Americans voted in an astonishingly high turnout election. They also did serious damage to [Dear Leader's] best — and possibly only — path toward illegally installing himself in the White House in 2024.
[He] tried to install people into powerful offices who could steal the election for him. And most of them have lost. It doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet. If it's close enough in 2024, he may only need to steal one state in order to pull off a coup.
And John Stoehr notes that flipping Congress in a midterm election is really a more recent phenomenon (a party can often lose many seats without losing control).
[T]he conventional wisdom, based on [recent] electoral patterns, said the Republicans would wipe out the Democrats the way they did in 2010.
Then something happened.
Whatever it was (the fall of Roe, probably, and/or the J6 insurrection), it pushed 2 percent of white women, who are unaffiliated with either party, to choose Democratic candidates.
These are respectable white people. These are the Americans who determine which party establishes and maintains a political regime. The GOP has lost the support of respectable white people in a year when they would normally rely on them. If they don’t have that support now, they won’t have that support two years from now.
I'm not sure I'm as optimistic that we're in "a new regime in which a majority favors the ideas and policies of the Democrats over those of the Republicans", but the Republicans built in all kinds of advantages (gerrymandering, etc) and will just barely win the House. It's possible our polarized standoff may last for years to come, but perhaps the transition is in motion. Unfortunately, urgent issues don't allow the luxury of much time.
Update (November 13): Democrats have retained control of the Senate with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto's win in Nevada.
But Chauncey DeVega reminds us that the fascists are not yet defeated.
In a reasonable society, the Republican Party would have been utterly vanquished or driven to the political margins, but instead it retains its cult-like hold on tens of millions of white Americans. The midterms represented a welcome setback for their movement, but have not altered that fundamental fact.
Update (November 16): Republicans are projected to win control of the House of Representatives. So, that sucks.
Update (December 10): Senator Warnock was re-elected in Georgia, but Senator Sinema mucks things up by switching to "independent" in party affiliation. The Senate will still have a chance to do more useful things than investigate Hunter Biden.
