It's now 11 am in Germany, where I am, which means it's 5 am in NY. By the time you all wake up, the information upon which this is based may change. But with the vantage of a night's sleep, here is how things look to me, trying to fuse the immediate returns with a longer sense of where the right is and has been and is going.
1. The scariest part of Trump's win in 2016 was that with that agenda, the GOP gained total control over the elected branches of the federal government. With that same agenda, even more so, the GOP last night lost that total control over the elected branches of the federal government.
2. I've been pointing out for two years all the ways in which the GOP agenda—from entitlement spending to budget cuts to health care—has been stymied with total control over the elected branches of the federal government. Having lost that control, they will have an even harder time of it.
3. The three key states in 2016—the three key states that gave Trump his victory with 80,000 votes—were Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Last night, all three of those states elected Democratic senators and governors. (And got rid of the odious Scott Walker who more than anyone began this most recent cycle of epic revanchism on the right.) In fact, if you throw in Ohio, another state that gave Trump his victory, there were 8 statewide races (for senator and governor) in these Upper Midwestern states. Democrats won 7 out of 8 of those statewide races.
4. I said before yesterday that we needed to focus on state legislative races. So far it seems that at least six legislative chambers have flipped—all to the Democrats and away from the Republicans. Also on Twitter, it's being said, the Democrats have gained six trifectas (where one party controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor's mansion) while the Republicans have lost three. Keep looking at the results all day to confirm or add or revise to this. But it's an important harbinger.
5. The losses of Gillum, Abrams, and Beto especially hurt because it seemed so possible for them to win, and to win on Democratic rather than conservative terms, to affirm the multiracial coalition in the face of the worst white revanchism. But they ran very strong campaigns, and the ballot measure in Florida to enfranchise former felons seems the more important long-term story.
6. Overall, I'd say the picture is not that different from where we've been—which in and of itself is good news considering that many people weren't sure we'd even have an election yesterday—and to the extent that there is change, it mostly points to signs of Republican weakening: that is, loss of control over the federal government, loss of control over a bunch of state governments, key movement in the Upper Midwest, and some very important long-term reforms. The victories in the Senate for the GOP aren't nearly as significant to me b/c it doesn't change the fundamental dynamic in the Senate and b/c they were in very strong red states. (And in 2020 a lot more of those GOP senatorial seats will be up for grabs than they were this year.) Where you saw movement against type, it was movement away from the GOP.
7. I just read an article by Gary Gerstle in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. In it, he defines the term "political order": "Perhaps nothing indicates the power of a political order more than its ability to shape the thinking of its opponents." By that he means, the New Deal fundamentally shapes the thinking of Eisenhower and the GOP in the 1950s who are forced to accept its terms, or the way that Reaganism fundamentally reshapes the Democratic Party so that Bill Clinton and the Dems fundamentally come to accept the thinking of Reaganites. I see absolutely no sign that anything like that is happening under Trump. To the contrary: the more he draws on the distilled essence of white nationalist revanchism and ultra-plutocracy, the more the Democrats and anyone who's not a Republican refuse to go there and in many cases push in the opposite direction. This is a long struggle, and the Democrats remain in pretty bad shape, as does the left as a whole. But having lived through the decades in which the Democrats reinvented themselves in Reagan's image, I have to say that all signs point not to the consolidation or creation of a new political order but to the continuing breakdown of the old one.
UPDATE: Just learned this on Twitter. Conor Burns, a Tory MP, tells the following story which seems all too relevant to point #7: "Late in 2002 Lady Thatcher came to Hampshire to speak at a dinner for me. Taking her round at the reception one of the guests asked her what was her greatest achievement. She replied, 'Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.'"
