With voter turnout nationally among the highest in the last 50 years, Democratic Party candidates defied widespread expectations in November’s US mid-term elections, writes George Binette.

The Democrats have retained their wafer-thin – and far from dependable – majority in the 100-member Senate. Depending on the outcome of a run-off on 6th December in Georgia between first-term Democrat Raphael Warnock and the scandal-plagued former gridiron football star Herschel Walker, endorsed by Donald Trump, the Democrats may even have achieved a net gain. Meanwhile, with 20 results still undeclared, Republicans have likely eked out a narrow victory in contests for 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Remarkably, though, six days after the polls closed even that remained uncertain. In short, the Republican “tsunami” foreseen by many media pundits simply didn’t materialise.

At the same time the overall national picture masked a further sharpening of a long-standing regional polarisation. On the one hand, the gains Republican officials anticipated in parts of New England did not emerge, while in the most populous southern states – Florida and Texas – hard-right Republicans Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott secured clear-cut victories. With an advantage of 19 percentage points in Florida (over a former Republican), DeSantis, who is waging a self-declared ‘war on woke’, cemented his position as the leading potential challenger to a Donald Trump candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Meanwhile, the 45^th president, until recently the toast of Fox News hosts, has become the target of thinly veiled attacks from the likes of his one-time cheerleader Laura Ingraham. The Murdoch-controlled tabloid New York Post derided its former favourite as “Trumpty Dumpty.”

Despite the frustration for Republicans across much of the country, and especially in midwestern regions ravaged by the decline in manufacturing jobs, its candidates scored unexpected victories in states such as California and New York, widely regarded as Democratic strongholds. While New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, who assumed office after the resignation of her disgraced predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, won over a Trump-backed opponent, the margin of victory was squeezed while a prominent Democratic member of Congress, Sean Moloney, lost a contest fought on new boundaries, but originally assumed to be safe. In total, the Democrats lost four seats in the nation’s second most populous state despite a powerful, well-funded party machine that leans heavily to the Democrats’ centre-right.

Toxic Trump

An explanation promoted by some leading Republican figures in the wake of the disappointing results emphasises the toxicity of Donald Trump’s embrace. With the notable exceptions of JD Vance, who captured a vacated seat in the US Senate from Ohio, and ‘election denier’ Ron Johnson, narrowly re-elected in Wisconsin, Trump’s endorsement, if not the kiss of death, seemed of little use to many of those whom he’d blessed as suitable acolytes.

Among the high-profile, Trump-backed failures were local newsreader turned far-right firebrand Kari Lake in the race for Arizona governor and the celebrity physician Mehmet Oz, who lost a hard-fought contest in Pennsylvania to the state’s lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, who enjoyed strong union support. Fetterman rallied after a serious stroke in May to demonstrate that Democrats could win with a left populist stance on ‘bread and butter’ issues. Fetterman took to the stage clad in jeans and a hoodie at what proved his victory rally.

In sharp sartorial contrast, Florida’s DeSantis celebrated his enormous win in the state’s contest for governor wearing a bespoke suit, followed on stage by his wife, whose dress might have passed muster on the Oscars red carpet. For all his Braverman-like rhetoric and reactionary stunts as the scourge of ‘woke’ and north-eastern liberals, DeSantis tiptoed around the issue of abortion rights. His campaign didn’t promote any change to the state’s current, comparatively liberal law after the Supreme Court’s notorious decision to reverse the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade legalising abortion nationwide. Ironically, Trump’s judicial appointments, who ensured a long-sought victory for the evangelical right, may well have provided the Democrats with a vital issue to seize upon.

Abortion Rights: A Change in Public Mood

An August referendum result in usually solid Republican Kansas following the Supreme Court ruling gave the clearest indication that the Court’s majority didn’t reflect public opinion regarding women’s reproductive rights. Other questions on state ballots on 8th November in Vermont, Michigan and California showed substantial support for enshrining legal access to abortion. More surprising was the result of a referendum in conservative Kentucky, home state of Republican right-wingers Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, where a majority rejected further restrictions on abortion, a dramatic shift from less than a decade ago.

Many Democratic candidates for Congressional seats and state legislatures homed in on the issue both in advertising and stump appearances. Both opinion polls and several results in swing states suggested that the Democrats’ strong emphasis on defence of abortion rights paid dividends with evidence of white women including previous Trump voters, shunning Republican candidates. While it’s extremely unlikely that the Democrats will be in a position to enact progressive federal legislation to counteract the Supreme Court decision, would-be Republican challengers to Trump, including DeSantis, now face a conundrum.

Do they push back against a crucial element of the party’s base on the evangelical right, or do they risk the long-term loss of substantial numbers of women voters, especially from younger and middle-aged cohorts? The issue’s salience may, of course, have declined by 2024, but it’s most certainly not going away. In addition, the new contingent of House Republicans is likely to struggle to contain its own internal tensions between Trump sceptics, keen on ditching claims about stolen elections, Trumpian true believers and a substantial group still fearful of incurring their weakened leader’s wrath.

A Diluted New Deal?

The current occupant of the White House has never been associated with the Democrats’ more progressive wing, yet Biden’s Administration has seen a tentative, but real, break with both the Clinton and Obama years in terms of public spending and state intervention in the economy. Remarkably few candidates standing as Democrats promoted recent measures that had contributed to significant reductions in child poverty and largescale – some £845 billion – investment in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

In fact, some of Biden’s erstwhile allies effectively undermined attempts to deliver a positive economic message. Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and former Harvard University president, Larry Summers, pinned much of the blame on Biden’s Covid relief package for the surge in inflation, so lending credence to a Republican narrative, which hammered away at the Biden White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress as culpable for the US version of the cost-of-living crisis.

The Republicans’ own lack of a coherent alternative programme for the economy helps explain their failure to capitalise on Biden’s historically low approval ratings, which are currently a bit worse than Trump’s at a comparable stage of his presidency. But there is also a persuasive case that Trumpian populists have been unmasked as fraudsters, while the Democrats have done just enough to win back votes among more traditional blue-collar workers at the same time as motivating more ‘Gen Z’ voters to cast their ballots with a partial cancellation of student loan repayments, albeit a measure now facing judicial obstruction.

Foreign policy was never really on the ballot this autumn, partly because there remains a very substantial cross-party consensus in terms of policy towards the war in Ukraine, with very few Republicans raising serious objections to US backing for the resistance to the Russian invasion. There are also significant voices in the Administration, possibly including Biden himself, who are reluctant to write an indefinite blank cheque to Kyiv and are willing to push President Zelensky towards a bargaining table. Meanwhile, both parties’ leading figures have sharply focused on doing battle with Beijing as the principal threat to US economic and geopolitical dominance even if the mood music surrounding the meeting between Biden and President Xi in Indonesia on 13th November was surprisingly calm.

Biden: A Candidate in ’24?

For now, at least, the overall results from the mid-terms have strengthened Joe Biden’s position within his own party even if a Republic majority in the House will probably block any major legislative initiatives. After all, the Democrats’ performance is the best in a mid-term year since 2002 when Republicans rode on the wave of George W Bush’s post-9/11 popularity.

Though always gaffe-prone and now showing signs of cognitive decline, the soon to be 80-year-old president has dropped big hints that he intends to stand again in 2024. And if he did the prospects of a significant challenge currently appear slim. Of course, the picture could change swiftly and not only because of questions over Biden’s health. While the inflation rate has started to fall, it remains high by recent standards and the prospect of a recession, exacerbated by the Federal Reserve’s ratcheting up of interest rates, looms large.

But if the downturn proves brief and relatively mild, then a candidacy from Biden’s left seems improbable. The already 81-year-old Bernie Sanders appears far more robust than the 46^th President, but a third national campaign over the next two years looks most unlikely.

There are few figures on the party’s progressive wing, other than Senator Elizabeth Warren, with the name recognition and fundraising capacity to mount a challenge even if so inclined. The so-called squad of more left-wing Democrats in Congress has again increased its modest ranks from eight to twelve, but none, including the media-savvy Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, are likely to command adequate support. Similarly, a challenge from within the current Administration isn’t on the cards for now, though the names of Vice-President Kamala Harris and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who both stood unsuccessfully in 2020, will doubtless feature in media speculation along with those of some Democratic governors.

There are undoubtedly elements on the right of the party, not least in senior positions on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who might want to see the back of Sanders or even Warren, but they can’t really dissociate themselves either from Biden or his Administration’s record to date. They certainly lack an obvious candidate of their own to stand for the party’s presidential nomination.   

There is already talk of new parties with ‘never Trumpers’ who have broken from Republican ranks promoting a formation dubbed ‘Forward’. The ardent Trump backer Missouri Senator Josh Hawley spoke of the mid-terms as “the funeral for the Republican party as we know it.” Trump himself has already announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2024.

On the left of the spectrum some disillusioned Sanders supporters have formed a Movement for People’s Party and thus far gained access to ballot slots in three states in two years. But whatever the realities of the USA’s decline as a hegemonic imperial power, the existential climate crisis and the intensity of ‘culture wars’, the reality of first-past-the-post, which still prevails in all but two states, and the astronomical cost of fighting elections beyond small local districts make the prospects for any electoral alternative – left, centre or indeed further right – bleak.

The late Mike Davis was surely correct when he wrote in 1980 of “the barren marriage of American labour and the Democratic Party”, but after four decades of neoliberalism and union-bashing, many union activists, not to mention bureaucrats, are simply relieved to have a National Labor Relations Board that appears friendly to union organising. In short, the uneasy relationship stumbles along, and divorce doesn’t seem imminent, and there may just be breathing space for a genuine resurgence of organised labour.        

George Binette is a Massachusetts native. He is currently the Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer and writes in a personal capacity.

Image: U.S Congress. Author: Superinformative, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.