One way to look at this election is to reject Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
In 2018, when Biden began his presidential campaign, Democrats held 235 seats in the House of Representatives. To the surprise of prognosticators, on the day he was elected in 2020, they won only a clear majority, 222. Right now, it looks like they will win by about 211 votes this year.
That’s higher than most projections, but the trend is not toward Biden. At best, this is a ponderous leak of the Democratic coalition.
As I write, there are enough Senate races on the line to be certain, but Republicans lost a seat in Pennsylvania, are ahead in Nevada and have a shot at 51st in the Georgia runoff scheduled for December 6. Nationalizing the race could support Republican Herschel Walker win unless former President Donald Trump comes along and lowers turnout, casting doubt on the process as he did two years ago – helping Democrats win 49/50 Senate seats on January 5, 2021 .
Republicans had hoped to do better in the Senate elections this year, and many believed that polls were underestimating Republican support, as was the case in 2016 and 2020. However, that did not appear to be the case. And GOP candidates who won primaries with Trump’s resounding support but received few dollars overall from Trump tended to perform worse than polls suggested.
J.D. Vance actually won Ohio, but he was 9 points behind Gov. Mike DeWine. In Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz lost a seat that Republicans had won in every election since 1968 to candidate John Fetterman, whose stroke left him indistinct. First-time candidate Blake Masters is losing 52-46% in Arizona, where Republicans won every Senate race from 1992-2016. Don Bolduc lost 54-44% in New Hampshire to Maggie Hassan, who won in 2016 by just 1,017 votes.
In each case, candidates who did not carry Trump’s baggage won.
Conservative analysts ridiculed Biden’s Democratic argument that democracy is at stake in this election. But clearly the specter of a January 6 Capitol riot hangs over candidates with Trump’s imprimatur.
The highlight of the evening was striking victories for Republican governors in the nation’s third and eighth most populous states, Florida and Georgia.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has been the target of Trump’s furious criticism since the former president narrowly lost the state in 2020, but he defeated a Trump-backed challenger by 51 points last May. Kemp has benefited this fall from his decisions to end Covid lockdowns and has vigorously defended Georgia’s voting rights law, denounced by Biden and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams as “Jim Crow 2.0.” In 2018, he won 50-49% with a majority of 54,000 votes, although Abrams, much pissed off by the fashionable press, denied that she lost. This time, Kemp defeated Abrams 53%-46% and won by a margin of 294,000 votes.
Georgia, by the way, has the third-largest percentage of Black voters in the country, and many Blacks from northern flagship cities flock to the comfortable suburbs of metro Atlanta. Kemp won 13% of black voters this year and 38% of the state’s growing number of Latino voters.
The biggest winner of the 2022 elections was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Four years ago he won Florida 50-49%, by just 32,000 votes, and was repeatedly attacked by the national press for his Covid policies, focusing on protecting the elderly and pushing for open schools and outdoor activities, and for a bill banning explicit sexual material in grades kindergarten through third grade.
His mettle was put to the test when Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida on September 28 at a time that meteorologists had not predicted. (Weather experts have improved significantly in recent decades, but they are not perfect.) He managed to repair the Pine Island Bridge in three days and the Sanibel Island Bridge in three weeks instead of the three months predicted. He didn’t just promise to build something – he kept it.
This year, DeSantis won re-election by 19 points, a margin of 1,506,000 votes, in a state that George W. Bush won in 2000 by 537 votes after 35 days of recounts and legal proceedings.
DeSantis carried 62 of 67 counties and won 16% of the Black vote. He carried Latinos 52%-45%. He carried Hispanic-majority Miami-Dade County 55% to 44% – the first Republican governor to win the county since Jeb Bush in 2002. He also had largely Jewish Palm Beach County, the first Republican governor to win in the county since 1986. Majority-Hispanic Osceola County, which includes part of Disney World, 53-46%.
DeSantis won majorities among women as well as men, all age groups, all income groups, and all religious groups except Jews (only 42%) and people with no religion (only 40%). Overall, DeSantis’ victory looks like a model for a lasting Republican majority in the country that neither George W. Bush nor Trump was able to deliver.
This Florida model can be applied beyond the disappointing Senate election results for Republicans. In terms of current gains, DeSantis won by a greater percentage and majority of the popular vote than Democrat Gavin Newsom in California and by much larger margins than Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York or billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker in Illinois.
In these immense states, the Democratic margin remained in upscale districts full of liberal white college graduates, but declined elsewhere because of high crime, homelessness and tax rates, as seen in congressional races. I’ll operate a phrase I coined in the 1970s that I thought was true because Democrats are bringing in lovely people, but they’re losing dutiful people.
The total effect can be seen if you add up the votes for Republican and Democratic governors in the 10 most populous states (taking into account votes for senator in North Carolina, which elects governors in presidential years). The tally so far this year is Republicans 51% and Democrats 48%.
We have become accustomed to a politics in which Republicans dominate in rural areas and fall hopelessly behind in major metropolitan areas. DeSantis’ results suggest this is not inevitable. He carried the Gold Coast (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties), metro Tampa, metro Orlando and metro Jacksonville – something no Republican presidential candidate had done since the 1980s, in another era when voters were also concerned high crime and high inflation.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
