The midterms (and Elon Musk)
Three takeaways: Republicans in disarray, rising Dem stars, and more
First, welcome to all of my new readers, of which there are about 1,000! I’m Andy Gawthorpe and I’m a historian and political commentator who uses this newsletter to push out some personal thoughts on American politics and foreign policy. A lot of you came here because you read a thread I wrote on Twitter about Elon Musk, and I say more about that below. But this post is also about last night’s surprising midterms.
Midterms
And how about that? Going into last night’s election we already expected a better result for Democrats than the economic fundamentals would suggest, and in reality it seems like things turned out even better than that. Democrats are now heavily favored to keep the Senate after John Fetterman’s win in the Pennsylvania Senate race, and possible House scenarios range from continued Democratic control to a relatively small GOP majority of c. 10 seats.
It’s going to be a while until we know the final results because so much now hinges on what happens in western states which are slower to count their ballots. There are four or five competitive races in California which we might not know the results of for days. Similarly, many people want to draw conclusions about which issues mattered to voters from the early exit poll, but this data isn’t really too good until more results are in and it has undergone statistical weighting to match actual turnout.
So with those caveats stated up front, I want to offer a few takeaways from what we know already:
1 ) Republicans in disarray
This result is coming as a seismic shock to the right and particularly the MAGA movement. They will now be plunged into their characteristic chaos. This is going to play out in two ways: in the 2024 presidential race and in Congress.
In the few days before the election, Trump, expecting victory, had started to position himself for a 2024 run. He dropped a hint he is going to announce his candidacy on Nov 15th, and sent a giant warning to Ron DeSantis not to even think about trying to challenge him. But with so many Trumpy candidates going down to defeat all over the country, there is once again cause for Republicans to question whether his leadership is worth the cost. Granted, they’ve had plenty of opportunities to do this before and failed to take them. But the chance of serious intra-party strife over the next presidential nomination is now higher.
Meanwhile, serious intra-party strife is absolutely guaranteed to come to the House. Even if the GOP wins a majority, it will be very small and constantly held hostage by extremist members. Whoever becomes Speaker - and that’s no longer guaranteed to be Kevin McCarthy - will find it impossible to impart any sort of order. The next Speaker might even be Steve Scalise, who once gave a speech at a white nationalist convention and won’t even have that much interest in controlling the circus. The spectacle is not likely to be edifying for the party heading into 2024.
On the other hand, if the Republicans do get a narrow majority, then that still means endless partisan “investigations” of the Biden administration, possible impeachments, and who knows what else. A narrow GOP majority in hock to its most extremist elements actually creates some dangers for the years ahead, something I’ll address in a future post when the final result is clearer.
2 ) Rising Democratic stars
There’s long been a lament in Democratic circles that the party isn’t producing enough young leaders. Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are all in their seventies or even eighties, and it’s not always clearly who the rising stars are who will eventually take their place.
But this election has produced at least two. In Pennsylvania’s governor race, Josh Shapiro barnstormed his way to victory with a campaigning style and quality that has rightly been compared to Obama’s. His opponent Doug Mastriano might be an extremist who once proposed treating abortion as murder, but Shapiro’s margin of victory is still highly impressive in a swing state like Pennsylvania. And it’s not like defeating extremists is some sort of niche skill in the modern day Democratic Party - it’s actually the whole deal!
Another rising leader who has emerged from these midterms is Wes Moore. Moore has become the first African-American governor of Maryland and only the third elected African-American governor in the nation. His brand of “progressive patriotism” hits the GOP where it hurts by highlighting how much the party has changed. Here’s how he puts it:
“I think this bastardisation of the idea of patriotism will not be tolerated … I am running against someone who is an insurrectionist. I won’t be lectured by him, nor anyone else in this wing of the Republican party who wants to define patriotism as people who are willing to fight for the overturning of the government.
“That’s not patriotism. My definition of patriotism was serving as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and leading paratroopers in combat.”
Positioned as they are near major north-eastern media centers, both Shapiro and Moore have a great platform for entering the national conversation - and for going far in Democratic Party politics.
3 ) The state of democracy
Going into Tuesday’s election, there was a lot of fear about what the results might mean for the administration of the 2024 election - something I wrote about for The Guardian on election day. Some key governor and secretary of state positions remain to be called, but there was good news as well. Tim Michels, who said that Republicans would “never lose another election” in Wisconsin if he became governor, has lost. And Shapiro’s victory keeps Doug Mastriano away from Pennsylvania’s elections.
If this trend continues in Arizona and Nevada - not a certainty - then I expect many on the right are going to start saying that fears about threats to democracy were overblown and ridiculous. But this would be completely absurd. It’s like saying that whoever persuaded you to stop smoking was ridiculous because you didn’t go on to get lung cancer. It was absolutely right to point out the threat that these candidates posed, and people doing so is one of the reasons that they lost.
On the other hand, let’s not get too jubilant about this yet. In a close presidential election, even one nefarious governor or secstate in one swing state could be catastrophic. And while so far some MAGA candidates seem to be conceding and not calling into question the integrity of yesterday’s vote, that is not guaranteed to continue. There is a high likelihood that the narrative that the midterms were stolen will intensify in the coming days. Rather than face up to the fact that his candidates lost and what that means for his future ownership of the GOP, Trump is likely to go all-in on accusations of fraud. This could lead in all sorts of nasty directions - violence, extended court cases, and further undermining of public trust in elections.
Finally… About that Elon Musk thread
On my lunchbreak last Friday I tapped out a thread on Twitter giving some of my thoughts on Elon Musk’s possible motivations in buying and overhauling Twitter. I certainly didn’t expect it to go on to be viewed nearly five million times and to bring over a thousand new people to this newsletter - but I’m glad you’re here!
If I’d known the thread was going to go so viral, I might have toned down the certainty a bit. The truth is that no-one knows exactly what is happening in Musk’s head. But I do know that it’s bizarre and perverse not to look at the obvious connections which exist between Twitter and Musk’s other political and commercial interests, which is all my thread was intended to do.
As well as leading the guy behind the Pizzagate conspiracy theory to set his nearly two million followers on me, making my Twitter account unusable for a day or so, the thread also got some pushback from people whose views I respect. I wanted to just briefly touch on some of that here because I think it helps clarify what exactly the stakes of Musk owning Twitter are and what we need to look out for.
The first critique, voiced here by George Conway, is basically that Musk is just a moron and there he has no plan.
I agree with this insofar as, yes, Musk does seem to be quite incompetent. But both of these things can be true at the same time! He can be animated by a certain set of goal - an attempt to ingratiate himself with the American right, and to make himself more influential with foreign governments - and also be incompetent at reaching them. “Having bad goals + being incompetent” is basically a description of Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is still very dangerous.
Some people point out that Musk tried to back out of the deal to buy Twitter, and so he can’t have been that enthusiastic about it. His attempt to back out seems to have had a lot to do with changing market conditions this year, when interest rates went through the roof and so the debt burden he had to take on as part of the acquisition became unsustainable. But that doesn’t really get to the question of why he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place. Saying that it’s just “ego” or “megalomania”, as some people did, is also highly reductive. Why is Twitter important for his ego or his sense of power? Without drawing connections like I did, we’ll never know.
A second critique was that it makes no sense for Musk to acquire Twitter to ingratiate himself with foreign governments, because foreign governments don’t care. I find this argument really strange, especially when applied to China. Beijing constantly uses its market power to try to shape Western discourse and punish companies that question its hard line on Hong Kong or Taiwan. In the most famous incident, the Chinese authorities banned 600m+ Chinese basketball fans (basketball is really popular in China) from watching the NBA because Houston Rockets owner Daryl Morey supported protests in Hong Kong. And what was Morey’s medium of communication? A tweet!
It’s also not just about Western discourse, but about Twitter’s use by and within China. Chinese dissidents sometimes use Twitter to communicate, and they’ve faced heavy prison sentences for doing so. Many Chinese government agencies and state media outlets use Twitter to promote their point of view, and Beijing’s spooks use Twitter to promulgate disinformation and run influence operations. It’s just naive to think that when Musk is making decisions about handling all of this, including whether or not to offer cooperation with Beijing, he can be completely unmindful of his massive business interests in China (which is Tesla’s second-largest market) and need for a good relationship with the Chinese government.
The third critique I got was about “horseshoe theory” - the idea that political extremes like the far right and the far left share a lot of similarities. Basically I was accused of being ridiculous for suggesting that Musk could be seeking to court both Beijing and the American right, because Beijing and the American right hate each other.
Again, this strikes me as something that sounds good on Twitter, but falls apart if you think about it for a second. It is true that Musk faces a very difficult task: he has to keep and expand his substantial business interests in China at a time when there is an increasing consensus in the U.S., especially on the right, that China is evil and the West shouldn’t do business with it. Trying to use Twitter as part of a strategy to overcome that problem involves no contradictions. Beijing doesn’t care about Musk’s war on the blue checks - if anything, they might vaguely approve. And whatever decisions Musk takes towards China, there’s no guarantee we’ll even know about them - Twitter is now a privately-held company and it’s not like China is going to blab.
History is actually full of examples of people overcoming political paradoxes of this sort - just look at how Trump has managed to use racism to drive up his support among lesser-educated whites while at the same time improving his support among non-white voters. The real world is complicated, and the friend of my enemy is not always my enemy
That’s all, folks
That’s it for this week. If you enjoy the newsletter then please forward it to a friend or leave a comment below. See you next time!