Ep. 77 Companion Piece: Democracy Catches its Breath

That expected “Red Wave” was more like a rivulet. Or rather a dribble.

Rarely, if ever is Election Day a slam dunk for one party rule. But the Democrats proved defiant in two remarkable ways: First, theirs was the strongest midterm performance for a president’s party since the GOP gained seats in the 2002 elections under George W. Bush, and the best one for Democrats since the party increased their Senate majority under John F. Kennedy in 1962.

But second, and far more consequentially, the Democrats defied an incipient authoritarian wave, wrathful in its populism, and galvanized by Donald Trump and his lies. In fact, the majority of election deniers were defeated for various offices in crucial swing states, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, chief among them.

“The Big Lie,” and its attendant falsehoods, insanity and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, has been more corrosive to the body politic and the erosion of trust than anything since Joe McCarthy’s frenzied, if futile attempt to smear the majority of public servants as irredeemably Communist. But the “Have you no decency sir” moment finally arrived, but not in the form of Joseph Welch, the famous army lawyer who raged against the Wisconsin Senators “cruelty and recklessness,” and sent McCarthy into political oblivion.

In this instance, Trump’s “Big Lie,” which resulted in the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and marked the first time in our history that we didn’t have a peaceful transfer of power, turned into political kryptonite for The Big Liar himself, and thus imperiled his party’s fortunes. And not a moment too soon. Trumpism as a scourge is by no means dead, but Tuesday’s vote reaffirmed, among other things, that truth matters. That free and fair elections matter. And that the inflammatory delusions of a deranged political movement wouldn’t yet vanquish our two and a half century old experiment in self-government. Our fragile republic, now older than the Athenian democracy from which the idea of self governance derives, could seemingly bring MAGA fascism to a screeching halt. But make no mistake, the skid marks remain.

Even in a post-Trump America (should that blessing actually be bestowed upon us,) the foundations of our electoral framework remain askew. And a trend which is no doubt likely to continue for the foreseeable future is the urban-rural fault line: Democrats are concentrated in big metropolitan centers, whereas Republicans are increasingly based in sparsely populated areas and exurbs. This gives the Republicans an advantage in the Electoral College, the Senate and — because the president selects Supreme Court nominees and the Senate approves them — the Supreme Court.

Recent election results fly in the face of majority rule. Republicans have won the popular vote for president only once since 1988, and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. Democrats easily won a greater percentage of votes for the U.S. Senate in 2016, 2018, 2020 and now 2022, and yet, as of this writing, the Democrats will only still have a 50/50 lock on the upper chamber. Should Senator Raphael Warnock be re-elected in the December 6th Georgia run-off, the Democrats would hold a 51-49 majority.

In other words, the onus is on Democrats to win more of the national vote for the Senate than it is on Republicans. For example, should the Senate remain 50/50, 50 Democratic Senators represent roughly 57% of the voters, while the 50 GOP members only represent about 44%. Even in a heavily Democratic year like 2018 where the Democrats won their biggest House majority since Watergate, 18 million more voters chose Democrats to represent them, and yet the Republicans picked up two seats.

Given the insurmountability of these structural imbalances, and in light of the fantastical notion that any substantive changes would be in the offing, The Democrats must continue to mobilize key voting blocs as they did this year, including but not limited to—the youth, independents, moderate Republicans, and conservative ex Republicans. Despite the ballyhoo about this year’s Gen Z electoral revolution, only 27% of voters 18-29 showed up to vote. While they may have voted two to one for the Democrats, and younger voters of color comprised that majority, more of the youth vote showed up in 2018 than they did this year.

Which is another way of saying that the continued mobilization of independent suburban swing voters and lapsed Republicans is a central component to any success the Democrats will have in future elections. Not for nothing did The Lincoln Project, that intrepid band of Republican refugees who have soldiered valiantly on democracy’s front lines, coin what they call “The Bannon Line '' in American politics. If using the advice of Trump’s Rasputin to command electoral majorities seems counterintuitive, think again. Bannon declared that if the Democrats could peel 3-8% of Republican votes away from their own party, they would win. That happened in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Detroit and Phoenix in 2020, giving Biden his narrow electoral college margin of victory over Trump. 2022 data is even more encouraging. As I write this, Lincoln Project grand poohbah Rick Wilson says the numbers of conservative/GOP defectors amount to a staggering 7-11%.

Ideology we hardly knew ye. Indeed, the preservation of democracy, to say nothing of SCOTUS’s egregious Dobbs ruling ending the federal guarantee to an abortion united a majority of voters across party lines, genders, races and age groups. As the MAGA right amps up its Insane Clown Posse rendezvous with demagoguery, the far less menacing, though misguided apparatchik left, must forsake their own designs on ideological purity at this inflection point in our history. Litmus tests must wait.

Democracy is forever a precarious endeavor, shaky in its foundations, and dependent upon a willing and active citizenry to sustain it. Invariably, the electorate yearns for a repose following hard fought election years, and certainly this year’s resistance to Trumpublican autocracy should earn them that night. No rest for the electorally weary, I’m afraid. Like a snake reliably regenerating its skin, reactionary movements like MAGA often shape shift, even as their power wanes. Hence why “We the People” is the only bulwark against their undoubtedly vengeful return.

For now, the majority of Americans repudiated lies, conspiracy, sedition and most of all, malice. I can only think of what Frederick Douglass meant when he assessed the true dynamic between progress and power. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did. And it never will.”