Backpedaling like a whirling dervish, TACO1Trump Always Chickens Out Trump claims that yesterday’s crushing electoral defeat has nothing to do with him as he wasn’t even on the ballot, which ignores the fact that throughout the mid-term campaign he harangued his followers to vote as though he were on the ballot.
Voters appear to have taken him at his word, handing control of the entire Congress to a far from popular Democratic Party, as well as the state governorships that were in play. The most eye-catching result may be that Democratic candidates won not only in so-called purple states, a customary kind of shift in mid-term elections, but also in states that until yesterday were considered permanent Republican strongholds, like South Carolina and Kansas. The last time Kansas had a Democratic Senator was 1939.
Just as significant as the magnitude of yesterday’s rejection is the responsibility for it, which falls squarely on Trump. He strove to make the elections about his persona, even when polls indicated his average popularity had dipped under 37%, an all-time low. At the beginning of the year nobody was saying that the deeply-disliked Democrats had any prospects for taking control of both houses of Congress. As late as May, 59% of U.S. adults had an unfavorable opinion of the party.
Four prominent factors largely account for yesterday’s results. One, Trump’s intervention in the GOP’s internal processes of candidate selection, in many cases choosing inexperienced and corrupt acolytes with divisive profiles over more vetted party favorites. Two, and also three, as the factors overlap, was the unprovoked attack on Iran, which Trump himself said would be a particularly stupid target for a regime-change war, a policy he claimed to have rejected no matter where it might be proposed, on the basis of the disastrous outcome of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In short, his Iran attack went directly against his own advice against “forever wars,” while also unleashing a ferocious wave of inflation on American workers, a large majority of whom live precariously from paycheck-to-paycheck to begin with. This third factor erased the 2024 voter perception that Trump would be the better bet to manage the economy well. Add to this Trump’s comments that he gave no thought to the impact on American wallets of plunging the Middle East into prolonged war, and his retrospective justification that no one should resent soaring gas prices because the oil companies were making “a freaking fortune,” and one should have no difficulty seeing that Trump was practically begging for a voter backlash.
Finally, Trump’s vicious and indiscriminate witch-hunt against immigrants, regardless of their legal status, expelled the Latino vote from the Trump coalition, a crucial part of his previous victories as well as any continuing hopes for Republican governing majorities. The best illustration of this change in voting preferences was seen in Texas, where James Talarico (Senate) and Gina Hinojosa (Governor) crushed their conservative opponents by margins nobody foresaw. In Florida, the far-right came very close to losing its stronghold in the face of liberal challengers.
Having said all this, it remains clear that yesterday’s vote does not represent a blank check for the Democratic Party, but rather a thunderous rejection of Trump himself, his arrogance, his perverse priorities, and his extreme policies. Very noteworthy in this rejection was the highly competitive performance of democratic socialist candidates, most of them young and from ethnic minorities typically marginalized or stigmatized. They fearlessly confronted the open contempt the Republican party holds for them, as well as the craven submission of corporate Democrats to cowardly and hypocritical compromises. They and millions of their fellow-Americans didn’t allow themselves to be manipulated by the lies and distortions of Republican candidates awash in billionaire cash.
Having said that, however, California’s Proposition 40, a modest tax on billionaires, appears to be going down to defeat on the pretext that billionaires might move out of state in response, as though their assets wouldn’t be taxed nonetheless.
As the final electoral results continue streaming in, the great question now hovering over the United States and the world is how the Republican Party will react to restrictions on its power, until now allowed to lurch from one disaster to the next without restraint.
In typical Trumpian style, the early signals have been contradictory: to the New York Times Trump said he was disposed to accept the results, and that he would probably make an agreement with the Democrats. On the other hand, before the polls closed he had assured CBS News the presidential veto gave him “the ultimate power,” while the Supreme Court had granted him “tremendous powers” over federal agencies without regard to who controls Congress.
With Democratic Party leadership in the hands of the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer it would be foolish to expect an abrupt shift into rational policy. On the other hand, they will be under strong pressure to appease a rising social democratic party base intoxicated with the exotic notion that democracy means representative power.
One can only hope that this means Democratic Party cowardice has a limit, which would be very good news, as Trump’s appetite for despotic authority clearly doesn’t.
ENDNOTE: