[The American crisis isn’t over, but the midterms were a good
sign. ]
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DEMOCRACY WAS ON THE BALLOT—AND WON  
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Tom Nichols
November 9, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The American crisis isn’t over, but the midterms were a good
sign. _

American flags in the US Capitol. , (Samuel Corum / Getty)

 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: In yesterday’s midterm
elections, a fair number of odious candidates managed to buy tickets
to Washington. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson is going back to the Senate,
where he will be joined by Ohio’s would-be hillbilly whisperer J. D.
Vance, whose campaign will stand for years to come as a monument to
cynicism and hypocrisy. We don’t know yet if Kari Lake—or as my
friend Tim Miller calls her
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the “Empress of Trollistan”—will become governor of Arizona. And
we still don’t know who will control Congress.

Nonetheless, yesterday was a good day for democracy. Some of the
worst election deniers
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kookiest candidates were sent packing, in many cases by larger margins
than anyone—including me—expected. Among those who must now go
back to writing angry Facebook posts and griping on conservative
podcasts were such notables as Don Bolduc, the retired general who
promised to get to the bottom of the Great Kitty Litter Mystery
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and Mehmet Oz, the carpetbagging
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doctor
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At the state level, things look even brighter for the protection of
democracy, as voters turned back a fleet of extremists
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weirdos
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Michigan, whose Democratic governor was the target of a bizarre kidnap
plot two years ago, is now under a unified Democratic government for
the first time in nearly 40 years
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A crackpot running as the GOP candidate for governor
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Pennsylvania was drubbed in a double-digit loss to an utterly
conventional Democrat. And let’s even give a cheer as well for one
Republican: Brad Raffensperger, who had to endure death threats
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defying Donald Trump’s demands to upend the 2020 vote in Georgia,
was reelected as secretary of state.

As the elections analyst Sean Trende said today
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Twitter: “It turns out that selecting your candidates from
the _Star Wars_ cantina might not be a recipe for electoral
success.”

If you want to know how bad a night it was for Republicans,
check Trump’s temperature
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which apparently zoomed last night
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“boiling,” through “molten lead,” and is now 
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near “the surface of the sun.” And rightly so: Some in the GOP are
holding Trump responsible for their party’s losses and are now
trying to push him out of the way. Even Trump’s conservative
hometown paper, the _New York Post,_ twisted the knife this morning
with a cover photo
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Governor Ron DeSantis and a one word caption: “DeFuture.”

The best news in all of this is that the pundits and advisers who told
Democrats to talk only about the economy and inflation and avoid any
boring yakety-yak about democracy were wrong. As my colleague McKay
Coppins tweeted
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looking at an AP VoteCast poll
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“it’s striking how many voters were motivated by concern for
American democracy.” I have been arguing for months that voters are
in fact capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time, but I
admit that I also was starting to wonder whether fears about GOP
authoritarianism could break through the noise.

And so I was especially glad that Biden made the case for democracy
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his closing argument at Union Station, because I thought it was his
duty as president to speak on the threats to our system and warn the
voters of what was at stake. In any case, to argue over grocery prices
while ignoring Republican threats to stomp on our rights and nullify
elections would have been malpractice, with Democrats taking the bait
to apologize for the economy (much of which no one can fix right now)
while giving a pass to unhinged candidates who couldn’t care less
how much a gallon of milk costs.

Looking ahead, American democracy now has some breathing room. What I
and others were most worried about was not some overnight
establishment of a dictatorship—our country is too big and diverse
for that—but rather the ripple effect of having multiple state
offices and governorships in the hands of fanatics and election
deniers while Congress was firmly in the grip of a Republican
majority. That’s not going to happen now. Important battleground
states, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, will continue to be led by
normal politicians of both parties (and yes, that includes Brian Kemp
in Georgia, who also defied Trump).

This means, in turn, that the nightmare scenario of ultra-extreme
governors and secretaries of state refusing to certify their own
elections is now a lot less likely. Of course, the Supreme Court could
still decide in the upcoming _Moore v. Harper _case
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state legislatures, not actual voters, control the outcome of
elections, and then we’re back in the trenches once again to protect
our rights and liberties—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Besides, we’re not out of the woods yet. Trump is almost certainly
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to run for president again, and then we’ll see just how many
Republicans are willing to join the former president on his own
personal Titanic_ _and go chasing more icebergs. We’re not done
with Trump’s cult of personality by a long shot. But Americans have
held off the vandals who sought to win offices specifically, it seems,
in order to subvert future elections
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That’s good for the United States, and it’s good for democracy.

_Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of
the Peacefield newsletter
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the Atlantic Daily newsletter
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* midterm elections
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* US Democracy
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