A bit like those Ireland football matches of old, this drawn battle is being seen by Democrats as a glorious victory. Expectations and history defied, pollsters wrongfooted, the US midterms have put something of a halt to the gallop of former President Donald Trump, though they have handed a narrow majority in the House of Representatives to the Republicans and left, it appears, the Senate in limbo.
President Biden will embark on the second half of his first term less able to govern effectively, with a legislature determined to block his every move, but will have been reassured that, despite woeful personal ratings, his own viability as a candidate for 2024, even then at 82 years old, has been shored up. Not least because of the real signs of fissures emerging in the Republican Party as unquestioning loyalty to Donald Trump gave way to criticism from former supporters.
Trump’s endorsement of candidates at national and local level proved a distinctly mixed blessing and his emerging rival for the Republican nomination, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, romped home with a stonking majority, routing former Representative Charlie Crist by 19 percentage points, in a win which as he put it, rewrites the national political map. DeSantis was perhaps “the real winner” of the midterms, with Biden noting, “it would be fun watching them take on each other.”
Biden, who maintains it is still his intention to run again, says he will make a formal announcement in the new year, while Trump is expected to make his next week. A rerun of the 2020 presidential vote would, on the midterms’ evidence, again be a close race. But, while the majority of Democrats would prefer another candidate, they are likely to unite around Biden, while Republicans may tear themselves apart in the primaries.
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The relative success of the Democrats in the midterms is also likely to strengthen the left/progressive wing in the party. Its main setback – the surprise loss of four House seats in New York – is being blamed by city progressives on the old guard party machine’s incompetent mishandling of the redrawing of constituency boundaries. Meanwhile, the victory of John Fetterman’s blue collar populism in the Pennsylvania Senate election is a robust, and repeatable, left-wing response to the appeal Trump made in winning Pennsylvania and other industrial states in 2016.
The battle over election integrity, a backdrop to the overwhelmingly smooth vote, no longer assumes centre stage. At least 210 Republicans who have questioned Biden’s legitimacy won seats in the House, Senate or state races. Most were in seats in which there was little contest and some notable election deniers were defeated – swing-state voters seemed especially reluctant to hand Trump allies the keys to the election machinery itself.