Plain English with Derek Thompson - Instant Reaction Pod: Midterm Election Winners, Losers, Surprises, and Takeaways

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

The polls were right; the vibes were wrong. Democrats seem to have blocked the Republican wave by riding “Dobbs and democracy.” Trump lost, and extremism lost. DeSantis won, and Florida is a red state now. Also: Why is America so terrible at counting votes? Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An Instagram post gets an unexpected boost. A TikTok catches in the algorithm. Sometimes that's all it takes to launch someone into internet fame. But then what? This blew up is a new podcast documentary that reveals how social media stardom is made. It's a different kind of fame. That's not always as glamorous as it looks. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Alyssa Boresnak.

You can listen to This Blue Up on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's emergency pod is about the midterm election. No guest today, just me and the mic and my thoughts. And as more results come in, I expect we'll have more guests on this show to chew over all the implications. But for now, the situation is this. Pundits broadly expected Democrats to have a terrible night on Tuesday, to lose the House in a landslide, to lose the Senate, to build an on-ramp for Donald Trump to announce his intentions to run for president next week. But for now, for now, it appears that Republicans very likely won the House, but barely.

That's important. It guarantees divided the government for the next two years. But in the Senate, Democrats defied the vibes and expectations, and they appear very close to maintaining their control of that chamber. They flipped a seat in Pennsylvania. That was John Federman defeating Dr. Oz. They are leading in Arizona, and that means they only need one of Georgia. or Nevada to hold the Senate. Both states, Georgia and Nevada,

are going to a photo finish right now. The New York Times projects both to be slightly leaning toward Democrats. If Democrats win both, they have 51 seats in the Senate. That means they will have added seats in a midterm, very rare situation. By the way, if Democrats lose Nevada, there's a possibility that the second consecutive election will end with a December runoff in Georgia,

featuring the Democrat Raphael Warnock for control of the Senate. Deja vu all over again. So what does it all mean? We're going to do five takeaways. Five takeaways from the macro to the micro. Takeway number one, count the damn votes.

It is astonishing to me that we do not know who Americans voted for last night because states refuse to pass laws that allow for the timely processing of ballots. Like, can we count? votes like a normal developed country, the U.S. has a GDP of $21 trillion. Democracy is a 2,000-year-old technology. How do we not know who voted last night in half the country? We still don't have 25% of the vote from Nevada. We still don't have 30% of the count

from Arizona. I'm saying this, by the way, at 912 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. We don't have 70% of the vote from several races in California. This is nothing against the men and women. staffing those voting locations. This is about systems and laws. Florida, which got embarrassed in 2000, totally pants, changed its laws, and now they count votes like a proper civilization. More than 95% of votes have been counted in Florida. Please, America, learn from Florida, feel shame and act on it, count votes like a real civilization, goodness gracious. Number two, the polls were right and the vibes were wrong. So in the last week, many pundits, including myself, became increasingly convinced the Democrats

were facing a red wave, a total blowout, getting crushed in the House, getting crushed in the Senate. Conservative pundits were sure of it, liberal pundits for dreading it. Meanwhile, the 538 weighted average of polls had this race at 50-50. Nobody believed it, but the 538 weighted average of polls had this race at 50-50. And right now, the most likely outcome is probably 50-50, 50-Republican senators and 50 Democratic senators, which, by the way, means a Democratic Senate because the vice president can cast a decisive 50-first vote in the event of a tie. So this is confusing people because I think they are overfitting to 2016. Remember, the polls whiffed in 2016, and then they whiffed again, even more in 2020,

and both of those whiffs overstated the Democratic vote share. In other words, Trump overperformed his polls in both elections. But coming off of that, I think a lot of people assume that this is the nature of polls. Polls are always going to be wrong for Republicans. But actually, this is now the second consecutive midterm election where the polls were, if anything, slightly wrong in the opposite direction. They understated Democrats' strength. So what does this mean going forward? Number one, maybe, just like downshift vibes, the polling industry is not utterly destroyed. It is not existentially screwed. It makes sense to look at the data to average.

It also means, as Nate Silver likes to say, that the direction of polling errors is pretty random. It's pretty hard to predict because pollsters are reacting. to pass elections, right? It's really embarrassing to overstate the Republican vote share by five points in every single election. It makes you look like an idiot. And as a result, pollsters change, and the direction of the error keeps flipping between Democrats and Republicans. I think that's an important thing to carry forward. This also means, by the way, that the wave of last minute right-leaning pollsters who came in at the end were way too optimistic about Republican chances.

And we're going to talk about what that means in a little bit more detail in a few minutes. Takeaway number three, Florida is basically Alabama light now, right? So, okay, I just said the polls were surprisingly accurate. And if anything, they understated Democrat strength across the country. That's basically true if you ignore Florida. If you only look at Florida, if you only looked at Florida, if you went to sleep last night At 8.45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Holy shit. Republicans looked like a juggernaut.

Governor Ron DeSantis was supposed to win this state by about 10 to 13 points, according to the polls. He's going to win by 20. And that's not just because DeSantis is a potent and talented politician. It's because Florida really is a red state right now, a deep red state. Here's a stat that is incredible and was one of the first things that I saw last night. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won. one Miami-Dade County by 30 points. On Tuesday,

Senator Marco Rubio and Governor DeSantis, both won Miami-Dade by 10 points. That's a, in six years, from a 30-point Democratic advantage to a 10-point Republican advantage, a 40-point swing in a major metro. That is basically unheard of throughout the country. Florida is cooked for Democrats,

totally cooked. The Cuban-American population and the Hispanic population of Southern Florida, has absolutely sprinted away from the Democratic Party in the last six years. And I should probably, at some point, try to figure out why this happened so fast. I think my favorite take, and this is from a private chat, so I won't say which journalist friend said it, but a journalist friend said it, and it's good enough to steal.

My favorite take is that an underrated aspect of Bernie Sanders' legacy is that bringing back the word socialism had an... interesting tradeoff. It energized young Americans, but at the cost of absolutely destroying democratic approval among Hispanics that left Cuba and Venezuela and other socialist countries, many of whom now live in Southern Florida. So that's a take, I think, that is worth chewing on, if not quite accepting, fully. But there is something here that demands an explanation. Obama won Florida 10 years ago. In 2012, Obama won Florida, and today the state looks like a double-digit Republican state. That's astonishing. And frankly, it was confusing last

night, too. Like, Florida votes were counted very quickly. Hats off to you, Florida. And that means we learned about the GOP blowout in Florida before we learned about anything else. So, like, my first text of the night were all to friends being like, holy crap, Miami-Dade is a bloodbath. Democrats are screwed. But it turned out that Florida's results were completely uncorrelated with the rest of the night. In the biggest picture, America remains. a 50-50 country, and Florida has basically become the tropical tale of Alabama. Both things are true. Okay, we're getting to the most important stuff right now. Big takeaway number four is the Trump tax. This is where things get pretty juicy. I think Tuesday night dramatically increase the

odds of a real showdown in the Republican primary. So let's start by imagining the scenario that's best for Donald Trump and his reelection ambitions, right? The scenario from last night that would have been best for Trump. I think it goes like this. Trump's handpicked candidates win up and down the country. Herschel Walker romps in Georgia. Dr. Oz and Maastriano win the Senate and governor race in Pennsylvania. Carrie Lake and Blake Masters, shadow the Democrats in Arizona. You got MAGA candidates winning their Secretary of State campaigns. There is no extremism penalty to be paid anywhere. It's a total red wave, and Trump is like this King Canute or Moses figure, right, the commander of the wave, the ocean tide mover wizard dude. Meanwhile, in this ideal scenario, still from last night,

we're still in the parallel universe, his chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, would only eke out a win in Florida, right? The takeaway would have been that Trump is this kingmaker supreme, and DeSantis is just this slightly more boring version of Trump, who's more of like a regional fixture than a national figure, right? Now open your eyes. Everything happened the opposite way everywhere. Everywhere. DeSantis clobbered in Florida.

The Trump accolades failed. The red wave puddled out. And as a result, most of the conservative pundits that I follow have now seized on the fact that team DeSantis outperformed Team Trump in this election by an astonishing margin. and that therefore it might be sort of cowardly and bizarre for DeSantis to let Trump bully him out of the primary at this stage. So I've made this point before. I'll make it again.

Trump is a loser from a majoritarian perspective. That's not an epithet. It's a description of reality. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. Then his party lost the midterms. Then he lost the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020. And then last night he dragged the party. down in 2022.

So across the board and across the country, Republicans who kept him at arm's length outperformed the candidates who embraced the MAGA label in competitive races. So this is a complicated dynamic for Republicans because Trump enjoys the support of about 35% of the electorate, maybe, you know, 65, 70% of hardcore Republicans. And that means his endorsement is gold in the primaries, but it's an anchor in the general election. And if you're a Republican strategist or, you know, if you're somewhat at the RNC, if you're a Republican donor, right, a multimillionaire figuring out where to allocate your money, how much more evidence do you need to see reality for what it is? This guy is a loser. He's a detriment

to your party. You raise a billion dollars for Trump and you might as well be donating to a GoFundMe account for his legal troubles. You are not helping Republicans' nation. wide. So I'm not making a prediction. Here, history is long and memories are short. And I don't know what's going to happen in 2024. But sweet, Jesus, how much more evidence to Republicans need to understand that they're going to keep paying a Trump tax every single election day that this guy puts himself on the ballot. All right. Now, that finally sets up, takeaway number five, maybe the most important takeaway we got. Dobbs and democracy.

Here's the big picture analysis in the midterm elections to me. The one biggest takeaway. Inflation is over 8%, and Joe Biden is among the least popular presidents at this point in his term since 1950, and midterm elections are typically where any incumbent majority goes to die.

And despite all of that, Democrats might keep the Senate. And I think a lot of this comes down to candidate quality. Like you look at a place like Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp won going away while the GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker is in a close fight and very well might lose. But it also comes down to two other factors, Dobbs and democracy. Over the summer, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And I think we're going to learn that that decision motivated a ton of turnout among Democrats in a year. where typically it's the party out of power

that has the most mojo. What also happened for the last two years is that Republicans have astonishingly rallied around an ex-president who invited and cheered the invasion of the capital, who called for overturning an election, who fought for candidates across the country, who talked about democracy

as if it were something expendable. You had governor candidates, like Mostriano in Pennsylvania, who continue to insist that the 2020 election was stolen and even introduced a bill that would have allowed him as governor to exert total control over the election process. This is total, kooky, weirdo monarchy stuff. And Mastriano got wrecked.

He got destroyed. So I know a lot of liberals who find Republican rhetoric on democracy to be purely terrifying. I do not find it terrifying yet. I find it abominable. I find it grotesque. But I think last night we learned

that a lot of Americans agree. Enough Americans agree. And the fact that enough Americans agree that this sort of rhetoric is disgusting and these sort of policies are anti-democratic and un-American, I think that should give us a little bit of hope that America isn't the irreparably broken hellscape that some people imagine

it to be. So in conclusion, number one, Trump lost, extremism lost. Number two, Desantis, one, Florida is a red state. Number three, moderates won. The extremists by and large did not win their elections last night. Number four, the institutional pollsters, one. And number five, Democrats seem to have narrowly lost the House and narrowly held the Senate. We don't know for sure yet. And that's because America sucks at counting votes. And that's the midterms.