A Republican Wave—or a Ripple?

The midterm elections will test whether the GOP can make gains while demonstrating contempt for mainstream public opinion

President Bill Clinton listens to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during a joint appearance at the local senior center in Claremont, NH, June 11, 1995. (Photo by Geoff Hansen)

When a striking political event happens once, it’s an anomaly. When it happens a second time, it looks like a possible pattern. Only with the third time can a pattern be confirmed and the observation elevated into something considered a regular or normal occurrence. (If the event recurs more than three times, it begins to look like something social scientists will pronounce an iron-clad law of politics.)   

A little over two months from now, on November 8, the American political system will be testing whether the apparent trend of Democratic presidents in the post-Reagan period enduring an historic wipe-out in their first midterm election should be considered a regular or normal occurrence.

It happened to Bill Clinton in 1994, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. And then it happened to Barack Obama in 2010, when Republicans won a net gain of 63 seats in the House, the biggest shift in a single election since 1948.

A couple months ago, many were predicting something similar would take place this November. Joe Biden’s approval rating was sinking to levels well below Clinton’s and Obama’s during the summer of their second years in office. Gas prices were spiking. The Democratic agenda seemed permanently stalled in Congress. Donald Trump looked to be losing some of his grip on the Republican Party, leading the GOP to appear less dangerous to independent voters. Put it all together, and it felt like a third Democratic midterm wipeout was looming.

But now much of that has changed. Gas prices have fallen. The Dems finally passed a large bill to address climate change and several other policy priorities. Trump is back in the news in a big, bad way. But most of all, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—and Republican politicians, especially at the state level, have responded by supporting draconian laws that place them quite far outside the mainstream.

That the Democrats could be spared a terrible drubbing by Republican extremism on social issues is an extremely encouraging development—because it shows that there are limits to how far right the GOP can go without paying a painful political price.

How Republicans Insulate Themselves From Public Opinion

It hasn’t always been clear that this is the case. Back in March, three months before the Dobbs decision overturning Roe came down, I wrote a column at The Week titled “How far to the right can Republicans go?” I argued there that two factors in our politics threatened to continue insulating the GOP from small-d democratic backlash to their extremism.

The first is the increasing efficiency of the Republican electoral coalition. Some of this, especially in House races, comes from gerrymandering that creates lots of safe Republican districts that will continue to vote for the GOP no matter how radical individual candidates happen to be. (Often the more radical the candidates, the better they will do in such homogeneous right-leaning districts.)

But there is also the extremely efficient distribution of Republican voters across the country. Whereas Democrats tend to cluster into more densely populated areas in and around cities, Republicans are widely distributed within and across a larger number of states, which gives them outsized strength in the state-based parts of our electoral institutions—the Senate and the Electoral College.  

Then there’s negative partisanship, which combines with GOP electoral efficiency to insulate the party’s increasingly extreme candidates from negative consequences. We saw this in the 2016 presidential race, when the unpopularity of Democrat Hillary Clinton among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents ensured a strong showing for Trump despite the widespread conviction that he was unfit for the presidency and too radically heterodox on policy. The voters disliked Trump, but just barely enough of them disliked Clinton even more.

The same dynamic nearly worked again in 2020, when Trump came within about 50,000 votes scattered across 3-4 states of defeating Biden in the Electoral College, despite losing the national popular vote by 7 million. The reason Trump (narrowly) fell short the second time is that negative partisanship turned out to be less salient than it had been four years earlier. Biden just wasn’t hated by enough people or with anything like the intensity that Clinton inspired.

Doing the Bidding of Radical Activists

If red-state legislators had responded to the imminent overturning of Roe by embracing the center-right consensus on abortion—something like abortion outlawed after 12 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother—I doubt the angry reaction of blue-state Democrats to the Dobbs decision would have been enough to overcome the various advantages Republicans enjoy at our political moment.

But, of course, this isn’t at all what Republicans have done at the state level. They’ve adopted the preferred positions of the most extreme pro-life activists in the country: outlawing abortion outright, from the moment of conception onward; refusing to codify exceptions to general bans on the procedure; attempting to criminalize interstate travel to prevent women from crossing state lines to procure abortions in more liberal states; and so forth.

The radical character of these red-state restrictions on abortion have helped to inspire solidarity among liberal and progressive women living in very different parts of the country, where regulation on abortion services are far more minimal. It’s almost as if Republicans have been trying to confirm the truth of left-wing-activist rhetoric: If Republicans win power, they will take away your constitutional rights, impose laws that radically curtail your freedom, and display indifference to the negative consequences of doing so.

I suspect a lot a women who have voted for Republican candidates at some point in the past, or who might have been persuaded to do so in the future, have been deeply shaken by how things have unfolded since late June. The result has begun to show up in the outcome of special elections, with Democratic women highly motivated to vote. That could well influence turnout and anti-GOP sentiment among independent women in November as well.

Will Republicans Receive Their Comeuppance in November?

None of this guarantees that Democratic losses will be minimal in the midterms, let alone that Republicans will lose ground. (Though there are already signs that some campaign strategists are getting scared and urging candidates to back off their abortion extremism a little.) At the moment, the most likely scenario is that the GOP picks up some seats in the House—and with the current Democratic majority so narrow, that probably means a flip to Republican control—while failing to take the Senate or just barely capturing it.

Democrats losing the House would be bad, and losing the Senate would be even worse. But if they can blunt Republican efforts to reproduce the waves of 1994 and 2010, that would both defy a would-be historical pattern and serve as strong evidence that Republicans paid a serious price for lurching so far to the right on abortion. And that, in turn, might convince some in the GOP that the party needs a conservative variation on “popularism”—the strategy pushed by Democrats who think elected officials and candidates should distance themselves from the unpopular positions favored by left-wing activists.

That could well be good for Republicans, making them more competitive with Democrats in future election cycles. But it would also be good for the country, since American democracy needs parties that respond to public opinion, not just to the demands of the most highly engaged activists on one side of the political spectrum.