RED WAVE SMASHED IN MIDTERMS

The chad mentally disabled red-wave ignorer

Every US President gets a hammering in the Mid-term Elections, and, with all the problems Joe Biden has had with inflation, etc., the Dems were expected to get wiped out in the House and Senate.

But, with a lot of the results already in, that is clearly no longer the case. Right now, the Senate is tied at 48 each, while the House, at best, looks like a GOP gain with a razor thin majority.

The big wins and wide margins predicted and expected for the Republicans simply did not happen. "The Red Wave" has become a pink ripple.

An important take away from all this is that, while the Dems are not particularly popular, neither are the Republicans. Also, many of the candidates personally picked by Trump, while mobilising parts of the GOP base, did poorly with the wider electorate.

The biggest upset was John Fetterman's Senate win in Pennsylvania, where he crushed the Trump-backed candidate Mehmet Oz.

The fall out of this is to strengthen the case in the GOP to move away from Trump, who will be 78 at the next Presidential election in 2024, and to look instead for a Presidential candidate who is less polarising with voters. But so strong is Trump's grip on the GOP, this may not even be possible.

With inflation soaring, a cost-of-living crisis, rising crime, and an unsettled geopolitical picture, this should have been a bumper year for Republicans. Instead, some of the MAGA and Groyper narratives, feeding into the GOP, like anti-abortion absolutism, "election denial," and Christian Nationalism, seem to have spooked floating voters and/or mobilised Dems.

As Colin Liddell wrote in August in these pages:

At best, what was shaping up to be a massive GOP landslide in the November Mid-terms could turn out to be a muted marginal victory; at worst, the Dems might even make gains. Corbynism (i.e. jerking off your hard core base while ignoring the floaters) doesn't work from the Left. There is no reason why it should work any better from the Right.