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\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLast night was a night of resistance but not revolution in American politics. The Democratic Party victory in the House of Representatives was a big one, and the Democrats gained important governors\u0026rsquo; mansions in the upper Midwest, but they lost high-profile governor races in Florida and Georgia, and they lost more seats in the United States Senate.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAmericans of the centre-left wanted, and perhaps had allowed themselves to expect, a cathartic repudiation of Trumpism, as though one could wake from a two-year nightmare to find (quoting Bruce Springsteen) the \u0026lsquo;\u003ca href=\u0022https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2012.749648?scroll=top\u0026amp;needAccess=true\u0022\u003ecountry we carry in our hearts\u003c/a\u003e\u0026rsquo;, the country that elected and then re-elected Barack Obama to the White House, still intact.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis yearning was not altogether detached from reality, or from the actual results. Women, especially college-educated suburban women who used to constitute a Republican bulwark, voted by a wide margin against the president\u0026rsquo;s party. There was real recoil against Trump\u0026rsquo;s language including mocking a sexual-assault victim, incitement against the press, fear-mongering against immigrants, and bizarre theatrics such as ordering 15,000 army troops to the Mexican border and pronouncing himself able to change the constitutional definition of citizenship by executive fiat. When the final two weeks of the campaign were beset by violence \u0026ndash; pipe bombs mailed to Trump critics, a massacre of Jews in Pittsburgh, the grocery-store murder of two elderly African Americans by a white killer who couldn\u0026rsquo;t get into the black church where he intended mayhem \u0026ndash; one didn\u0026rsquo;t need to ascribe direct cause and effect to argue that reckless discourse was endangering public order. \u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAt the same time, in concrete policy terms, the election result was a revenge of Obamacare. Healthcare was the main issue that Democratic candidates campaigned on, and exit polls suggest it was the leading issue on voters\u0026rsquo; minds. Republicans did not help themselves by trying, unsuccessfully, to repeal the law (and failing, in the end, through the last-hurrah thumbs down of a dying Senator John McCain). It turns out that, while voters may be averse to the concept of socialised medicine or to any major disruption to employer-provided insurance, they do want insurance companies regulated to the extent that they cannot deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. To this end, there are no pure market solutions; Obamacare is the closest version of a market solution that anyone has devised, and voters decided that they prefer to stick with it.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch4\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBlue wave or Trumpian triumph?\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe term \u0026lsquo;wave election\u0026rsquo; is appropriate insofar as the Democrats reached successfully into Congressional districts that were long considered safe, Republican-held seats. And there will now be more than 100 women, a record number, in the US House of Representatives, almost all of them Democrats. But the wave, even so, was not dramatically more powerful than the natural, tidal oscillations of American politics. Most mid-term elections go against the president\u0026rsquo;s party. One could go further and paint it as a Trumpian triumph, insofar as the diverging House and Senate results were driven by the same rural-urban and white-minority polarisation that had rendered American politics so raw.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe defeats of three moderate Democratic senators in the red states of North Dakota, Missouri and Indiana (partly offset by a single Democratic pickup in Nevada) were amenable to two, not necessarily contradictory, narratives. On the one hand, the Senate electoral map this year was steeply and unusually tilted against the Democrats, who were defending many more Senate seats and mostly in rural, Trump-friendly states. On the other hand, this constituted further progress in the steady and Trump-helping polarisation of the United States between over-represented rural territories and under-represented urban or suburban ones.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe avatar of this anti-majoritarian system is, of course, the presidential electoral college, which Trump won in 2016 while losing the popular vote. Nothing in Tuesday\u0026rsquo;s results precludes him from doing it again, although the Democrats did make important gains in the upper Midwest, the epicentre of Trump\u0026rsquo;s 2016 triumph. The Democratic candidates pushed out Republican governors in Nevada, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Maine, as well as the Trump margin-of-victory states: Michigan and Wisconsin. Democratic governor Tom Wolf also won re-election in Pennsylvania, which was the third state in Trump\u0026rsquo;s electoral college trifecta. But Ohio went, narrowly, to the Republicans. \u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDemocrats had high hopes for radically progressive African-American governor candidates in Florida and Georgia. Georgia will probably be lost, and Florida is already lost to the Republican candidate \u0026ndash; the vaunted swing state that Al Gore lost in the Supreme Court and that Barack Obama won twice, albeit narrowly the second time. Florida now appears to be trending Republican.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThese state government contests are important not least because the decentralised mechanics of voting have become a hotly contested matter, with Democrats accusing Republicans of pursuing myriad tactics to suppress turnout among African Americans and other minorities, on the professed grounds of fighting supposed \u0026lsquo;voter fraud\u0026rsquo;, which elections experts consider negligible. One bizarre example is the still-undecided governor election in Georgia, where the Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, is currently secretary of state in charge of elections. On Friday, his office announced an investigation into an apparently spurious allegation that the Georgia Democratic Party tried to hack the computerised voter system. The basis of this accusation appears to be that it was Georgia Democrats who alerted the secretary of state\u0026rsquo;s office to vulnerabilities in the system.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe foreign-policy consequences of this election are difficult to predict. The president\u0026rsquo;s wide latitude in national security and diplomacy is unaffected, but the Democratic-controlled House will almost certainly be launching investigations into the Trump campaign\u0026rsquo;s relationship to Russian interference in the 2016 election; Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u0026rsquo;s independent investigation on the same subject is ongoing. Whatever the results of these investigations, they will in the meantime consume a large share of time and attention from an administration that will in any event be increasingly distracted by the demands of the 2020 presidential campaign \u0026ndash; which begins today.\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_y2WakzBGkSgFMDTJxCC2Q"))});
\u003cp\u003eWhile the gains made by the Democratic Party in the US mid-term elections signal resistance to Donald Trump\u0026rsquo;s presidency, the results were driven by the same rural-urban and white-minority polarisation that has rendered American politics so raw.\u003c/p\u003e
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