Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Looking at initial results, one of the things that stick out to me is that the overall margin of loss is wide enough that I feel there's less credibility in various 'Trump/Republicans could have won the midterms if it weren't for [X]' arguments. People have (for as old as democracy) loved to point at their personal priority of [X] as the thing that should have been adhered to, be it Iran or Gaza or ICE, but I'm not seeing data yet to support any singular thing being the 'but for [X], Trump would have kept the Senate.' The closest might be 'but for [Inflation],' but there have been so many contributing causes for inflation in the US beyond the Iran War that trying to tie it to any one thing is often just going to be a revision of the 'if they just cared about the [X] the way I wanted' typical-minding.
One relevant aspect for that degree of loss is that it actually undercuts various political arguments for moderating in the name of electability. There's a constant tension between general viewpoints of 'you need to moderate in order to win power and do any of what you think is best,' and 'the point of winning power is to do what you think is best, even if you lose as a result.' Professional political establishments tend towards the former, but establishment outsiders and lame-duck politicians lean towards the later. If you're not up for election again, and you believe you can't get what you want/think best by running on it in a future election, then you're in a use-it-or-lose-it window of your chance to use institutional power.
Which is to say, I suspect these results make more volatility more likely, not less, over the next two years, especially via the sort of executive tools.
The stronger you read this as a rebuke to Trump/MAGA, the less incentive MAGA has to not-MAGA while in office, because the less viable any MAGA prospects for 2028 are the less reason there is to compromise what you could do now for electoral prospects later. If you have none, there is nothing left to salvage, and you might as well get what you can before you go into the political wilderness regardless. Especially since many of the macro-factors that already made it a back election cycle- inflation, global instability, political instability- are likely to disrupt the post-Trump administration as much as their pre-existance weakened the Biden/Harris administration.
Which actually brings a final note on Texas and some similar upsets. I'm not convinced these are as tectonic as they will no doubt be claimed to be, because on top of a rough year the Republican party was having its own internal civil war of sorts. This is most notable with Paxton, who was a truly bad candidate, but almost as importantly his primary opponent Cornyn, who was one of the vanishing breed of pre-Trump establishment republicans. They weren't the only two to fight eachother, and while maybe the party civil war wouldn't have mattered in a good year, it wasn't a good year. But it's also not liable to repeat next cycle- while the voters defeated MAGA this cycle, MAGA defeated a lot of the never-Trumper holdouts in the primaries, and one of those factions has a lot more ability to regenerate political support in the Republican party than the other. MAGA-Republicans are much less likely to face primary-revolt civil wars in 2/4/6 years, while anti-MAGA-never-Trumpers have less of an institutional toe-hold. I'm sure some will cause drama next cycle, but we're barely 5 years, and just the third election cycle, since Liz Cheney got kicked out of the Republican Party and broke the back of the never-Trumper movement in the Republican party structure. I think it's fair to say their influence has been and still is consistently decreasing, and infighting like the Paxton-Cornyn primaring is going to be less consequential due to fewer opportunities.
So, calling this a shellacking is perfectly fair. I'm sure much more will be made of it than the Obama analog, but we're very much in the same ballpark and the Obama-wing of the party neither died or become electorally irrelevant afterewards. Neutralizing MAGA? Not so much, though I'm sure people will carry forth arguments about how MAGA is permanently doomed and the Democrats will be on the cusp of a permanent majority once more by means fair or foul depending on the stance of the sayer.
Yes, it's clear that ICE/Iran/Israel/Epstein etc... weren't decisive.
It was an all of the above scenario.
Let's not forget the NoKings movement.
There was evidence from early voting that the electorate was older and whiter this time around. (Not sure if that stuck around on election day). I think Trump lost a lot of high propensity voters in the senior bracket. I know my senior relations are absolutely off their rockers with Trump hate. There's an old woman stumbling around my neighborhood literally carrying a sign that says "Trump lied, people died".
I know it was super lame, but those grannies with signs are much more important electorally than podcast bros.
Oh, sure. The boomer demographic remains dominant in American politics, and the elderly are among the most sensitive to things that threaten their retirement prospects, such as inflation and energy prices.
That's also part of why I'm not inclined to read too much long-term into this particular election. Economic talisman voting is common, and the headwinds that worked against Trump this time are liable to get even stronger in the post-Trump election cycles. AI data centers aren't going to be dismantled, and will drive up energy costs and wipe out jobs. The middle eastern countries aren't going to go to the pre-2026 oil export methods, deglobalization will continue, and regional conflicts will provide ever-greater threat to inter-regional trade flows. And that's without the tripple-whammy of job-losing effects of AI, age-out retirements across the economic leader boards, and France-style welfare-budget crashes.
I think any premise, explicit or implicit, that MAGA will be held responsible for these forevermore is a bit silly. It'll a campaign accusation, sure, but economy-voting doesn't care about that.
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