A few days later—hours before Trump sounded the alarm about the caravan—the president tweeted the news that a judge had thrown out a lawsuit against him by Stormy Daniels. In so doing, Trump described his former sexual partner as “Horseface.”
DESPITE THE DAILY CHURN OF SELF-IMPOSED DISTRACTIONS, TRUMP endeavored to echo Gingrich as often as possible. In the final weeks before the midterms, he regularly touted his appointment of not one but two Supreme Court justices, taking every opportunity to remind Republicans of the abuse Kavanaugh had been subjected to in his confirmation hearings, which had devolved into one of the nastiest partisan food fights Capitol Hill had ever seen.
Still, he was far more adamant about the caravan. Calling it “an invasion of our country” by “gang members,” “very bad thugs,” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” Trump hammered the issue on a daily basis, even deploying five thousand troops to the southern border in what Pentagon officials later acknowledged to be a naked political stunt.
There were boasts of a booming economy and talk of tax reform’s benefits in the kitchen-sink strategy used by the White House down the stretch. Trump also touted the recently renegotiated trilateral trade deal with Canada and Mexico that carried benefits for U.S. dairy farmers and automakers. But the thrust of his “closing message” was the same as it had been two years earlier in his pursuit of the presidency: fear.
Trump aimed to brand the election as a stark choice between two parties. Democrats were weak; Republicans were strong. Democrats were beholden to global interests; Republicans were prioritizing America’s well-being. Democrats were motivated by malice and spite and an obsession with toppling the president; Republicans were motivated by patriotism and security and a desire to protect Americans from the wolves at the gate.
Interestingly, while most of the prized Democratic recruits around the country ran disciplined campaigns steering clear of these stereotypes, certain elements of the progressive base—and some of the party’s most prominent figures—walked right into Trump’s trap.1
In late June, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was loudly confronted by protesters while dining inside a Mexican restaurant in Washington; members of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter chanted “Shame!” in response to the family-separation policy at the southern border. The next week, Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant because of her work as White House press secretary. In response to these incidents, California congresswoman Maxine Waters told a crowd of her constituents, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them.”
Eric Holder, the attorney general under Obama, told a Georgia crowd while campaigning in the fall that he disagreed with the former First Lady’s insistence on elevating the national discourse. “Michelle [Obama] always says, you know, ‘When they go low, we go high,’” Holder said. “No. When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
The same week as Holder’s remark, Hillary Clinton put a cherry on top of the civility debate. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” she said in an interview with CNN.2 “That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”
All this played directly into Trump’s argument that Democrats were the party of protests, of lawlessness, of hatred and hostility—all while he continued to embody those very things.
In October, Trump tweeted a campaign ad that was blatant in its deception and brazen in its racist innuendo: Rolling footage of brown-faced crowds funneling through fences, the ad highlighted a Mexican man, Luis Bracamontes, who had killed two police officers. “Democrats let him into our country,” the caption read. “Democrats let him stay.” But Bracamontes had been released “for reasons unknown” by none other than Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the right-wing guardian of law and order, before being deported under the Clinton administration and reentering the United States during Bush’s presidency. This nuance was absent from the ad, which asked viewers, “Who else would Democrats let in?”
It was difficult to gauge the aggregate effect of the increasingly vitriolic national climate. In the battle for the Senate, with Republicans playing offense in a batch of predominantly conservative and more rural states, Trump’s rhetorical firefight with the Democrats was a net benefit; in the contest for control of the House, with Republicans defending dozens of moderate, suburban-based congressional districts, it was proving less helpful.
By the middle of October, it seemed almost certain that Democrats would win back the House. They had too much verve in their base, too many pickup opportunities, and too much cash not to flip the lower chamber. (Republicans began complaining to donors that fall about a “green wave,” citing the record fund-raising sums for congressional challengers across the map.) Trump and his team were highly in tune with this reality. The closer Election Day drew, the clearer the president made it that he did not want to be campaigning with any Republicans who would lose, as it would reflect poorly on him. Strategically, his political team avoided House races almost entirely and stuck to the easier, safer Senate races.
Even in those instances, nothing was guaranteed. Trump could not understand how Democratic senator Jon Tester stood a prayer in Montana, a state the president had carried by 20 points. He was equally miffed by Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s staying power in West Virginia, which Trump had won by 42 points. The president insisted on pounding both states all the way to the finish line, certain that his appeal was stronger than that of the incumbent Democrats.
And then there was the curious case of Texas.
For much of the previous year, Ted Cruz was perceived to be sailing to reelection in the Lone Star State. He was a political celebrity with a fat bank account and a proven campaign machine; his Democratic opponent, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, was a little-known congressman from El Paso, the sixth-biggest media market in the state (behind even the Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley region). Plus, as the conventional wisdom dictated, this was Texas, after all—no place for a Democrat to flourish in the age of Trump.
All this was proving backward. For starters, this was no longer the Texas of George W. Bush. The state’s accelerating demographic transformation, paired with the GOP’s rightward lurch, was making for an increasingly competitive atmosphere. After four consecutive presidential cycles of landslide double-digit victories for the GOP, Trump carried Texas by 9 points in 2016—a smaller margin than in battleground Iowa. There were warning bells galore, none shriller than the result in Harris County. Anchored by Houston and home to swelling populations of both Hispanics and college-educated whites, Harris County was fought to a virtual tie in 2012, with Obama topping Mitt Romney by fewer than 600 votes. Four years later, Clinton carried the county by 162,000 votes.
For the popular perception of Texas as backcountry, it boasted four of the nation’s eleven largest metropolitan areas and was spilling over with the suburbanites who were most hostile to Trump. In a sense, the former Texas governor, Rick Perry, had been too successful in luring jobs to the state: By cutting taxes to the bone, he had caused millions of new residents to flood into Texas over the past decade, many of them liberal, college-educated exports from California. This influx, on top of the ever-rising share of Hispanic voters, was dry demographic tinder. The contrast O’Rourke struck with Cruz—and with Trump’s GOP—provided the spark.