Well that just happened. In some ways the 2018 midterm election was pretty "normal", that is it's fairly typical for a unpopular president's party to do poorly in midterm elections and that's basically what happened earlier this week. We also saw some other big recent trends in American politics continue apace: the partisan divide remains pretty Yuge and the country remains deeply divided along the lines of race, education, and geography. Indeed take a look at where the Dems won in the Senate and Obama won in 2012 and it's the same map (with the exception of Florida, which the Dems might end up winning after the recount!).
I'll have deeper thoughts on what to make of the Trump Era two years in, but for now I'll just make some quick observations.
I don't know what counts as a "wave" election, but by any standards this was a pretty great results for the Democrats. We won't know for a while but it looks like they ended picking up 35+ seats in the House which would make it their best showing since the post-Watergate wave in 1974. In addition, they picked up seven governor's races, and 330+ state legislative seats all over the country. These get much less coverage, but they are very important for all sorts of reasons, from finding new candidates to run for higher office in the future, to dealing with any matter of policy issues.
The victory wasn't total of course, in the Senate Democrats lost between two and four net seats, but that again is probably just the product of a very hard map for them this cycle and the flukes of winning in places like North Dakota, Missouri and Indiana back in 2012 due to the Republicans nominating really bad candidates who made, uhhh, unconventional campaign choices among other things. In that light the Senate results, while disappointing for Democrats, are hardly some massive defeat.
It was fashionable after Trump's election to talk about the idea of "realignment" in American politics. But while there have been some pretty big shifts from the Obama years, realignment clearly hasn't happened. One of the most apparent ones was in suburbs that were longtime bastions of GOP support, swinging hard to the Democrats. Here in Minnesota we saw Democrats take out Republican incumbents in the 3rd (western Twin Cities suburbs) and 2nd (southern suburbs and some rural areas) congressional districts. Along with a slew of GOP state representatives, many in positions of leadership in suburbs all around the Twin Cities.
However, despite it being a great night for the Democrats overall it wasn't that great for progressives. I totally agree with Eric Levitz, that you can always cherry pick a few examples to show that the key to winning elections is to embrace your policy preferences and preferred style of politics. After all progressive heroes like Beto and Stacey Abrams lost, but so did more moderate incumbents like Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heidkamp.
So while I wouldn't agree with the idea that "2018 shows that progressives can't win" I do think we did see an important dynamic play out. As I see it the much of the "regular" groups and actors in the Democrats "expanded party network" really did seem to be bowled over by Trump's win and initially didn't know what to do (this is true of a lot folks, Trump's camp itself seemed as surprised as everyone else that they won). And with no clear national leader or strategy in 2017 a lot of insurgent progressives forces where able to jump in to the gap aided by a progressive media figures eager to chart a new direction for the Democratic Party and the non-partisan press who loved the idea of continuing the Hillary vs Bernie death-struggle into the Trump era.
This whole trend never struck me as being grounded in reality as most of the real action in Democratic politics as of late hasn't been around ideological disputes over the future of the party. Moreover if you look at the actions of party aligned groups this cycle it's pretty obvious that the "regulars" did much better than the "insurgents." Two notable insurgent groups, the Bernie aligned Our Revolution and the new pressure group Justice Democrats saw zero of the challengers they backed be able to flip a US House seat. While more regular groups like Emily's List and the most regular of them all, the DCCC, saw dozens of the candidates they backed win.
In other words the first two years of the Trump Era were ones of great chaos, but as Petyr Baelish might put it, chaos is a ladder, and those two years presented a lot of opportunity for all sorts of groups. Trump could have tried to fasten his mixture of resentment and economic moderation into a new type of Republican politics but he either wouldn't or couldn't. Likewise unified GOP control of government gave conservatives the opportunity to really remake American society according to their own lines, but they failed to do that as well and ended up with just a remarkably unpopular tax cut instead. While progressive groups who really wanted to change the Democratic Party had a opportunity to wrestle control from the regular groups and actors who held it during the Obama years, but in the end they only succeeded in winning a handful of primary elections. While the GOP Senate and a need to defeat Trump will probably confine a lot of their ideas to the shelf for a while, with the regulars seemingly in control as ever.
In that sense we might be looking the 2018 being something of the beginning "return to normalcy" in American politics with fairly unchanged parties from 2015 squaring off in divided government. In any event much of Trump's agenda outside of judges is now dead in the water and attention will turn to the morass of scandals he's sinking into to and 2020.
Or not! In the Age Of Trump you of course never know.
