have resulted in a Blue Wave, but see point 2 above.)

 

4. Is Trump now persona non grata? Not likely. Or at least not for long. GOP politicians may feel he’s worn out his welcome, but that’s really only because he didn’t deliver the Big Red Wave they were expecting. And that can’t possibly be THEIR fault, so Trump is the most obvious scapegoat – and a potentially safe one, now that Ron DeSantis seems to be rising as a viable Trump alternative (see below).

 

On the other hand, the MAGA Cult is still very much a thing, and the GOP can’t afford to alienate them for the same reason they couldn’t do so before – they can’t risk a split vote if Trump goes third-party. If FiveThirtyEight is any benchmark to go by, Trump still polls well with rank-and-file GOP voters. That is the GOP base now, whether they like it or not, and honestly they’ve liked it just fine since 2016. So I think once the GOP gets over the shock of not winning as bigly as they’d hoped, they’ll go with whoever the political winds favor.

 

5. Will that be DeSantis? I’m not convinced yet. There is talk that he could be the next evolution of Trumpism – all of the xenophobic authoritarian bigotry without the paranoid batshit klepto chaos-monkey shenanigans. Maybe. The thing is, the aforementioned MAGA Cult base seems to enjoy paranoid batshit klepto chaos-monkey shenanigans over the Woke Washington Corporate Interest Swamp that they think only Trump can fix. It’s on DeSantis to prove otherwise.

 

So, I think that as things stand now, the only sure way DeSantis will gets the GOP nomination is if Trump dies before Super Tuesday 2024 – or maybe if Trump goes to jail, but I wouldn’t bet on that. It’s entirely legal to run for and serve as POTUS from a jail cell. Of course it might depend on what he goes to jail for. If he’s convicted over the Jan 6 insurrection, that could pose a problem for him, but not an insurmountable one.

 

As for the Please-Not-Trumpers, I suspect they’ll do what they did in 2016 – bad-mouth him until he wins the nomination, then pretend they were behind him all along.

 

6. Is democracy saved? Not yet, no. There may not have been a Red Wave, but the GOP didn’t lose by much either. Many of the losing candidates still managed to pull over 40% of the vote, and on a generic national level, the Repubs actually pulled over 3 million more votes than the Demos. Which basically means that a little over half of the voting pop is still willing to vote for an increasingly openly white supremacist fascist party that reserves the right to never accept any election result in which they lost (although, as I said, lots of people voted GOP for all kinds of reasons besides supporting white supremacist fascism ).

 

That said, it’s interesting that, as far as I know, nobody – apart from Kari Lake – seems to be pushing a #stopthesteal argument for the midterms like many people (including me) thought they would. Maybe they only do that for Presidents? Or maybe it’s just because many election deniers didn’t do so hot, so now is not a good time?

 

Anyway, the point is that the GOP (1) is continuing to embrace white supremacist fascism, (2) sees Hungary as a swell template for America’s future (i.e. an authoritarian conservative dictatorship dolled up as a democracy for the sake of appearance), and (3) still has half the country behind it. If Trump wins in 2024, we’re in trouble. If he gets the nomination and loses, we may still be in trouble because, as we’ve seen, he does not lose well.

 

White riot,

 

This is dF