The US midterm results are a wake-up call for the Republicans

There was no ‘red wave’ in America last night. This became obvious fairly early on, when congressional seats the Republicans hoped to pick up in New England failed to flip. Many on the American right had made the assumption that seats won by Democrats by a few percentage points in 2020 would easily turn red. This turned out to be wrong. In fact, there has been very little turnover in the House of Representatives or the Senate in either direction so far. The election map looks stuck in time, a close replica of how politics panned out two years ago, with both Democrats and Republicans holding their seats.

Yet much has happened since the last election: mainly economic turmoil. The US, like the UK, is dealing with inflation rates at a 40-year high. There is consensus that the US is headed for a shallow recession, the effects of which are already being felt by voters. The Democrat party’s frequent deflection and denial about the state of the economy was a gift to midterm Republican candidates. Attempts to avoid talking about the economy increasingly made Democrats look out of touch and, at times, like they had lost the plot.

It was the Republican’s midterm to lose: the party only needed a net gain of five seats to win the House, and one seat to win the Senate. And while the GOP certainly haven’t lost the election, it wasn’t the big win that the party and plenty of pollsters were predicting. The GOP still appears on track to win back the House – nevertheless, the race this morning remains too close to call. Going into election night, it was thought that Republicans were on track to achieve the upper end of expectations, perhaps getting up to 240 seats in the House. As results rolled in over the course of a long evening, the expectation now is that they will just edge the 218 seat threshold needed to win back control. Meanwhile the Senate race looks increasingly likely to be a 2020 replay: so close that it may take another run-off in Georgia to determine which party will control it for the next two years.

Regaining the House will have plenty of practical benefits for the Republican party, not least, if he wants to get legislation through, forcing President Biden to the negotiating table with any plans he has for the next two years. But with fewer GOP seats up for re-election this midterm – combined with historical trends that see Republicans tending to perform better in midterm elections – last night should have been an electoral slam-dunk for them. What went wrong?

There will be plenty of competing theories, especially amongst different factions of the Republican party already looking ahead to the presidential race in 2024. Early data suggests that the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Dobbs v. Jackson earlier this year – returning the issue of abortion to the states – did play a role in this midterm, as more than a quarter of voters in the exit polls listed it as a ‘top issue'. This will also have aided Democrat candidates. Anecdotal evidence, which will become clearer as the day goes on, suggests higher-than-normal turnout in university districts within states where there was an abortion referendum on the ballot.

But exit polls revealed that inflation still trumped abortion as the biggest issue for voters, with a third naming price hikes as their number one issue in this election. This hints at a far more uncomfortable truth for the Republican party. It’s clear from split-tickets in this midterm (a person voting for candidates from different parties on the same ballot), that the character of the candidate played a big role in this election, too. And Donald Trump’s eccentric picks performed worse than expected.

Trump did have a few big wins for his heavily endorsed candidates: mainly J.D Vance in Ohio, who was announced early in the night as the new Senator for Ohio, beating Democrat candidate Tim Ryan by roughly six percentage points. Trump-backed Ted Budd in North Carolina won, too. But these were GOP holds, not flips. They were also the height of Trumpian success last night. The crucial seats for taking the Senate have not performed nearly as well. John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz (known as Dr Oz) by more than two percentage points in the end, making it a Senate seat pick-up for the Democrats. Meanwhile Republican Herschel Walker trails Democrat Raphael Warnock in Georgia by half a point. 

Compare these lacklustre results to another heated race taking place last night: the governor election in Georgia. The Republican incumbent Brian Kemp was in a rematch with Democrat candidate Stacey Abrams, who struggled to admit defeat to Kemp in 2018, blaming voter suppression. Kemp has notably been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and the former president’s refusal to accept the 2020 election result. Kemp’s comfortable win of nearly eight percentage points was declared early in the night – a stark contrast to the Senate race, which will almost certainly go to a run-off. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a more moderate (or simply less MAGA) Republican could have ridden Kemp’s coat tails to victory.

It’s a growing theme of the election – candidates that made their case without heavy reliance on the Trump brand seem to be the winners of the night. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, touted as a possible presidential candidate, perhaps takes the gold medal, turning his slim majority in 2018 (winning by half a percentage point) into a landslide victory, flipping even the solid-blue Miami-Dade County into a Republican win.

This midterm is a wake-up call for the Republican party, which in many ways has still failed to grapple with its outstanding relationship with the former president. A vocal chunk of the party insisted the endorsement (and eventual return) of Trump was the key to its success; a claim that has not been bolstered by these election results so far. But with such a big political opportunity come and gone, the GOP may finally have to reckon with what is keeping that electoral map stuck.