MINNEAPOLIS — A volatile battle for Congress that has bitterly divided Americans over President Trump concludes on Tuesday with Democrats poised to capture the House of Representatives amid a suburban revolt and Republicans positioned to hold the U.S. Senate on the strength of red-state fidelity to this White House.
Trump in the final sprint to the midterm elections wielded dark imagery to warn of the consequences of a Democratic takeover as he barnstormed through red America where control of the Senate was to be decided. In stark terms, the president declared that the Democrats would transform the U.S. into a Venezuela-style socialist failed state and encourage hordes of Hispanic migrants to overrun the southern border.
An apparent winner for Republicans in Senate battlegrounds overflowing with #MAGA loyalists, Trump’s strategy was fueling a backlash against his party in the House. The GOP’s 23-seat majority was teetering as suburban voters in affluent districts from coast to coast and across the Heartland headed to the polls motivated to rebuke the president. Several seats on the brink have been voting Republican for years, some for decades.
[Opinion: How will we determine whether Republicans or Democrats won the midterm elections?]
“People are polarized,” said Jennifer Hutzal, who showed up at a Whole Foods Market in suburban Minneapolis to meet Democrat Dean Phillips as he campaigned across the 3rd Congressional District. Hutzal, in her mid-40s and married with a young son, is rooting for Phillips to oust Rep. Erik Paulsen, the Republican incumbent who has been comfortably re-elected four times but is in deep trouble this time around.
“Either you’re happy with Trump or you’re not so happy with Trump and where things are going in this country,” said Hutzal, counting herself among the not-so-happy. “I think [Phillips] really speaks to what is the polar opposite of Trump and what we see happening right now.”
Paulsen, attempting to defy the odds in a district Trump lost by more than 9 percentage points, spent the final full day of the campaign knocking on doors to turn out the vote.
The fifth-term Republican cast Tuesday as a choice between Republican leadership and handing power to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. And he sought to make it a referendum on the GOP’s $1.3 trillion tax overhaul that he credits for a growing economy that has produced record unemployment and, just this past month, significant wage growth.
“The economy is booming again and make no mistake about it, Dean Phillips would take all of that away and we would be going in a different direction,” Paulsen said a few days earlier, exhorting a crowd of Republican activists to continue pounding the pavement. “So let me ask you this question: Who wants to keep the gavel out of Speaker Pelosi’s hands? Who wants to keep their tax cuts? Growth and prosperity are on the ballot this year.”
The Democratic Party was threatening in four-dozen House seats controlled by the Republicans, a playing field that actually expanded in the home stretch as the sugar high of GOP enthusiasm subsided after an early fall uptick that was sparked by the explosive hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Under fire for more than a year in the two-dozen mostly suburban seats that swung for Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016, the number of vulnerable Republican districts has doubled to include those with exurban and rural strongholds that sided with the president two years ago.
In the final days, Republican groups rushed to save veteran Republican Rep. Don Young in ruby red Alaska, and preserve power in a conservative open seat in Charleston, S.C., with late-breaking districts in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah previously presumed to be holds for the GOP becoming more competitive.
Quality candidates and a burning desire to put a check on Trump have combined to supercharge Democratic intensity, putting the party in contention in districts that were afterthoughts when the 2018 election cycle got underway.
“I don’t think anybody was really excited about Hillary Clinton — like, nobody,” said Liesha Petrovich, 48, a karate teacher who is volunteering for Jared Golden, a Democrat who could oust Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin in Maine’s Second Congressional district, a rural seat that voted for Trump by 10 points. “The opportunity to have some kind of good Democratic candidate is energizing for us.”
Democrats have labored to make the midterm elections a referendum on healthcare policy, charging in House and Senate races that the Republicans’ commitment to repeal Obamacare, as yet unrealized, would gut federal protections of pre-existing conditions and prohibitions against lifetime caps on insurance payouts. (Republicans have cried foul, claiming the attack is untrue.)
But Trump — specifically disgust with Trump’s provocative behavior and combative Twitter feed — is the lifeblood of the Democratic surge.
The president and his brand of culture-war politics has motivated Americans who were never politically active beyond voting to volunteer their time and donate money to Democratic campaigns. At the same time, Trumpism has pushed into the Democratic camp many white suburban women — including the so-called “Panera moms” — who typically vote Republican because of they prefer fiscally conservative policies and strong U.S. internationalism.
“I watched that 2016 election like many of you. My expectations of its outcome were quite different than it was,” Phillips, the Democrat challenging Paulsen, told a throng of campaign volunteers at a field office in suburban Minneapolis a few days before the vote. “I woke up the next morning and like many of you, I said, I’ve got to do something, and that doing something turned into a run for Congress.”
In a subsequent interview, Phillips conceded that economy in the district he wants to represent is doing quite well — the local jobless rate is 1.9 percent. But, the Democrat suggested, this election isn’t really about the economy.
“By the way, truth is truth, and the economy is booming, and I would never ignore or deny that,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what is transcending everything is a palpable anxiety … There’s a sense that’s what’s really fraying and what’s falling apart in this country is a simple commitment to respect.”
Trump on Monday finished an active rally schedule with three #MAGA gatherings — two in Indiana and Missouri, where Republicans were hoping to oust two hard-nosed liberal Democratic incumbents, and one in Ohio, where the Senate race was out of reach but the GOP was hopeful about preserving its hold on the governor’s mansion.
The late September hearings in the Senate to vet ultimately uncorroborated allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh awakened what had been a complacent Republican electorate. That unexpected development helped put the Republicans’ slim 51-49 majority on firmer ground, even as key races stayed competitive, with gains possible despite an otherwise difficult national environment for the party.
But Trump’s decision to return multiple times for rallies in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with a few stops in additional contested states, kept the Kavanaugh fire lit, elevating Republican incumbents and challenger candidates after their Democratic opponents appeared headed for possible upsets.
Heading into Election Day, Republican insiders disagreed over the president’s decision to put immigration front and center, rather than the economy. In some quarters of the party, there was fretting about Trump’s focus on the caravan of Central American migrants headed north toward the U.S. in search of political asylum as a means to juice GOP turnout was unnecessary and could boomerang.
“The economy is a more important issue,” said Rick Rice, Minnesota’s male representative to the Republican National Committee and a Trump loyalist with “MAGA Man” on the vanity license plate of his Chevy who otherwise supports the president’s immigration policies. “I think that would have been a smart play.”
Others said that Trump’s energetic, no-holds-barred commitment to rallying the faithful, without concern for the rules of conventional politicking, had almost single-handedly saved the Republicans’ Senate majority. Indeed, in mid-September, political forecasts upgraded Democratic prospects of taking the Senate, in a path that would have run right through Trump country.
“President Trump has put his reputation on the line with his barnstorming tour through the most competitive senate races,” said Dan Eberhart, a GOP donor in Arizona, where the party is locked in a close race for an open Senate seat in a state that was once thought to heavily favor the Democrats. “If Republicans pick up seats in the Senate or maintain control in the House, he deserves the credit.”
