Much was lost, yet what was gained was squandered.
Nobody likes losing elections. A successful political party, however, should know how to learn and benefit from its losses. A missed opportunity to get something out of losing can be just as bad as a failure to capitalize on victory. Somehow, both parties wound up not only losing valuable ground in the 2022 midterms, but also failing to learn anything from their setbacks.
Following a good November 2021 for Republicans — including Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race and Jack Ciattarelli’s surprising showing in the New Jersey governor’s race — 2022 was full of massive warning signs for Democrats that their agenda and their incumbent president were unpopular and that voters were alarmed by the state of the economy, the border, and public safety. And it did end up costing them. Democrats lost control of the House, lost the only incumbent governor in the country to be defeated (in Nevada), and saw red-wave conditions in some parts of the country, such as Florida and Long Island. But by focusing their fire and their turnout game on Donald Trump and his “stop the steal” candidates and capitalizing on the counter-reaction with some voters to the Dobbs decision (as well as avoiding the worst economic blowback when gas prices went back down from their summer high), Democrats were able to avoid a race that was all a referendum on the incumbent. Thus, they gained a seat in the Senate, flipped three governorships (including Arizona), limited their losses in the House, and gained total control over the legislatures in Minnesota and Michigan.
A red-wave blowout would have put enormous pressure on the aging Joe Biden to step aside. Instead, Biden took it as vindication, both of himself and his strategy. Democrats have doubled down on “Trump is a threat to democracy” and abortion as their message and squelched any primary challenges to Biden, while doing nothing to fix the crisis at the border. Now, they find themselves saddled with an 81-year-old man whose mental decline is undeniable to any observer, and they can’t get rid of him. They paid the price for Biden once, learned nothing, and could pay a steeper one in November.
For Republicans, 2022 was an agony of missed opportunities. Bad candidates, many of them dragged across the primary finish line by Trump and/or closely associated with his election challenges, lost race after race, including the governor’s races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, the Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, a couple of House races where Trump primaried the Republican incumbents, and multiple races for secretary of state. There were also disappointments and near-misses in the gubernatorial races in Kansas, Oregon, and New York. The signs of a potential Big Red Wave amounted to a trickle.
As painful as those losses were, the party could at least have drawn the obvious conclusion: a decisive segment of swing voters, many of them the sorts of suburbanites who always turn out to vote, were done with Trump and anybody who smacked of his approach to the 2020 election, while being open even to candidates who were Trumpy on policy but fundamentally normal, such as Ron DeSantis.
As we roll into the Biden–Trump rematch, however, it seems that neither side learned anything at all from 2022. The defeats yielded no lessons and no silver linings. Much was lost, yet what was gained was squandered. One wonders if the same dynamic will repeat itself after this election.