If you’re still feeling a bit woozy and disoriented by the surprise sputter-out of The Big Once-In-A-Lifetime Red Wave that took place on Tuesday night, then make no mistake: My jaw is still a bit wobbly too. (As this goes to press Sunday morning, the Arizona Senate race has been called, and Adam Laxalt’s appointment with the electoral reaper finally arrived on Saturday night.) “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson once philosophized, and mine began to crumble somewhere around 8:00 p.m. Central Time or so on Tuesday, when it became apparent the Republicans weren’t making the easy House gains in New England and Virginia that a real wave would have portended. You can put a brave face on things, but though on Tuesday morning I nightmarishly predicted everything that would happen on Tuesday night (as friends point out, I was mistaken: I was over-optimistic about the worst-case GOP gains in the House. Silly me) even I wasn’t truly prepared for the sharp divide in the nature of the failure.
Since you’re here reading this, you’re probably already well aware of the narrative taking hold about 2022 — almost entirely correct, in my view — which is that the electorate passed judgment upon Trumpish candidates, candidates whose primary qualification for winning the nomination for their federal or statewide positions was either fealty to Trump and his stolen-election fantasias, or his explicit endorsement. This narrative is complicated somewhat by the Peter Thiel phenomenon, who as a strychnine-blooded venture capitalist might conclude that going 50/50 with J. D. Vance in Ohio over Blake Masters in Arizona as ideological and financial investments is a decent-enough payout. (For him, not you.)
A further complication to that narrative is the matter of abortion, and the electoral reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade nationally (particularly in states like Michigan, where intelligent Democratic activists were preparing Tuesday’s victorious state ballot initiative enshrining maximally permissive abortion as the law of the land long before the Dobbs decision had even leaked). That is properly the subject for a separate discussion, but let it suffice for now to say that, while its effect was most apparent in Michigan (where Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Democrats weaponized it in conjunction with the on-tape statements of hapless Republican gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon that she would ban abortion even in clear cases of rape), it played a role all over the country, and will continue to do so going forward unless Republican lawmakers and candidates course-correct to the specific temperaments of their state electorates immediately.
The final element of the emerging electoral narrative is Ron DeSantis and the GOP’s truly stunning performance up and down the ballot all throughout Florida. Florida, a former swing state which DeSantis himself won in 2018 by fewer votes than it takes to fill up half the stadium at Gainesville for a Gators game, now looks rather immovably Red indeed. The story here is one of principled and focused governance leading to electoral dominance, as ably summarized elsewhere by my colleagues. But from a longer-term electoral perspective, it is worth noting how both continuity (in governance) and contingency (in lucky choices of opponents; imagine Gwen Graham as the Democratic nominee for FL-GOV in 2018 against DeSantis and make the sign of the cross) has served the Florida Republican party incredibly well throughout the years. DeSantis is entirely the agent of his own fortune; the alternately focused and daring decisions he made as governor after a rocky 2018 election campaign are his primary argument as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. But it is also true that he was blessed to inherit a Florida Republican Party that had been oiled and machine-tooled to perfection by a sequence of party-building governors (amusingly and tellingly, aside from Charlie Crist) beginning with Jeb Bush.
This is the state of our emerging conventional wisdom about the 2022 election; I can do no better than to summarize it above, with commentary, as I have. In the main, it is correct. But there is one state not named Florida whose Republican overperformance on Election Night was truly impressive, and it is in danger of being forgotten because the marquee candidate at the top of the ticket didn’t win his race. I am talking, of course, about New York.
I can do no better than to quote my friend Robert George, a longtime centrist observer of New York politics, who summarized the magnitude of Representative Lee Zeldin’s (NY-1) performance against incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul thus: “Lee Zeldin had the most successful GOP gubernatorial result in 20 years. Even more remarkably, he had more coattails (as seen in House results) than the winning Democratic governor.”
Those coattails are truly remarkable, and should not be ignored in what is now becoming (as seen above) a triple-headed Election Narrative about Trumpism, abortion politics, and DeSantis/Florida. Right now, Lee Zeldin currently sits at 47.1 percent to Hochul’s 52.9 percent. Her margin should expand as late votes get counted. That sort of margin might seem disappointing, except for the fact that, as Robert pointed out above, it’s the best result for a Republican gubernatorial candidate since the days of Pataki, and furthermore was brilliantly focused for maximum Democratic pain.
One sub rosa narrative coming out of 2022 for election wonks — see RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende’s musings here — is that, for once, it was Republican votes rather than Democratic ones that were inefficiently concentrated in blue states and congressional districts rather than the other way around (this is the natal source of both the “ungerrymander the House!” and “abolish the Senate/add more states!” grievances you occasionally stumble across on your semiregular trawl across the New York Times op-ed page; those arguing are likely unaware of their own intellectual genealogy). But one state where that proved not to be true was New York, where Zeldin’s candidacy awoke a dormant Republican vote that not only may have broken the Democratic state senate supermajority, but also made major congressional gains all throughout the state — the ones that will literally make the difference in securing a Republican majority for the 118th Congress.
The reaction in the New York City suburbs was pointedly fierce. On any night other than one of shockingly disappointed Republican expectations, we would be spinning out new Norse sagas about the downfall of Democratic Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who carpetbagged his way into the newly-drawn 17th congressional district. Even though he had never represented a large chunk of it, it was “safer” in terms of Cook PVI (i.e., generic Democratic versus Republican voting preference) than his original 18th district would be under new lines, and so he claimed it as his own. In order to do this, he had to boot out its present occupant, a black “Justice Democrats”–affiliated incumbent named Mondaire Jones. He could get away with this act because, well, he was the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
He won’t be anymore, because he lost that safer district anyway. (Mondaire Jones lost his primary for the New York City district he was forced to move into, incidentally, and I hope he enjoyed an extra drink or three on Tuesday night.)
Elsewhere on Long Island, Tom Suozzi’s NY-3 seat, long tantalizingly out of reach for Republicans, was taken decisively by George Santos, who becomes the only openly gay member of the GOP House caucus. Kathleen Rice retired from her seat in New York’s fourth (southwestern Long Island) rather than face the music this cycle, so it was left to Democrat Laura Gillen to face it for her: Anthony D’Esposito took the seat for the Republicans. Simply by mounting a serious, respectable campaign — without running away from the conservative positions he staked out as congressman representing eastern Long Island for eight years, through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations — Lee Zeldin and the New York GOP accomplished something for New Yorkers who had long since given up on the idea of ever seeing representation either in Albany or Washington, D.C., for conservatives, and for the Republican Party as well. That achievement — an achievement shared by New York Republican primary voters, who avoided self-inflicted aortic knife-stabs like nominating Carl Paladino for federal office — led to real down-ballot gains in a massively important state otherwise hopelessly left for dead by those who think purely in terms of red or blue. What happened in New York provides just as important a blueprint for Republicans to study, particularly as counterinsurgency, as DeSantis’s triumph in Florida has.