In the first few hours after the midterm election, I saw the result as a rebuke rather than a repudiation of President Donald Trump. But two weeks later it appears to be more of a repudiation than it had appeared at first blush.
True, some high-profile Democrats were defeated, notably Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Democrats lost one or two seats in the Senate. But they won Republican-held Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada to go along with a special-election victory in Alabama, and they gained at least 37 House seats — their biggest pickup since the 1974 post-Watergate election. At the state level, Democrats won seven governor’s offices and roughly 250 state legislative seats, taking control of seven chambers in six states.
With his typical tendency to evade responsibility, Trump now says, “My name wasn’t on the ballot.” His motto might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. But the president was closer to the truth when he declared before the election: “I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me.”
As Ron Brownstein noted in the Atlantic, exit polls show that midterm voters disapproved of Trump by 54 percent to 45 percent – and “fully 90 percent of Trump disapprovers said they voted for Democrats for the lower chamber.” Nate Silver estimates that 60 million people voted for Democrats, compared with the 45 million votes Republicans received in their 2010 wave election.
Trump’s xenophobic closing argument, highlighted by hysteria over the migrant caravan in Mexico, shored up Republican candidates in rural areas but contributed to a GOP wipeout in suburban districts. Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, was the most populous county in the United States that Trump won in 2016. On Nov. 6, it supported Democrat Kyrsten Sinema for the Senate. Tarrant County, Texas, which includes Fort Worth, was the second-most-populous county to go for Trump in 2016. It supported Democrat O’Rourke for the Senate. Even more dramatic is the fact that Orange County, California, the birthplace of Richard Nixon and of the modern conservative movement, is for the first time since the 1930s represented entirely by Democrats in the House.
These shifts came about because women, the young, minorities, the college-educated and independents deserted the GOP in droves. The percentage of women with a college degree voting for the Democrats went from 51 percent in the 2016 presidential race to 59 percent in the 2018 congressional race, according to Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. He points out that even among white working-class men — Trump’s core constituency — Republican support declined from 71 percent in 2016 to 66 percent in 2018. Even some of these Trump voters must have noticed that he hasn’t revived smokestack industries or built a border wall.
The most gratifying results for me, as a Trump critic from the center-right, was to see moderate Republicans voting for Democratic candidates. Conservative analyst Henry Olson writes, “Across the nation, moderate college-educated independents who had frequently backed Republicans in prior elections switched sides.” Greenberg reports that “40 percent of moderate Republicans either voted Democratic or stayed home.” Turns out we #NeverTrumpers are not as inconsequential as pro-Trumpers claim.
The shift was particularly dramatic in Arizona. In 2012, Mitt Romney crushed Barack Obama among college graduates in Arizona, 63-36 percent. This year, Republican Senate candidate Martha McSally lost college graduates, 47-52 percent.
Here’s an ominous statistic for Republicans concerned about their party’s future: The share of Democratic support among under-30 voters increased from 55 percent in the 2016 presidential race to 67 percent in this year’s congressional election. Here’s another: The Democratic margin among Latinos grew from 26 percentage points in the 2014 midterm election to 40 percentage points in 2018.
Republicans have become the party of grumpy old white people who live in rural areas and lack college degrees. Trump managed to squeeze a narrow electoral-college margin out of those voters in 2016. It is possible that, with his demagogic skills, he can do so again in 2020. But the writing is on the wall for the GOP, because every year there are more minorities, more college graduates and more residents of suburban or urban areas. The country will no longer be majority white by the 2040s. With Trump in the pilot’s seat, the national Republican Party is in a demographic death spiral.
If you want to see the fate that will befall the GOP if it continues to blindly follow Trump, look at the California Republican Party. It took a tough anti-immigrant line in the 1990s under Gov. Pete Wilson. Today the GOP has all but ceased to exist in the nation’s most populous state. Not a single statewide elected officeholder is a Republican, Democrats won supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, and Republicans now will control only eight of 53 House seats. As goes California, so goes the country? The self-centered president doesn’t care, because he will leave the White House in 2021 or 2025 at the latest, but his Republican enablers will be left to wander, like victims of a firestorm, through the smoking ruins he leaves behind. They can’t say they weren’t warned.
Max Boot is a