The Daily - The Republican Wave That Wasn’t

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

In the early hours of Wednesday, control of both the House and Senate remained uncertain.Going into the midterms, some analysts expected a repudiation of the Democrats and a surge of Republican victories. But this “red wave” did not materialize. Today, we try to make sense of the surprising results. Guest: Astead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: As the results continue to come in, follow the latest updates here. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

This is Sydney Harper, Daily Producer here. This is Rob Zipko. I'm Diana Nguyen. Jessica Chung. Nina Feldman. I'm in Virginia, outside D.C. In Houston, Texas. Here in Philadelphia.

I am in Staten Island today. I am here in the suburbs of Chicago. It's Election Day 2022. Of course, there's a leaf blower blowing in the background. And what is bringing you out today? I was Republican, okay? That's why I'm here. Crime is up. My city is being destroyed. Look, Roe v. Wade was around for 50 years,

and they did away with that. That's insane, okay? That's just wrong. The biggest one is the economy. Go to the grocery store. You can't buy meat unless it's on sale. As a young person, like, if I want to see change, like, I gotta vote for more young people.

I gotta get all these old people out, so I'm hoping I'm voting now. I'm really want to see change, like, I got to vote for more young people. I got to get all these old people out. So I'm hoping I'm voting now. I'm really hoping to see a change by the time I'm 30. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Does this election feel different than the ones that you've voted in? I'm a little bit more desperate this time, yeah. Like, I have, like, there's a little bit more of a nervous desperation. Like, I really do feel like if things don't change

soon, you know? What do you feel like, generally speaking, is at stake today? Our children's lives. Okay. I mean, how do you put that into words? I think our country is at stake. I really, really do. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, control of both the House and Senate remained uncertain as a wave of expected Republican victories in the midterm elections did not materialize. And which party are you here to support today? I'm here to support the Republican Party.

Oh, the Republicans. The Democratic. Yes, the Democratic Party. We're probably going to split a ballot. Oh, split a ballot. Oh, you're one of those rare creatures that do. Today, I turn to my colleague, Astead Herndon, to make sense of the surprising results. How do you feel about the prospect of a Republican victory tonight?

Loving it. It'll be wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Terrible. Terrible. Scared. Frightened. Terrible. I don't believe that. I don't believe. I don't claim that. I don't know. It might be an extra Xanax day maybe. Right? Extra. I mean, I haven't had one yet, but I will. It's Wednesday, November 9th. Hello. How are you? You're going to sit there.

Okay. Do I have coffee? I made you a cup of utterly mediocre coffee. It's kind of like a puke color, but I appreciate it. it's the color it's the color of caffeine at two in the morning all right so instead yes good morning good morning to you too michael i mean it is very much the morning it is 2 a. And this was not, I think it's fair to say, the election was all we were expecting. No, I think that's really fair to say. And I think that it's an election where coming into it, there was a sense that we would have a national story. And I think it became very clear that if there is a national story, it's not the one we expected.

Well, let's just rewind the clock for a moment and explain what these expectations were. Heading into this midterm election, our understanding was that some form of political repudiation was coming for Democrats for all kinds of reasons, because midterm elections are almost always a rejection of the party in power. We've talked to you about that on the show because polls told us because of issues like historic levels of inflation, Democrats were in trouble and that swing voters were breaking for Republicans. And so the question seemed to be just how big a repudiation would come for the Democrats.

Yeah. I mean, that was my question heading into this night. It felt like every single objective measure we really had pointed to the idea that there will be some repudiation for Democrats. Would it be something that felt regional or small or was something that's national and overwhelming? Right. I think the first thing we saw to that point tonight was really the results we saw in Florida.

You had Governor Ron DeSantis, obviously emerging figure in the Republican Party, really clean up in Florida. Marco Rubio marches on the victory. The Latino vote population continues to move toward Republicans. I think that all of those things kind of built together would really push people to say, OK, this is the first kind of signs that that expected wave of repudiation on the Republican side might be coming. wave of repudiation on the Republican side might be coming. But then kind of at the same point of the evening, you really saw results that forced a gut check on that extrapolation, on that read people were taking from Florida. And for me, the race that really jumped out was the congressional race in Virginia with Democratic incumbent Abigail Spanberger. This was someone who was an intense target of Republicans. This is someone who was an intense target of Republicans. This

is someone who represented the Democratic claw back in the suburbs that happened in 2018 after Donald Trump was elected. And the thought was in a Republican wave year that this is a candidate who would go down. Right. This is a seat that Republicans can pick up. Right. And it looked for a while like she was about to go down. And it looked for a while like she was, but the Democratic counties in there really turned out to really deliver Spanberger re-election. And you saw that with a couple of those tight seats that we were looking at on the East Coast line.

I think that, to me, was the first signs that this is not the midterm environment where Republicans are having a national repudiation of the Democratic Party. Well, just how much of a not wave is the situation in the House? We should say it is 2.15 in the morning. A lot is still unresolved. Let's say it again. It is 2.15 in the morning.

But exactly where do things stand at this tender hour in the House? 15 in the morning. But exactly where do things stand at this tender hour in the House? So when we came into tonight, the parameters for what would constitute a Republican wave were probably 25 plus seats. At this point, we're looking at a projection, maybe about four or five seats. And it's also important to look at what seats those are. We're really seeing Republicans make pickups in seats that were just easy wins for them, seats that had been redrawn through gerrymandering, things that were pretty much baked into the cost of tonight. And those competitive seats in the races in which it was about, would they turn out their voters or persuade a more swing or moderate voter? We're

not really seeing them have those good results. Now, Republicans are still favored to flip control of the House of Representatives and really get a foot back into power in Washington. That's still really, really important. Which is a big deal, and we won't get to that. Yeah, but the scope of that, the size of that, the mandate of that

is so much smaller than what democrats and republicans expected coming into this evening that it has to be one of the first takeaways for anybody is that the republican strength all across the country probably just outside of florida was way less than the party expected so let's talk about about why Republicans did not do anywhere near as well in the House as lots of people expected them to do and that they themselves expected themselves to do. Because they had a lot of advantages in this election. Not just all the structural stuff,

the gerrymandering, the historical pattern around midterms. They had the economy. They had, according to polling, crime. So why did they do so poorly? I mean, I should say that that's really a question that we'll get better answers to going forward. Right, with just a few more hours of sleep.

With just a few more hours or just like a little more data. But I also think that it comes down to a couple things. I think on the Democratic side, there's a lot of evidence to say that issues that favor Democrats, people who wanted to protect abortion rights, people who wanted to protect the kind of Democratic system or were fearful of what Republicans would do to it. Those things did remain motivating factors and they didn't fade away for issues like inflation or crime and the way that some, I think, projections and punditry kind of a thought that they did over the last month. But I also think that on the Republican side, there is just an independent question of their brand right now and what Donald Trump has really done to it. And I think that the real place to look for that is not necessarily in turnout among, let's say, Trump's base and how they came out for these candidates, but really is on the moderate side. I mean, when you look at what Republicans were hoping to do in the House, that was going to require them taking down people in those suburban districts. They did not meet those targets.

And so that to me says that even among a more moderate candidate who may be keeping a distance from Donald Trump, that kind of stench is still smelly enough that it's turning off some swing voters. Right. And I think that that's going to really fuel some of the questions Republicans have about whether Trumpism is weighing them down.

So behind the Republicans' pretty disappointing midterm here in the House, you're saying, is perhaps an underestimation of Democratic strength on these core issues like abortion and an underestimation of the damage that Donald Trump has done to everyone who campaigns under the Republican banner. Yeah, totally. I think it's a both-and question. Republicans have questions to ask themselves about what Trump has done to them internally and with their own voters. But I also think we can say that Democrats did have a relative strength

that was at least underestimated in the measures we look at going into election. We'll be right back. So I said, how much was this underestimation of Democratic strength and underestimation of Trump's damage to the Republican Party also the case on Election Day in statewide races for U.S. Senate and for governor's races? Yeah, it was a bad night for Republicans on the House level, but on the Senate and governor level, it was a specifically bad night for Trump Republicans. And I think the state that really proves that is Pennsylvania. That's a state that should be a place where Republicans in this environment have a great shot at the Senate and governor level.

This is a close state in presidential elections. And in a midterm year with a president with this low of an approval rating, you would expect Republicans to really be in a commanding position on both those things. That's not what we saw. We saw Democrat John Fetterman, who himself was the target of a lot of Republican negative advertising, who had a stroke, who had a questionable debate performance, who had a lot of questions about his health. Pennsylvania voters rallied around him. In a big way. In a big way.

That was not clear that we were going to have a result on that tonight. Right. So Miminoz lost by a wide margin. By a wide margin. That is a candidate who clearly was very tied to Donald Trump, who had a rally with Donald Trump in the closing stages of his campaign. That's even more so true at the governor level in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Josh Shapiro defeated Doug Mastriano, who was at the Capitol on January 6th. He was, frankly,

fairly shellacked for a Republican in Pennsylvania. And so that's a cohesive rejection of Trumpism on the ballot in Pennsylvania. To round out that picture, though, I think Georgia is another good example because there you have a Trump-backed Senate candidate in Herschel Walker who aligned really closely with the former president but had scandals of their own. But then you have Governor Brian Kemp who was distant from Donald Trump on the 2020 election

but has also just carved out a kind of distinct brand. Right, not a Trump candidate. Not a Trump candidate. He has already secured re-election, and Walker was running further behind him to the point where he's going to have to go to a runoff against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in the Senate. So again, you have the Trump-aligned candidate

performing far worse. And I think for a lot of Republicans, they got all the drawbacks without the benefits, right? Trumpism, you know, it's going to create scandal. It's going to have bad headlines and all of that stuff. But you're supposed to get those Trump voters on election day. They got all of the scandal without that voter really taking them over the top in these races. And that's why you're seeing this kind of landscape across the board, which has challenged Republicans from Georgia to Pennsylvania. Right. This is known as ticket splitting. And what it tells us is that Republicans went into the polls in Georgia, looked at a candidate for governor who was a Republican, not backed by Trump, and said, I want this person.

Many of them said that. And they looked at a candidate for U.S. Senate Republican, Herschel Walker, backed by Trump, and they said, I don't want that candidate. And the decisive difference there is Trump. Yeah, I think like there was some question about whether ticket splitting was still a thing, right? Whether elections have become so national and our politics have become so polarized that all voters cared about was Democrat or Republican.

And I think we have some real clarity tonight that that's not true for everybody. You know, politics is not one team versus another team fully just yet. So just give us the bottom line at this hour on where things stand overall with the Senate. Bottom line, because of the disappointing showing from Republicans, they have lost their best case scenarios to take over the Senate.

And for them, it's really going to come down to a couple races that we don't know yet. Nevada and Georgia. That's really their narrow path to flipping the Senate because they've lost out on other opportunities. So, Asad, I want to circle back to Florida because as you told us earlier, that was where early Republican success evaporated. But it was a place where there was Republican success and therefore it's a bit of an outlier in this election. So what should we make of exactly what happened in Florida on election day?

Yeah, I think that's going to be a really key question going forward because it gives us a kind of dual answer to the Trumpism question. On the one hand, you have candidates who embody Donald Trump's messaging, succeeding in big numbers among Latino populations in Florida. In Miami-Dade County, Republicans won for the first time in years. I mean, this is continuing a trend that we saw in 2020 that has grown for Republicans, where they, I think, are rightly confident that Florida voters are moving in their direction. voters are moving in their direction.

But at the same time, that is really happening under a Republican governor in Ron DeSantis, who has increasingly positioned himself as the Republican alternative to Donald Trump. But I think we should kind of pump the brakes a little

because for a lot of Republican voters, Trump and DeSantis are not at odds just yet. Right. They, in fact, seem like very similar political animals. Yes. DeSantis is a practitioner of Trumpism more than an opponent of it. And I think that might change as 2024 gets closer, as a presidential election starts to crystallize. But that hasn't really happened yet. And so it's going to be interesting to see whether Florida moved in this direction as a response to Donald Trump or they've moved in this direction as a response to Ron DeSantis. And I think that you're certainly going to see

Ron DeSantis make the case that that happened because of him and that he is a he is a kind of better vessel for Trumpism than its original standard bearer. But I think for voters, though, that's still an open thing that has to be untangled. And these results, I don't think, clearly give us an answer to that yet. But you're saying we should bank on the idea that in the coming weeks and months, Ron DeSantis will make the case to Republicans

that what happened in Florida was a result of him, not Trump. And because it didn't happen outside of Florida, they should see him as a plausible alternative to Trump as the future of the Republican Party. And let's be honest, as a potential Republican nominee for president in 2024. A hundred percent. If you are a Republican who does not want Donald Trump

to be the nominee in 2024 and want a conservative alternative, tonight was a great night. Mm-hmm. Because Republicans as a whole did not flame out or bottom out. This version of Republicans. The Trump.

The Trump version of Republicans did not live up to expectations. Mm-hmm. Now, Donald Trump has survived a lot before, so I don't think that's a reason to write him off. But that does mean that he has more political challenges today than he had yesterday. Right. And this result tonight and what it says about Trumpism, it does make me wonder if the Republican Party may be on the cusp of having a conversation with itself. We always talk about it potentially having, which is, you know, is Donald Trump the right leader?

And there's now two well-documented major political setbacks for the party. The first was in 2020 when he lost re-election. The second, these midterms where the Republicans didn't have the success they were supposed to have that might give the party lots of grist to ask itself, is it time for Trump to step aside? Yeah. If Republicans didn't take back the House, I would totally think that is about to explode into the public arena tomorrow. And it will for some candidates, it will for DeRonda Santis, it will for people who want to make that case. But at the same time, if Republicans do take back the House, even with a smaller than expected margin,

you still have a Republican caucus gaining power that is being driven by Trump-backed legislators, right? The energy, the activism, the money on the small donor side of the Republican Party still resides with Donald Trump and his supporters. Wait, can you explain that to me? Because I want to understand this. If Republicans take back the House by a very small margin, how does that make Trump Act forces in the Congress more powerful? Because haven't we just seen that those allied with Trump stood in the way of the Republican Party having a big, big victory tonight? So how is it that they would somehow be more empowered in the event of a narrow Republican majority in the House? Yeah, this is an important question.

And so, like, let me try to think about how to explain it most clearly. Like, I think it comes back to how Congress works, frankly. The party that has the majority in the House has a lot of unilateral power of decision making. And the Speaker makes a lot of those choices based off of managing their own party's caucus. And for Republicans, if you have a small advantage, you have to make sure your party is aligned and you have to make sure you are appeasing all different parts of them to keep that alignment going and if you are kevin mccarthy who leads house republicans the most popular members of your caucus the ones who raise the most money, the ones who are on TV the most, the ones who have the most power to make your life difficult, are all people aligned with Trump, aligned with Donald Trump. I'm thinking of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I'm thinking of

Andy Biggs in Arizona. I'm thinking of Paul Gosar in Arizona. I'm thinking of people who drive the energy and conversation among the Trump base. They still retain that power, even in a small majority that the House caucus would have. It is up to Republican leadership to sideline those voices. And I don't think that's something we should take as a definite. If anything, we have seen a year where Republican leaders have increasingly bought those people into the fold. And so at the same time, you have a country that kind of nationally rejected Trumpism in its most explicit forms. The people most associated with those forms could very well use their new powers of the House should they get them, no matter what the country said. Right. You once predicted this very thing in a conversation about the midterms. Instead, I remember that the extreme edges of the Republican Party could be rejected in these midterms and still end up more empowered than before. Absolutely. So you think there's very little chance that this hypothetical but quite likely narrow Republican majority

and its leaders won't ice out the right wing that hurt the party in these midterms? If tonight leads to a Republican party that is open to bipartisan cooperation, then that will be more than a result. That would be a change of heart from Republicans. Right. That would go against everything they've said over the last couple of years. So I just don't think that's likely. I don't think that it's a given that even with the small majority that the Republican House could have, and even with the wide underperformance of the Republican Party, that that definitely leads to a more moderate Republican Party. I think we should check that assumption because the evidence over the last several election cycles has not been that. Well, Sted, I'm exhausted. You're exhausted.

Let's go to bed. Thank you very much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. The Times reports that while Republicans are still favored to win the House, it could be days or even longer until there's enough information to determine if they've won control of the chamber. Democrats remain favored to keep control of the Senate, but that could hinge on the outcome of a Georgia runoff election, which would be held early next month.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know about Tuesday's elections. Here's what else you need to know about Tuesday's elections. In New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul narrowly defeated her Republican opponent, Congressman Lee Zeldin, in a race that had become unexpectedly close as it focused on crime and public safety. And in Ohio, the author and investor J.D. Vance, a Republican, the author and investor J.D. Vance, a Republican, defeated his Democratic challenger, Representative Tim Ryan,

by seven percentage points, deepening Ohio's reputation as an increasingly red state. Finally, voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont chose to enshrine protections for abortion into their state constitutions, while an abortion referendum in Kentucky was too close to call. The results showed that when asked directly, a broad cross-section of Americans want to protect access to abortion. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Rob Zipko, Nina Feldman, and Diana Nguyen,

with help from Sydney Harper and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Paige Cowett, Lisa Chow, MJ Davis-Lynn, and Lisa Tobin, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.