Election Results
Making sense of the Republican disappointment and hoping to get rid of Trump in the process.
Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown! Please subscribe if you haven’t already so that you never miss a newsletter. You can blame Nevada and Arizona for my late newsletter this week as I have been waiting to see how those races turned out.
Election Results
Alright, let me acknowledge right off the bat that I was pretty wrong in my prediction for the midterm elections. Last newsletter I wrote, “Let’s start with the elections on Tuesday. I think Republicans are going to trounce Democrats pretty much across the board this year… I do think it will be an overall good night for Republicans.” Let’s just say that “trounce” is not the word anybody would use for the results of Tuesday.
Now, I wasn’t completely wrong. I wrote, “For the House of Representatives, the question isn’t whether Republicans are going to gain control but how large of a majority they will have.” The Republicans are almost certainly going to take the House but the majority that they will have is slimmer than almost anybody projected. Instead of the 20-30 seat majority that many people (including Democrats) were projecting, the Republicans will end up with less than a 10-seat, maybe even as slim as 5-seat majority. To be blunt, it was a brutal night for Republicans compared to expectations.
The chances of the Republicans taking control of the Senate are gone. Arizona and Nevada are still technically being counted, but multiple outlets have called both for Democrats. Georgia is going to a runoff, but it will not determine control of the Senate like last year.
Swing states, such as Pennsylvania, were particularly rough for Republicans. As the New York Times wrote,
“Democrats excelled in Pennsylvania. They ran as well as Biden had in 2020 or even better. They swept every contested House seat. John Fetterman won the race for U.S. Senate by a much wider margin than Biden had won the state. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, won in a landslide.”
Now, that doesn’t mean that everywhere was a disaster for the Republican Party. The margins that Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio won in Florida were larger than even the most optimist Republican would have predicted. For example, Miami-Dade County voted 63% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2022, Ron DeSantis won the county with 55% of the vote. That staggering swing to the Republican Party happened across the state.
Also, Republicans performed pretty in New York of all places. The New York Times again,
…in New York, Republicans won big. Their candidates for Congress fared seven to 13 points better than Donald Trump had in 2020 presidential votes in those same districts. Republicans won all but one of the state’s competitive congressional districts. The governor’s race was fairly close in the normally blue state, though the Democratic incumbent, Kathy Hochul, held off her Republican challenger, Lee Zeldin.
Furthermore, there were incumbent Republican governors that crushed it even in states with struggling senate candidates. Brian Kemp in Georgia, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, and Mike DeWine in Ohio all performed significantly better than their Republican counterparts in the same state.
What Happened?
The easy part of every election is seeing the results; the hard part is figuring out why the results turned out the way that they did. Frequently, analysts cite exit and/or issue polls to help determine what was front of mind for voters as they cast their votes. The issue with this is the notorious unreliability of these polls leads to unreliable conclusions. That doesn’t mean issue and exit polls can’t be used, but they can’t be used as the only data point from which conclusions are drawn.
The other difficult part of analyzing election results is the complexity of studying the actions of millions of people widely dispersed geographically. Due to this reality, monocausal explanations for anything, particularly election results, are too simplistic to reflect reality. The “cause” of the results is undoubtedly a combination of too many factors to thoroughly account for, but there are some dominant themes that can be illuminating for where the electorate is.
I have read, watched, and listened to as much election analysis as I possibly could since Tuesday so most of this is not original to me but is a summation of what people who do this for a living are thinking.
Independents
One word helps explain why the red wave never materialized: independents. With the talk about a red wave, many people missed that many of the polls were incrediblly close. Most people assumed that even though the polls were close the that independents/undecided voters would break towards the Republicans.
This assumption wasn’t necessarily foolish either. President Biden’s approval ratings are incredibly low, inflation has remained stubbornly high, and the party in power almost always does poorly during midterms. In that kind of environment, history tells us that independents/undecided voters typically swing towards the party out of power. The size of the red wave was going to be determined by just how many of these independents/undecided voters swung to the Republican Party.
The issue is that they didn’t. I think this tweet says it all:
In fact, many voters who acknowledged dissatisfication with Biden opted to voted for his party anyways. The Republicans failed because they did not convince winnable voters that they were better than Democrats. Indendepent/undecided voters recognized the many issues with Democrats and still preferred them over the Republican candidates. That’s a sobering reality for the Republican Party.
Incumbency Matters
However, there were exceptions to Republican foibles and that lies in the incumbent Republican governors. Mark DeWine outperformed JD Vance in Ohio by 9.5 points, Brian Kemp outperformed Herschel Walker in Georgia by almost 5 points, and Chris Sununu outperformed Don Bolduc in New Hampshire by almost 13 points.
The advantages of incumbency are well-known in politics, but it also speaks to the willingness of many voters to vote for Republicans when they have a record to run on. The issue with so many of the candidates that Republicans ran this year is their general inexperience in politics. Vance, Masters, Walker, Bolduc, and Oz were all political first-timers.
There is a role for candidates without political experience in our system. They can be enormously helpful when an incumbent politician has entrenched power and a “wildcard” is the best chance of shaking things up. However, when the party in power is already unpopular and voters are seeking out a change, the wisest political strategy is to run “boring” candidates with a track record that voters feel comfortable voting for.
While this sounds great in theory, the Republican Party is currently in a populist fever that wants to get rid of “establishment” Republicans. Primary voters have made it very clear that MAGA wins primaries, not “zombie Reaganism.” A candidate’s “establishment” status is actually a liability, not a strength like it ought to be.
To make matters worse, real MAGA candidates must prove their MAGA status by denouncing all “establishment” Republicans as RINOs (Republican In Name Only) or squishes that are too weak to “fight.” It turns out that when you denounce anyone who disagrees with you as a traitor to the cause, they aren’t quick to support when you need them during the general election.
Trump’s Involvement
Which brings me to the elephant in the room: Donald Trump.
This is the theme that most people are pointing to as decisive in taming the red wave. Essentially, Donald Trump and his MAGA form of politics are not popular enough to win national elections. In fact, MAGA is such a net negative against Republicans because it not only tamps down on Republican enthusiasm but increases Democratic enthusiasm.
Look, I have made my disdain for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement abundantly clear; I desperately hope this theory is right and the Republican Party reverts back hard to its pre-Trump years. That bias may color how much I buy into this theory, but I think there is a lot of evidence to support it.
What does Trump have to do with an election that he wasn’t involved in?
First, it is clear that Trump was a deciding factor in which Republicans decided not to run for Senate. Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania was a solid conservative who elected to retire instead of running again for the Senate. Toomey was one of the Republican Senators that voted to impeach Donald Trump after January 6th and he retired because he knew that in order to run again he would have to go through a brutal primary against a more MAGA candidate.
Similarly, Doug Doocey in Arizona, Larry Hogan in Maryland, and Chris Sununu in New Hampshire are all governors with high approval ratings within their own states. While Mitch McConnell was actively recruiting them to run for their state’s open Senate seats, they all three refused to run for Senate. The reality of having to face an ultra-MAGA candidate in the Republican primary was certainly a deterrent to these three men. All three of these men would have been high-quality candidates that had a real shot at winning.
(In case you are tempted to argue that if MAGA were so unpopular then these men had nothing to fear in a primary, here is my newsletter for why primaries are awful and cater to the most passionate and radical parts of the base.)
Once these men decided not to run, the Republican Party had to move on to recruit other candidates. This is where Donald Trump’s influence was most notably felt as he endorsed various MAGA candidates. In wide open fields with many possible candidates, Trump’s endorsement was gold as it almost guaranteed the nomination.
As a result, the candidates that ended up running for Senate on the Republican side were all endorsed and hand-picked by Donald Trump himself. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Blake Masters in Arizona, and JD Vance in Ohio all fit this bill. The same thing happened in many governor’s races as well with Kari Lake in Arizona being the leading example. You could also maybe include Tudor Dixon in Michigan.
Looking at the results of these MAGA candidates, Oz, Bolduc, Masters, and Dixon all lost. In fact, Oz, Bolduc, and Dixon did not have very competitive races at all. Masters ran a closer race in Arizona, but he still lost by 5 points in a state that Republicans should be able to win. Vance won in Ohio (a thoroughly Republican state now), but he won by less than 7 points while Ohio’s Republican governor won by over 25 points. Lake is likely to win in Arizona, but it is clear that overall there was a huge underperformance by MAGA candidates.
Abortion
Finally, there is still some debate about how significant the Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court was in the midterm results, but there was certainly some impact. After the Dobbs decision was released this summer, the polls very quickly began to show increased Democratic enthusaism. This wasn’t surprising as abortion has been a central tenant of the Democratic platform and enshrined in law for decades.
As polls surged in favor of Democrats, the question became whether that enthusaism was going to maintain itself until November. As time went on, the polls corrected back to where they had been prior to the Dobbs decision, so most people assumed that the Dobbs bump for Democrats was over.
The Democrats were unwilling to let their momentum fade though and they ran almost solely on abortion with every Democratic ad going after Republicans for their desire to get ride of abortion “rights.” Again, it’s impossible to know for sure how much of a tailwind abortion was for Democrats, but every abortion measure that was voted on went the way of Democrats.
Other than being clear that the pro-life movement still has a lot of work to do to, it’s also clear that abortion is not a popular issue for Republicans. It will be interesting to see if Republicans continue to advocate for pro-life policies or run away from the abortion issue in order to win elections. I have a feeling that the days of the Republican Party being a predominantly pro-life party may be coming to an end.
Now What?
So, where does the Republican Party go from here? As I have made clear before, I am first and foremost concerned with the advancement of conservative principles and policies; whether the Republican Party is the vehicle for that or not is up to the Republican Party. At one point, the conservative movement and the Republican Party were intrinsically linked, but as I explained here a few months ago, I don’t believe that is the case anymore.
I say that to say my only concern with the success of the Republican Party is whether it promotes consevative principles/policies. If it does not promote conservatism, then I hope it continues to be met with electoral defeat. Fortunately, I think voters have made it clear that they prefer the traditional conservatism of yesteryear to the Trump/MAGA politics of the last 6 years.
I think it’s clear what I mean when I refer to Trump, the man himself, but what do I mean by MAGA? This is where definition can get a little blurry, but generally I mean the brand of politics that portray conservatives as victims, equates “fighting” with meanness, depicts America in demise, and defines itself only as what it is opposed to.
Voters, particularly swing voters, do not find this kind of politics appealing. Despite making that clear in 2018 and 2020, the Republican Party has continued to insist that this new way of doing politics was necessary to become a successful “working-class” party. Now, the Republican Party has to face the reality that this “new” party has been rejected by voters 3 election cycles in a row now.
It turns out that people don’t like it when their leaders constantly talk about how evil and wicked this country is. Surprisingly, politicians that are known for being a jerk and treating anyone who disagrees with them with disrespect don’t garner widespread support from people who are attempting to raise their kids differently. Also, people aren’t fond of someone who whines and complains about how everybody is against them instead of focusing on improving the lives of the people they are meant to serve. As the success of Republican incumbents demonstrates, people prefer to vote for someone who has a sound track record of not being crazy instead of wildcards that merely “own the libs.”
Owning the libs may be fun, like juveniles that think throwing rocks into windows is entertaining, but it leads to the libs owning elections. Turns out Trump’s “winning” includes a whole lot of losing.
God Bless,
Hunter Burnett