AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman

When the first wave of exit polls, which have historically overestimated Democrats, were released at 5 pm on Tuesday, CNN was already analyzing a Democratic fiasco. They painted a bleak picture: 73% of voters felt unhappy or angry about the direction of the country, and the top issue was inflation, at 32%. But the power of this narrative, in a touch of irony, backfired on Republicans as well. So fatalistic were Democrats about their chances that Republicans too became convinced that what was on the table was not merely a defeat of the Democratic Party, but its annihilation.

In this belief, Republicans set themselves up for disappointment much as Democrats had in 2018. In that year, however, the bubble had burst early. The Democratic wave came up against the state of Florida, where, powered by an aggressive investment of personal prestige and resources by President Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott defied polls to win the governorship and Senate seat. This victory came early enough in the night that, when combined with Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee voting to form and against Democratic Senate candidates, it was clear that, however successful Democrats were elsewhere, they were operating within a partisan world. At the end of the day, Democrats were Democrats and Republicans were Republicans.

If Florida’s results provided an early dose of reality in 2018 and 2020, they did the opposite in 2022. They seemed to confirm the inflated expectations which had entered the minds of Republicans and the fatalism of Democrats. Indeed, what befell Democrats in Florida was not a defeat but an extinction-level event.

Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio won by margins of 19% and 17%, respectively, even carrying Miami-Dade County. This was the largest margin of victory for any Republican governor in history, exceeding even Jeb Bush’s 13% margin in 2002. When compared with these margins, especially against highly touted Democratic candidates such as former Governor Charlie Crist – who had previously been a Republican – and Congresswoman Val Demings, who was passed over for Kamala Harris in the 2020 vice presidential sweepstakes, anything which followed would look disappointing. And so a year in which the GOP improved on the party’s performance in 2016, 2018, and 2020, and did so against almost the uniform opposition of the media and much of the cultural establishment, instead was seen as Democrats “defying the odds.” This is unfair.

Tuesday was not a night which brought the extinction of the Democratic Party. But it did narrow the path forward. Democrats arrested their decline in the Midwest and Northeast, where they had struggled since 2016, but they still lost the Senate races in Ohio and North Carolina and are trailing in Wisconsin and Nevada as of Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, their efforts to build a new base of support in the sunbelt, the project for which they abandoned their working-class base, ran into a brick wall. It is for that reason that their defeats in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, which between them hold 84 electoral votes, and may gain six more this decade, matter.

Democrats have come to hold a special animus toward Florida, which they believe cheated them of victory in 2000 and 2016, ousted its Democratic Senator in 2018, and trended against them in 2020. But Georgia and Texas hold a special place in their hearts. “Turning Texas Blue” through a mixture of a growing Hispanic population and a migration of upscale suburban liberals has been an obsession ever since the term of George W. Bush, when it emerged as an almost petty method of revenge against Bush and Tom Delay. It appeared to be fools gold until 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within an inch of winning the Senate seat of Ted Cruz, losing by a narrow 50%-48% margin. These hopes were disappointed in 2020, when Biden lost the state 52%-46%, while Democrats failed to make gains in the legislature.

Equally heartbreaking was Georgia, where Stacey Abrams, like O’Rourke, came within an inch of defeating Brian Kemp for the governorship in 2018, nearly bringing an entire Democratic statewide slate into office. Unlike Texas, Democrats felt they had been vindicated by history, or at least a confused and disorganized electoral process, when Joe Biden carried the state by 12,000 votes in the official returns, and they won two Senate seats in runoffs. For them, Georgia was trending inexorably blue due to demographics, and it helped reassure them that 2020 was merely a bump on the road to “blue Texas” and they could write off Florida or their lost voters in the Midwest.

That is what must make the clobbering O’Rourke and Abrams suffered last night more galling. They represented the future of both states and the Democratic Party in 2018, and their losses were chalked up to demographic shifts not yet being significant enough to tip the scales. The lopsided defeats of both O’Rourke and Abrams last night suggested different narrative. Their futures were never to be. And a Democratic Party which bet its future on winning the 2018 elections the next time they come around is going to have to face the reality that 2018 is in the past and will never return. It will not be helpful to winning the 2024, 2026, or 2028 elections.

In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s gubernatorial bid ended only slightly better than that of Abbott’s hapless opponent in 2018, the Lesbian Sheriff of Dallas County, Lupe Valdez. Valdez had lost by a margin of 56%-43%, whereas O’Rourke, who won 48.4% of the vote against Senator Cruz back in 2018, looks likely to receive just under 44% this time around. His defeat is due in large part to a poor performance with Texas Hispanics. While they still voted for Democrats, they did so by an underwhelming margin of 58%-40% according to exit polls. Meanwhile, Asian Americans, one of the fastest growing demographics in Texas, and one which had powered Democratic gains in 2018, split almost evenly between the parties, evidently alienated by Democratic indifference to crime and immigration.

In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, the standard bearer of Democratic hopes that they could organize their way to victory by counting voters on the basis of race and background, also went backwards. Having lost to Brian Kemp by less than 2% in 2018, she appears to have lost by at least 8% this time. Humiliatingly for a candidate who based her brand on appeals to racial identity, Kemp did well with rural African American voters. He became the first Republican since Richard Nixon to win Calhoun County, which is 64% African American.

Those defeats were real. Democratic “moral victories” in keeping races in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin closer than perhaps they were expected to be still resulted in them failing to win those races.

Nor was there a clear pattern of defeats for Trump-backed candidates or wins for others. Donald Trump’s endorsed candidates won those close races in North Carolina and Ohio, and may well win in Nevada. By contrast, candidates who repudiated the former President lost races they were expected to win in Rhode Island’s 2nd district, and the GOP Senate candidate who rebuked him lost by double-digits in Colorado.

In a sense, 2022 was 2018 in reverse. It was a bad night for the incumbent party, but one where the nature of partisanship limited the room for maneuver. Early expectations should not define the evening.

Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman. 

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