During the Trump years, a deep cynicism came to grip many political commentators, myself included. This cynicism was best summed up by the phrase, endlessly repeated in the media and on Twitter, that “nothing matters”. The fact that someone so patently unfit for the job could become and stay president seemed to shred our previous notions of what was acceptable in American politics. Admitting to sexual assault on a hot mic? No problem. Trashing war veterans? Go right ahead. Asking Russia to hack your opponent? Here are the keys to the Oval Office, sir!
Even the 2020 election didn’t entirely dispel this feeling, for a few reasons. The first was that it even though Trump lost the election soundly, he actually received more votes than he did in 2016, and it was plausible to imagine the election might have gone the other way if it weren’t for the pandemic. Secondly, the fact Trump didn’t lose his grip on the Republican Party despite the insurrection and ‘Stop the Steal’ seemed to suggest the bottom had not yet been reached, and that the future of democracy itself might be menaced.
Then, last week, suddenly and unexpectedly, the storm clouds parted - at least for now. The Republicans suffered a catastrophic midterms, losing the Senate and barely winning the House. And they did it because it turned out some things do matter.
This can best be understood by looking at how the midterms bucked a decades-long trend of “nationalization” in American politics. Nationalization refers to the fact that in recent years, Americans have tended to treat all politics as just a subset of national politics. Even in contests at the local or state level, voters have made choices based on how they feel about the two national parties rather than local factors. When combined with a deep partisanship which sees only a tiny fraction of Americans ever change which party they vote for, ours has been an era in which a candidate’s character or views seem to matter less and less. So long as they were wearing the right color jersey, nothing mattered.
As Daniel Hopkins argues in the best book on the topic, nationalization has also made it harder for Democrats to win elections. That’s because the party’s voters tend to be more geographically concentrated, and so in order to triumph in legislative elections - whether it be for Congress or statehouses - they need to win over right-leaning voters in the more numerous sparsely-populated districts. Nationalization makes this much harder because it makes it more difficult to break through with some sort of special local appeal.
Yet the midterms saw a modest reversal of this trend. In the modern era of nationalized elections, shifts against or in favor of one party tended to occur nationwide. If the GOP was doing better in Florida, they were usually doing better in Oregon and New Hampshire as well. That didn’t happen in these elections, which instead saw serious divergences between how the same party performed in different states. The GOP romped home in Florida and New York, but the Democrats made major gains in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Nor were these splits regional, with Democrats struggling in the South but doing well in the North East, for instance. Nate Cohn makes the point that if you drive across the border from New York into Pennsylvania, you wouldn’t even notice you were in a different state. But the two places experienced profoundly different outcomes in the midterms. Pennsylvania experienced a blue wave, but the GOP swept six out of seven of the competitive districts in New York - likely to be enough on its own to hand them control of the House.
What accounts for these differences is the choice by voters to reject the most extreme positions offered by the GOP, and particularly by Trump. For once, candidate character and viewpoints mattered, and independent and Republican voters proved willing to desert their party and buck the national trend if the stakes were high enough.
Two issues seem to have caused these shifts, the first being abortion. When the Dobbs decision was handed down earlier this year, it created a profound rupture between the states: in the future, some would provide their citizens access to a fundamental human right, and some wouldn’t. State governments suddenly became the battleground on which this issue would be decided. In blue states like New York which were going to protect abortion rights anyway, there was far less incentive to turn up on that battlefield than there was in a purple state like Pennsylvania. Up and down the country, Democrats triumphed in local races where abortion rights were on the ballot.
The second issue was the future of American democracy. The Republican Party rejected the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and then set out to place fanatics in key strategic posts in order to force some kind of constitutional crisis if they lost in 2024. This dramatically raised the stakes in races for governor and secretary of state, offices which would be crucial to any attempt to steal an election. Voters seemed to notice, systematically punishing candidates associated with election-stealing. In the end, Republicans ended up in control of none of the strategic swing-state positions they would need to try to steal the 2024 election - a phenomenal result.
The backlash against Republican positions on abortion and democracy suggests that, perhaps, the bottom has finally been reached. The American people - including a sufficient portion of independents and Republicans - have sent a strong message that there is a ceiling on the support that a radicalized GOP can expect to garner. Biden has been ridiculed for years for suggesting that it was possible to stitch together a broad pro-democracy coalition from the part of the political spectrum that runs from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney. But the midterms suggest that he was right.
There’ll be more time to process these results and their implications in a future post, but for now let’s just celebrate this: MAGA is not an unstoppable force. Trump can go too far. And democracy will endure.
“There need not be a new Cold War”
Republicans losing elections is good not just for America but also for the rest of the world, and the same can be said about the outcome of the other big story I was tracking this week: Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Indonesia.
Going into this meeting, U.S. relations with China were at their lowest point in decades. The Biden administration identifies China as its chief geopolitical rival and recently imposed crippling sanctions on the country’s advanced semiconductor industry. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this year incensed the Chinese leadership, who also can’t be thrilled that Kevin McCarthy has pledged to repeat the exercise if he becomes House Speaker. On top of that, Biden has now said repeatedly that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. This represents a dramatic change in American policy which I stopped believing was a mere run-of-the-mill Biden gaffe when he said it the second, third, and then fourth times.
As a result, expectations for this week’s meeting between Biden and Xi were low, with many expecting a repeat of the mutual denunciations which dominated the first major summit between the two governments in Anchorage last year. Instead, the meetings were cordial and seemed to lead to a slight thaw in relations. Among the outcomes were:
An agreement between the U.S. and China to restart climate negotiations, which had ended after Pelosi’s Taiwan visit;
A statement - at least according to the Americans - that both presidents opposed the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine;
A pledge to renew cooperation between the two governments at the cabinet level;
A statement by Biden that “there need not be a new Cold War” and a statement by Xi that he sought improved relations;
A pledge that Secretary of State Blinken will visit Beijing in early 2023 to follow up.
To be clear, none of this is monumental, and it doesn’t solve any of the issues that divide the relationship at the deepest level - particularly trade and Taiwan. It was also notable that while the American read-out of the meeting referenced opposition to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the Chinese read-out didn’t. Beijing certainly doesn’t want to see the Ukraine conflict go nuclear, but it also doesn’t want to relieve Western discomfort too much either. Having America focused on Europe is just too useful for a country which wants to dominate Asia. This refusal to be clear about an issue of common concern to all humankind was highly unfortunate and is a reminder that China will always place its own interests above being a “responsible stakeholder” in the international order.
But the meeting was also positive for two reasons. The first is that it showed that both governments want to try to arrest the steady deterioration of their relationship rather than rushing into conflict. Xi Jinping could have emerged from the recent Party Congress that granted him an unprecedented third term in a belligerent mood, but it doesn’t seem that he did. The second outcome is that both sides seem to agree on the need to establish “guardrails” in the relationship that protect against competition spilling over into outright conflict, a key goal of the Biden administration.
Competition between China and America is inevitable; conflict doesn’t have to be. And talking to each other doesn’t mean going soft on conflicting core interests and red lines - it just means trying to find a way to negotiate and co-exist in spite of them. If we are to live in a peaceful century, then it’s vital that Washington and Beijing are able to do this. So let’s give three cheers for the Xi-Biden summit - especially when we consider the alternative.
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!