In the 3 1/2 years since President Trump descended an escalator to announce his candidacy, nothing about politics has seemed normal. Trump has broken every rule and made experts question everything they thought they knew about how elections worked. That changed on Tuesday.
By sweeping Democrats into control of the House of Representatives and electing more Republicans to the Senate, voters behaved as they were expected to. The results were not any sort of historic victory. They were consistent with past midterm elections. And they were in line with what polls, pundits, and forecasters have been telling us for weeks. Yet that itself seems noteworthy.
In 2016, when the prevailing view among Republican consultants was that the party needed to nominate somebody with a more moderate tone, particularly on immigration, who could appeal to a demographically changing nation, Trump went in the opposite direction. Pundits predicted doom, and yet he blew away expectations, energizing working-class white voters to win not only in usual swing states, but in states that Republicans hadn’t captured in 28 years — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The two intervening years have been an ongoing drama — the news dominated by tales of a White House in chaos, early morning Twitter tirades, celebrity guest appearances, inflammatory rhetoric, increasingly bitter partisan warfare, and the specter of an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections that could lead Democrats to pursue impeachment.
Yet when push came to shove, the midterm elections were relatively normal. Candidates argued about traditional issues such as healthcare, taxes, immigration, and guns. The president campaigned for his party in tight races. And the results showed that the parties mostly won the races they should have won, but mostly were unable to redraw the map.
For instance, Democrats captured the majority in the House in large part by winning back suburban and other districts that went for Hillary Clinton, where Trump’s support was at its softest. With a number of races still outstanding, Democrats will probably see gains somewhere in the 33- to 35-seat range. It’s a respectable showing, and controlling the House still counts for something. But it was nowhere near the 63 seats that Republicans gained in the 2010 midterm elections. It does not demonstrate some sort of massive, historic, unprecedented repudiation of a president and his party — of national buyer’s remorse.
Democrats were unable to win the Georgia or Ohio gubernatorial races, or to pull off an upset in a deep-red Senate race such as Texas or Tennessee. With Arizona still too close to call, the only Democratic Senate pickup could be Nevada — which happens to have been the one Republican-held Senate seat up in a state carried by Clinton.
Republicans, meanwhile, managed to take advantage of the favorable Senate map and secure most of their gains in deeply red states Trump won easily — Missouri, North Dakota, and Indiana. However, they were unable to convert other states Trump had flipped in 2016 — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin (where in addition to the Senate defeat, Gov. Scott Walker appears to have lost).
With the Arizona and Florida races still up in the air, Republicans are looking at a gain of one-to-three Senate seats, which would increase their majority to at least 52 or as high as 54. That would be on the high end of expectations. That not only makes it easier to push through a flurry of Trump judicial nominations, but it makes it significantly harder for Democrats to retake the Senate in 2020.
Speaking of 2020, there are reasons for each side to feel good, as well as concerned, about Tuesday night.
If what we saw tonight is echoed two years from now, it will be devastating to the GOP. Republicans lost important races in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — if any three of these four states go blue in 2020, Trump won’t have a path to the electoral vote majority.
On the other hand, the relentless campaign by Democrats to portray Trump as not just a bad president with terrible policies, but as a unique threat to American democracy, has failed. Tuesday’s election did not provide evidence of a national panic over Trump. His late campaign stops in states where he’s popular may have helped put Senate candidates over the top. Running for re-election, he’ll have the benefit of incumbency and may thrive in having probable House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as a foil. On the other hand, Democrats have a wide open presidential field with no clear front-runner.
Though this is all to be determined, one thing is clear: In 2018, voters made U.S. politics seem normal again.
