U.S. elections: How the right wing’s anticipated “red wave” fizzled

The results of the U.S. midterm election broke a well-established historical pattern of the “out” party scoring a victory over the president’s party. In the process, the results made fools of the right-wing politicians and pundits who had proclaimed that a “red wave” would wipe out the Democrats and, possibly, put President Biden on the road to impeachment. The journalist Mehdi Hasan pulled together a rogue’s gallery of right-wing talking heads and their mainstream accomplices here.

Going into the midterms, the Republicans had history on their side. In every midterm in the last century except three (1934, 1998 and 2002), the party that didn’t hold the presidency has won more seats in the Congress than the president’s party. Republicans also counted on Biden’s unpopularity—hovering in the Trump-like territory of about four in 10 Americans viewing the president favorably. And finally, with the highest inflation in 40 years eating into workers’ paychecks, the GOP expected voters to punish the Democrats.

Given these “fundamentals” and based on past experience, mainstream political scientists and analysts had predicted that the Democrats would lose around 40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and lose the U.S. Senate. This expectation for the 2022 midterm to be a “normal” election lent some nonpartisan credibility to the “red wave” narratives that conservatives and Republican operatives were peddling.

But these midterms did not unfold in “normal” circumstances. These midterm elections took place only a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the national right to abortion. This led to a huge spike in voter registration—particularly among younger women—and the Democrats exceeding Biden’s 2020 electoral support in a series of House special elections held over the summer. The resounding defeat of an anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas constitution in August turned out to be a harbinger of the strong Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterms. Democratic candidates even raised more money, on average, than Republican candidates.

The second major factor in the race was the presence across the Republican field of far-right Christian nationalist conspiracy mongers. Some of them, like Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor, had worked with Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign to undermine Biden’s victory. And Mastriano himself even helped to organize the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Others, with Trump’s endorsement, won Republican primaries by pledging to restrict voting rights and to support abortion bans.

These two factors fused together to create anti-Republican momentum. “I do think there is a broader narrative of Republican extremism that Dobbs really connected the dots on,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic Party data analyst who predicted the strong Democratic showing after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. To Bonier and only a handful of other Democratic Party operatives, such as the New Democrat Network’s Simon Rosenberg, evidence pointed not to a “red wave” but to a much closer election.

As even the Republican pollster Bill McInturff noted weeks before the midterms,

There is a campaign about the economy, cost of living, crime, and border security, and Republicans are winning this campaign.

But there is a second campaign on abortion, democracy and climate change, and Democrats are winning that campaign.

To push the “wave” metaphor one step further, there were two waves rushing toward each other, with Election Day determining which of them would be stronger. In the event, it appears that the Democratic wave was just strong enough to keep the Republican wave from overwhelming it.

Voter turnout was high by the standards of midterm elections, when usually fewer than half of eligible voters participate. But it was down from the 2018 high water mark for midterm elections (about 50 percent, the highest midterm turnout in more than a century). When all the votes are counted, it may end up around 47-48 percent. What’s more, as of the time of writing, it appears that more people voted for Republicans in the House elections than for Democrats.

Liberals and Democrats are feeling pretty good about the election, but when the tide washes out, we’re left with a mostly status quo result, at least at the federal level. At the time of writing, it looked like the Democrats would hold a narrow majority in the Senate (as before) and the Republicans would narrowly win the House. Nevertheless, there was a slim chance that late-counted votes in the western states could end up preserving the Democrats’ hold on the House.

And this, after an enormous amount of money spent. Candidates and political action committees spent around $17 billion, with individual billionaires putting down millions of their own. This is almost twice as much money as the entire 2010 midterm election cost. Democrats and allied groups, like Planned Parenthood, spent half a billion dollars on abortion-rights related ads alone.

In the end, we are left with (still) a country that remains closely divided, while millions opt out of the political system. The far right appears to have been pushed back at the ballot box, but millions remain in thrall to its ideas. On the other hand, it’s clear that mass opposition to abortion restrictions helped save the Democrats’ bacon. For socialists, both of these tasks—defeating the far right and winning abortion rights—will require much deeper and broader organization and mobilization than voting for what the political commentator Kevin Phillips once called the U.S.’s “second most enthusiastic capitalist party.”