NATION DIVIDED
By the time Nancy Pelosi took the stage at the Hyatt Regency in Washington on Election Day, it was nearly midnight and the panic had passed. After an evening of equivocal results and occasional heartbreak, the House Democratic leader was there to assure the cheering crowd that their party had won, and she was the proof: Democrats, she said, “have taken back the House for the American people!”
The message was met with relief more than triumph. Democrats had hoped the country would deliver a decisive verdict to President Trump and the Republicans, but it did not. Pelosi’s party took the night’s biggest prize, flipping about 30 GOP-held seats to take over the House of Representatives. Democrats won large majorities of women, young people and nonwhite voters, according to exit polls; ran up the score among voters with college degrees; and captured contests in historically Republican suburbs of cities like Richmond, Va., Chicago and Denver. They chipped away at the GOP’s edge in governor’s mansions, reclaimed the Rust Belt strongholds that put Trump in the White House and won the total vote by about 9 percentage points.
But a President who turned the election into a referendum on himself saw plenty to like in the results as well. The GOP gained ground in the Senate, easily defeating Democratic incumbents in Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, states that Trump won in 2016 and that he campaigned in just days before the midterms. Much of the country’s deep-red interior got redder, and Trump-hugging GOP candidates appeared to turn back strong challenges from talented Democrats—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida—who had vaulted to national celebrity.
Rather than a country rising up as one to rebuke the President and reverse 2016, the election showed an intensification of the trends that put Trump in office. The President’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections because only the opposition is roused to anger. But these were not typical midterms: turnout surged to levels not seen in decades for a nonpresidential contest. In 2018 it wasn’t only Democrats who were riled up—Republicans, too, came out at high levels, perhaps vindicating Trump’s strategy of ginning up his core supporters
