The Morning After

 The biggest loser in yesterday's landslide was not Donald Trump.  It was another Boomer, Newt Gingrich, who managed to redraw the political map in ways that have kept the Republican Party in or near power for the last five decades.  While the Democratic base eroded, with the Northeast losing relative population and the Midwest turning purple to red, the Republicans secured hegemony in the rapidly growing Sunbelt, with the exception of California.  They have evidently overplayed their hand.  In one extraordinary night, some of the most solidly Republican states have gone purple, and the largest of them all, Texas, looks like it might have gone blue.  And the Republicans have lost Senate seats in at least one and maybe two of the most historically reactionary and racist states in the union, South Carolina and Mississippi.  I never expected to see that in my lifetime and I feel like a great weight has been lifted off me.  The Civil War, whose origins I am now studying in detail, is finally over, a fitting 161 years (= 2x80) after the fighting stopped.

Let me begin with some data, more than you will find on the front pages of leading newspaper websites. The Associated Press has awarded 228 seats to Democrats and 139 to Republicans.  Of the remaining 68 seats, Democrats lead in 38 of them, and if they win those 38, they will finish with 266 seats, representing a gain of 60 seats.  Because apparently so many Republicans either stayed home or voted Democratic, the redistricting battle that the Republicans set off turned out to be disastrous for them.  If current trends hold up the North Carolina delegation will be will be 10-4 Democratic,  up from 7-7;  California will be 48-4 Democratic,  up from 39-12 (one seat was vacant); Texas will be 24-14 Republican, down from 25-15; and Florida, where four Republicans are hanging on by tiny margins, will remain at 20-8. Republican.  The Republicans have for the moment lost the richest and fastest-growing states in the Sunbelt.  That is a truly historic development.

In the key Senate races Democratic performances range from impressive to miraculous.  In Texas Ken Paxton, one of the worst candidates in American political history, who owed his nomination to President Trump, went down to James Talarico won by 55 percent to 43 percent. Roy Cooper won 59-39 in North Carolina over another hand-picked Trump opponent. Sherrod Brown won 50-45 over John Hustead in Ohio and Abdul Sayed won in Michigan by 7 percentage points.  Democrat Josh Turek won Iowa 51-46, and Adam Hamilton became the first Democratic Senator from Kansas since the New Deal days by the same margin.  Troy Jackson beat incumbent  Susan Collins in Maine, 54-46.  And most incredibly, Annie Andrews, the Democrat, beat Darline Graham, another Trump designee, 51-47, while in Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes [sic]. Annie Andrews is the first post-Dixiecrat Democrat ever to be elected to the Senate from South Carolina, and Colomb will be the same from Mississippi if his lead holds up.  (I'm afraid it won't, because all the absentee ballots remain to be counted, but we shall see.)  Since 1874 racial issues kept Mississippi and South Carolina firmly in the Jim Crow Democratic camp until the 1980s and firmly in the Republican camp since then.  Apparently those days are over.  Republican Julia Letlow won her race in Louisiana by only 2 percentage points, Jon Ossoff in Georgia won handily, and it looks like Alabama is the only remaining Republican bastion in the Deep South.  What this means to me is that 161 years after Appomattox, the Civil War is over, and we don't need the post-1983 interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and the racial gerrymandering that went with it after all.  No one will win a state election in South Carolina or Mississippi simply by being white again.  Hallelujah.

In the runup to this election Donald Trump did what Franklin Roosevelt had been unable to do in 1938: he successfully defeat popular Republicans, led by John Cornyn in Texas and Tom Tillis in North Carolina, who had stood up to him.  His candidates' disastrous performance should break his hold on the Republican Party and it will put some pressure on Republican hopefuls for 2028 to abandon him.  Democrats also gained one House seat and state legislature seats in Indiana, where Trump purged the Republican state legislature after it refused to execute a redistricting plan.  For the eleventh time in the last twelve national elections, the people of the US exercised their constitutional right to turn the rascals out--this time, it looks like, even more decisively than in 2008 and 2010.   I certainly can't predict what this means for the future. Donald Trump was never our only problem.  I have always said he is more of a symptom than a cause.   The task of restoring the bonds between our citizenry and our political elites has not yet begun, and our society seems at the mercy of forces beyond political control.  Still, there are signs of a very new era in yesterday's results, which exit polls will probably show to have been heavily generationally inspired.  That is a great comfort at my advanced age.