Key events
Adam Gabbatt has taken a look at the latest round in the long-running American political parlor game, ‘Has Rupert Murdoch Finally Dumped Trump?’:
On election day, Donald Trump was clear about how his efforts to support Republican candidates should be seen.
“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Trump told NewsNation. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
Unfortunately for Trump, he did not get what he hoped for. Instead the former president has seen conservative news outlets, the Rupert Murdoch-owned ones in particular, turn on him, in some cases with gleeful abandon.
“Trumpty Dumpty” blared the front page of Thursday’s New York Post, the tabloid Murdoch has owned since 1976. Editors went so far as to mock up Trump as Humpty Dumpty, his enlarged orange head stuffed into a white shirt and a signature red tie.
Next to the picture of Trump as an egg perching precariously on a brick wall, the text goaded: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”
The Post cover offered the most visceral insight into Murdoch’s thinking, and its contempt was far from an outlier in the mogul’s news empire.
“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser” was the verdict of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. A subheading added: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.”
The piece was just as scathing as the headline, running through nine races this November the paper said Trump had effectively tanked through his continued election denial, his various wars with more moderate Republican candidates and his general unpopularity nationwide.
“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat,” the editorial said.
“The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat.”
It added: “Now Mr Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years.”
Martin Pengelly
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not happy about how Democrats performed in her state, New York, in the midterms – a series of House losses helping (probably) hand the chamber to Republicans, though Kathy Hochul, the governor, did fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge from her Trumpist opponent, Lee Zeldin.
The New York City congresswoman popularly known as AOC told the Intercept: “New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map … what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide.
“… I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York state.”
Identifying key election themes in New York, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think policing was a big one, I think the choice among certain Democrats to … amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it … validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was … other key and top priorities.
“I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund [the police], which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives.
“… And I think another prime mistake is that in New York state, [ex-governor Andrew] Cuomo may be gone, but … much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganised, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organising across the state.
“And so … you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into … it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York state Democratic party.”
Martin Pengelly
Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri who may or may not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but definitely did run from Capitol rioters on 6 January 2021, even after raising a fist to the mob, thinks Republicans did not do as well as they might’ve done on Tuesday night because they didn’t run on his populist, not to say Trumpist, principles.
He tweets, in a message at least partially counter to the emerging consensus that Republicans suffered (if probably winning the House and maybe winning the Senate can be called suffering) because voters wanted to rebuke their Trumpist drift:
A refresher on how Hawley ran, as shown by the House January 6 committee, is here.
Video of Josh Hawley running, meanwhile, is here:
Martin Pengelly
My colleague David Smith has been speaking to anti-Trump conservatives about where the former president stands now, after a disappointing midterm election for his endorsed candidates and the Republican party, and with conservative media including Murdoch-owned papers showing signs of throwing in their lots with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who had a contrastingly strong night on Tuesday.
Donald Trump is still expected to announce his third run for the Republican presidential nomination next week, though a chorus of party voices seems to wish he wouldn’t.
Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, tells David Trump “is wounded and that’s evidenced by the rightwing media ecosystem putting out collective rebukes in the wake of a disappointing midterm result because Donald Trump was at the centre once again.
He cost them a much larger victory in the midterms. He is the albatross around the Republican party’s electoral neck and will continue to be as long as he is alive and breathing.”
But Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, is not convinced Trump is a spent force yet: “I’m not holding my breath that this posture will remain. We saw this before after the election in 2020 and it lasted as long as the ratings started to crash.
When they started losing ratings to Newsmax and other media outlets, they went right back to the fawning coverage of Donald Trump. Are they willing to remain steadfast this time around because they think now that Ron DeSantis is the heir apparent? We’ll see how long that lasts.”
Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who ran in the 2020 Republican primary as an anti-Trump candidate, also thinks the former president isn’t done with his party, or America, yet.
We’ve seen this movie before. He led a fucking insurrection and the party still bowed to him. So will the dam finally break with this one? No, I don’t think it will. I still think it’s his party.
“This whole DeSantis thing is overrated. Trump knows that. He knows who DeSantis is. I still expect him to come out this month and announce he’s running and I don’t expect many Republicans to have the balls to say, ‘Donald, you suck’. I just don’t think it’ll happen.”
Story:
The day so far
Ballot counting continues across the United States, with the outcomes of two key Senate races and several House races up in the air. Meanwhile, new government data showed inflation declined in October, potentially marking the beginning of the end of the political perilous wave of price increases that has gripped the country for more than a year.
Here’s a rundown of what has happened so far today:
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A top White House official insisted the Democrats still had a chance at winning the House.
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A newly elected Republican congressman said the party should “move forward” from Donald Trump.
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The chair of the Texas GOP said the party needs to give voters a positive message if it wants to improve on what is looking to be a lackluster performance in the midterms.
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How did John Fetterman, the Democratic victor in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, pull it off? The Guardian traveled to the state to find out.
Candidates who deny Joe Biden’s 2020 election win were rife on ballots nationwide, and the Washington Post has been tracking how they fared in the midterms.
Have a look:
Georgia’s Democratic senator Raphael Warnock plans to address the press after his race for re-election against Republic Herschel Walker went to a runoff.
The two men will face off again on 6 December in a race that, depending on the outcome of Senate contests in Nevada and Arizona, could decide control of the chamber.
Warnock announced he will speak at 1pm in Atlanta. Meanwhile, NBC News reports that Warnock’s campaign manager is signaling optimism to supporters about the senator’s prospects of winning a six-year term.
“Reverend Warnock will win the runoff by continuing the strategic investments in paid communication and field organizing, continuing to hold the diverse coalition that has driven Reverend Warnock’s success, and emphasizing that this race is about who is able to represent our state,” Quentin Fulks wrote in a memo today.
He characterized former NFL star Walker as “completely unqualified for a job that requires knowledge of the issues and an interest in listening and learning.”
Whatever the results of the midterms, Democrats are assured about eight more weeks of controlling both the House and Senate, and have a packed schedule of lawmaking ahead of them.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Democratic senator Cory Booker offered a preview of what the party’s priorities will be in the closing weeks of the year:
Republicans found unexpected enthusiasm in New York, where they won several tight House races including in New York City’s exurbs, where Mike Lawler triumphed over sitting Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney.
But in an interview with CNN this morning, Lawler signaled he was willing to break from the party’s embrace of Donald Trump:
A number of Republicans are doing some soul searching after the “red wave” they hoped for did not arrive.
The party still could win the House and Senate, but it’s clear Americans weren’t as enthusiastic about Republicans as they expected.
Matt Rinaldi is chair of the Republican party in Texas, where the GOP suffered no major setbacks on Tuesday and is generally the dominant political force in the state. On Twitter, he shared his view of what went wrong for GOP candidates elsewhere:
While voters may have displayed surprising enthusiasm for the Democrats on Tuesday, Joe Biden’s party isn’t out of the woods yet, The Guardian’s David Smith reports:
It was a result that, Joe Biden said on Wednesday, gave everyone a “whew! sigh of relief” that Make America Great Again (Maga) Republicans are not taking over the government again.
Biden won and Donald Trump lost in midterm elections to decide control of Congress. But just as in 2020, a collective exhalation is not enough to spell the end of political dysfunction in America. Things are about to get messy.
For all their deflation, Republicans appear on course to capture a majority in the House of Representatives, albeit by a far smaller margin than history has suggested or crystal ball gazers had forecast.
That means the end of Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s reign as House speaker, at least for now. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has announced his intention to take the speaker’s gavel. It might be better described as a poisoned chalice.
Should McCarthy prevail, his achingly slim majority will afford little room for maneuver when it comes to legislating. McCarthy will have to do deals either with Democrats or far-right Trump loyalists. In a House where every member fancies him or herself as president, the speaker could find himself perpetually bending to the will of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Democrats have picked up another House seat.
The Associated Press confirms Gabriel Vasquez has ousted incumbent Republican Yvette Herrell in New Mexico’s second district. Herrell took the seat from Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in the 2020 election.
Politicians across the country broke barriers in the midterms, with the first member of generation Z elected to Congress and the first openly gay woman winning a governorship.
Here’s more about the historic firsts that resulted from Tuesday’s vote: