Come January, three-quarters of Americans will be living in states with Democratic governors, including nine of the 10 biggest states and nine of the 10 richest ones.
This isn’t just a blue wave, or a repudiation of the president, or a cost-of-living revolt. It tells us something profound about the nature of the country and the spiritual life of our politics, where not just policy and ideology are hashed out but also the deeper meaning of everything from music and movies to fashion and food culture, educational attainment, economic opportunity, income inequality and much more besides.
For a long time, Americans thought of their country as decidedly right of center and irreconcilably polarized, divided by partisanship so intense that the conflict was sometimes compared to a civil war. But in the aftermath of an electoral rout, the map looks quite different. To put it bluntly, it all looks pretty deeply blue.
The reconfiguration of the political map by this blue tsunami probably isn’t permanent. I would guess Democrats will notch another victory in 2028, much as they did in 2008 after a huge midterm victory in 2006. But those races are obviously still up in the air, and these days it often seems that politics is balanced on a knife’s edge, with neither party capable of securing a significant advantage.
This is precisely what makes the scale of the romp so remarkable. By popular vote, Democrats seem to have notched the biggest victory any party has achieved in congressional elections in 50 years. In the new Congress, Democrats will have more House seats than Republicans have at any point since the Depression. If Scott Colom’s lead in Mississippi and Mary Peltola’s lead in Alaska both hold up, Democrats will have more Senate seats than Republicans have had at any point since the early 1920s.
The state-level triumph is so broad — Democrats will now control a majority of legislative chambers, and have more trifectas than Republicans for the first time since 2009 — that Democrats could pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to bypass the Electoral College. And yet as a purely partisan matter that particular project seems much less pressing, suddenly, because there isn’t such an obvious Democratic disadvantage left to erase. Those swathes of the electoral map that used to look like Republican fortresses — the Old South, the Sun Belt and the Great Plains — are no longer red but purple. In some cases, just blue.
There could very well be a Democrat representing Mississippi in the Senate come January, and there will be another representing South Carolina. Blue Texas isn’t a progressive dream anymore. It has happened, and pretty emphatically: Democrats won not just the open Senate seat and the governorship but also control of the State House. The Texas land commissioner is now a Democrat, as are the agriculture commissioner and the railroad commissioner. Ted Cruz is the only Republican who will still be holding statewide office.
The biggest shock is how consistent it all seems: Nationwide, Democrats won the House popular vote by more than 13 points.
Above all, the midterms were a devastating verdict on Donald Trump and a rebuke to MAGA — which is now, according to exit polls, a phenomenon not much bigger than Democratic Socialism. A liberal coalition this big contains multitudes, which is one reason the election has given way to some intense factional infighting about what the victory tells us about the future of the Democratic Party.
In truth, it told us a lot of different and contradictory things. Candidates mixed remarkably strident class-warfare messages with a variety of gestures toward big-tent social moderation. But there was little in the way of an actual policy agenda visible to a national audience. Instead, candidates seemed to want to coast in on anti-Trump vibes: anti-inflation and anti-corruption, anti-plutocracy and antiwar.
One cautious way of interpreting the results is to say they don’t tell us all that much. You could see them as only the latest backlash election in what I’ve been calling our age of whiplash politics, in which even large majorities are fleeting almost everywhere in the world and meaningful political change has become incredibly difficult as a result.
That context still holds. But you simply can’t get liberal majorities like these in what has so often been described, across that long history, as a libertarian nation, or a conservative one, a center-right country or, more recently, a MAGA majority. The math gets even harder given gerrymandering, the imbalance of campaign financing and the structural bias of Senate power, which hugely advantages rural and sparsely populated states over denser and more urban ones.
A tremendously unpopular president helps, of course, and the results should humiliate anyone who ever argued Trump possessed some supernatural hold on the country. But under conditions like these, you can only win big liberal majorities if the country itself, as a whole, is left of center.
How far left remains up for debate — or, rather, determination. Yet even in this whiplash period, the Democratic backlashes are proving much bigger than the Republican ones, because the country’s actual center of gravity remains much more Barack Obama than Donald Trump.
Nationwide, the Democratic victory in the House is, by popular vote, twice as large as Republicans have managed in any race since 1984. Republican presidential candidates have reached 50 percent of the vote just once since 1988, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 2.4 percentage points in 2004.
The structural bias in the Senate isn’t about to change anytime soon, but whatever you might’ve heard a few years ago about what it would take to flip that chamber — about the need for more anti-abortion Democrats, or liberal independents who might avoid the toxic Democratic brand — if Scott Colom prevails in Mississippi, the party will have won Senate seats in 43 different states since 2008, as Nate Silver pointed out. With all their structural advantages, Republicans have won them in just 35.
This is a chaotic and disorderly nation politically, full of plenty of conservatives and even more citizens full of nonpartisan frustration and rage. The Democrats do not now have the mandate of heaven thanks to just one electoral blowout, and even this huge majority doesn’t quite vindicate the long-derided “emerging Democratic majority” thesis of the early Obama years — let alone secure that majority for a generation. No political majority looks all that long-lasting anywhere in the world these days, though the success of Mark Carney in Canada and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico suggests that we may be turning a corner globally, as well.
But perhaps conservatives were onto something when they insisted on describing themselves, across both Trump presidencies, as embattled insurgents fighting an entrenched liberal elite. For all their norm-breaking swaggering and imperious brutality, theirs was always a fleeting, minoritarian claim on power. It’s a shame and an embarrassment, looking back, that so many universities and law firms and media organizations failed to see things as clearly — capitulating, just in time for the vibes to shift again.
Remember hearing that MAGA had laid claim to the future of pop culture? The biggest act the Trump White House managed to book for the country’s 250th birthday party was Flo Rida. Hollywood never went centrist, let alone MAGA, and Tesla just announced the Cybertruck was being discontinued. “The Daily” from The New York Times has been at or near the top of the podcast app list for years.
On the campaign trail in 2019, Joe Biden described MAGA as a kind of national fever that would break once Trump was defeated, with Republicans who’d enabled the president so slavishly shame-facedly coming to their senses. Biden was mocked when, after his victory, that fever didn’t break but intensified. It does feel like it’s broken now. But what has been revealed?
In certain ways, the political landscape looks like it did 12 years ago — Obamaism with a new Zohran twist. The 44th president is the most popular political figure in the country, and many of the Democratic leaders given new prominence by this wave election came of age in the Obama years, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out after election night, which she described as a hopeful redux of 2008.
The rhetoric of Democrats, too, fused quite explicit and moralistic populism with old-fashioned appeals to homespun common sense and community tradition — with some of the party’s leading lights literally sounding like Obama every time they took the stage. “The Resistance” was really rump Obamaism by another name, and it emerged from this election much mocked, looking nevertheless like a resurgent force in Democratic politics — now given new energy by anti-establishment populism as much as it was genuinely displaced by it.
The map, too, looks like a delayed prophecy from the Obama years. The Washington suburbs, the research triangle, the Atlanta sprawl and the big blue cities of Texas — these knowledge-economy cities and suburbs of the broad Sun Belt are the country’s growth spots of the last 15 years, and they are all drifting left.
And yet what has given Democrats the biggest wave election in living memory is not exactly liberal triumphalism. It’s more like the opposite, with national confidence in the Democratic Party far from some all-time high. The country has been battered by a decade-long assault on its institutions and its ideals, which has left some liberals skittish, nervous to dare anything, and others angry and unwilling to compromise.
The policy landscape looks different, too, with many of those longstanding crusades we once used to orient ourselves, has dropped away in salience. Perhaps the country has grown somewhat less anxious about climate chaos; abortion and crime have almost fallen off the radar entirely. Immigration has become less charged as the number of migrants apprehended at the southern border has fallen dramatically, though the fight may well reignite again, and it’s not exactly clear what new bargain Democrats are aiming for.
More broadly, the party doesn’t seem inclined to raise taxes on anyone except perhaps the very, very rich, and though Democrats are coming into power on the basis of cost-of-living complaints, they don’t seem prepared to propose any large new social programs to alleviate them. It’s not hard to imagine an out-of-power Republican Party getting religion again on the deficit and size-of-government issues, but one notable feature of the Trump years has been how much less focused on cutting entitlements the G.O.P. became. And it’s not at all clear what a post-Trump conservative coalition would really be for.
The result is a kind of political agoraphobia, in which both the political landscape and the policy agenda look dizzyingly indeterminate. Presumably, in the next few months, we’ll begin to hear from congressional Democrats about A.I. policy proposals, good-governance legislation, anti-corruption investigations and perhaps some more of health care expansion, likely short of Medicare for all. On the very first day of business for the new Texas state legislature, Democrats filed bills to expand Medicaid, repeal the state abortion ban, raise the minimum wage, end tax incentives for data centers, limit the use of Flock cameras and stop the construction of border walls in state parks.
But where will national Democrats go on immigration or Gaza? Will there be permitting reform? Will there be an actually effective affordability agenda? Will any of these policy proposals actually matter to voters? The horizon looks pretty wide open to me. But that sky looks pretty blue, too.
The post The Political Center of Gravity Isn’t Trump. It’s Obama. appeared first on New York Times.
