The contrast between the journalism and entertainment wings of the network had been a source of running tension for years, with Baier and Wallace known to apologize to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill for the antics of their colleagues. Wallace, for one, seemed to savor the occasion to shut one of them up on Election Night. When Ingraham opined that the election results showed “the Democrats are going to more of an Ocasio-Cortez party,” a reference to the Democratic Socialist in New York, Wallace stopped her.
“I don’t think that is a fair thing to say about the Democrats. I think that is a complete mischaracterization,” he said, pointing out how the majority was won with moderate Democrats hugging the center. “You know, if you’re going to give the Republicans credit for holding on to the Senate, then I think you have to give Democrats credit for actually flipping the House.”
As Trump’s staff went into full spin mode, saying the House was lost due to factors beyond the president’s control, and crediting Trump with saving the Senate majority, Wallace produced a fresh bucket of cold water.
“I think we are . . . giving too much credit to Donald Trump for holding onto the Senate,” he said. “The fact is, this was a historically difficult year for the Democrats. The Democrats had twenty-six seats that they had to defend. The Republicans had nine seats they had to defend.”
“So, yes, it’s a victory for Donald Trump,” Wallace continued, “but this was something he should have been expected to do.”
A POLITICAL PARTY CAN ONLY PLAY THE HAND IT IS DEALT, AND REPUBLICANS took advantage of the friendly Senate map, knocking off numerous Democratic incumbents: McCaskill of Missouri, Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and most important to Trump, Bill Nelson of Florida, in a race he’d been personally invested in because of his friendship with Republican Rick Scott.
There were also a handful of marquee governor’s victories to celebrate, including in Florida (where Trump had gone all-in behind Republican Ron DeSantis) and Georgia (where Brian Kemp, the GOP nominee and secretary of state, came under intense scrutiny for purging disproportionate numbers of minority voters from the rolls, only to defeat Democrat Stacey Abrams by 55,000 votes).
More striking were the gubernatorial election results in Maryland and Massachusetts. In Maryland, Republican incumbent Larry Hogan won reelection by a comfortable 12 points; and in Massachusetts, Republican incumbent Charlie Baker won another term by a whopping 34 points. The common denominator: Both men had governed as pragmatic problem solvers in two of the nation’s bluest states, setting aside divisive cultural fights and emphasizing kitchen table concerns: schools, roads, housing and health care costs, and the opioid epidemic. Even as the national GOP was addicted to dysfunction for much of the previous decade, some of its state parties were models of competence, and Hogan and Baker were at the forefront.
On the whole, however, Democrats increased their number of governorships. The most celebrated win came in Wisconsin, knocking off Governor Scott Walker, who, friends worried, had gotten greedy in seeking a third term. The left’s most symbolic victory came in Kansas, where Democrats toppled the longtime immigration provocateur and Trump ally Kris Kobach, who ran what Republicans described as the worst campaign of the entire election cycle, focusing more on issues of voter fraud and border security than education and health care.
Senate and gubernatorial contests aside, Election Night 2018 was defined by the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives—the statement it made about the appeal of Trump’s party, and the implications for the government moving forward.
When all the votes were counted—which took weeks, considering the molasses mechanics of California—Democrats had won a net gain of 40 seats, well above the preelection forecasts in both parties that ranged between 25 and 30. This result was the culmination of two years of shrewd, self-controlled campaigning that took advantage of the president’s unpopularity in the suburbs by straddling the middle of the electorate and not giving in to the tribal nuttiness of the day.
One notable casualty was Dave Brat in the Virginia suburbs. The Freedom Caucus board member lost to Abigail Spanberger, a sharp, centrist former CIA officer who had promised to bridge the divide between the two parties and bring down the decibel level in DC. The symmetry was striking: The man who had slayed Eric Cantor by running an anti-Washington, talk radio–backed campaign pounding the issue of immigration, was ejected from office because of his district’s adverse reaction to the president who followed that very blueprint. (Brat was promptly rewarded with a job running the business school at Liberty University.)
While Republicans stood their ground in exurban and rural areas (and in some cases, even grew their support there), the story of the midterms was the Democrats’ supremacy in the suburbs. From New York to Philadelphia to Washington to Richmond to Atlanta to Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Houston to Oklahoma City to Denver to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Republicans bled support in America’s suburbs, giving away dozens of districts that had been drawn by GOP lawmakers not long before under the impression that those voters were party lifers.
Driving this transformation of the suburbs was women—and particularly college-educated women. According to national exit polling, Democrats won 59 percent of women overall compared to Republicans’ 40 percent. (That 19-point margin was nearly double the 10-point spread by which Republicans lost women in 2016.) And among white women with a college degree, Democrats beat Republicans by 20 points.6
The bulk of GOP losses came in districts where Trump’s numbers were insurmountably low. In these areas, Republicans witnessed a wipeout of some of their most effective members—including Mike Coffman of Colorado, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Peter Roskam of Illinois, and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, among others—whose strong individual brands back home were not sufficient to overcome the president’s devastating unpopularity. In Orange County alone, Democrats flipped all four of the remaining Republican-held congressional seats. The GOP had been wiped out in the heart of Reagan Country.
Trump could not be held solely responsible for this realignment of the electorate. As the journalist Ron Brownstein has written, the “class inversion” of white-collar suburbanites moving toward the Democrats and blue-collar exurban and rural voters moving toward the Republicans has been under way for a generation. Yet the Trump presidency proved an explosive accelerant: According to the national exit poll of House races, Democrats won whites with a college degree by 8 points; Republicans won whites without a college degree by 24 points.
These demographic splits, statistically speaking, would have been unimaginable one decade earlier.
FOR ALL THE TALK OF TRUMP REMAKING THE ELECTORAL MAP IN 2016 and defying the prescriptions of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus and his “autopsy” were haunting the party from the grave. Republicans won white votes overall, 54 percent to 44 percent, according to the exit polls, but Democrats won nonwhites by a margin of 76 percent to 22 percent. Meanwhile, the overall vote share of whites fell 3 percentage points from the 2014 midterms, which itself had been down 3 points from the 2010 midterms.
Trump had won the White House with an inside straight, sweeping the Rust Belt and notching impossibly narrow victories in the three predominantly white states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But repeating that path looked a lot more difficult as the returns came in on Election Night: In the statewide races for governor and U.S. Senate in those states, Democrats went six for six, patching the holes in their “Blue Wall” and regaining control over certain key functions of government, including voting regulations, that could prove decisive in 2020.