The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that Tuesday’s election was a rejection of the president but not necessarily and embrace of “progressive” propositions on ballots around the country:
Democrats had an extraordinary night at the ballot box on Tuesday, but what does it mean for policy? Looking further down the ballot in swing states shows that while voters wanted Democratic elected officials to check President Donald Trump, they also wanted to check the power of government. And they aren’t sold on left-wing economic policy prescriptions.
They follow that with a selection of “left-wing economic policy prescriptions” that failed in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, all states in which Democrats replaced Republicans in the Congress but ballot propositions were defeated. They conclude:
If voters in the most competitive battlegrounds believed in progressive policies, they would have rejected these ballot measures with as much enthusiasm as they voted for Democrats. But they approved a lot of conservative policies while voting for anti-Trump candidates. If Democrats lurch far left on policy, the voters who gave them an enormous victory on Tuesday will probably be strongly tempted to switch back to the GOP or stay home in future elections.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal take a similar tack:
Democrats won an historic midterm election victory Tuesday, and congratulations on again having real legislative power. The question now is what lessons Democrats will take from their triumph, and whether they’ll return to the same mistakes of the Biden era that cost them so dearly in 2024.
The first essential lesson is that voters are handing Democrats power because they wanted to rebuke President Trump. They think he failed to deliver on his promise to lower prices, and they don’t like his excesses on the rule of law, tariffs, mass deportation, and crony cashing in.
Voters weren’t endorsing the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even the 38% for the Republican Party. Voters also weren’t embracing a Democratic policy agenda, since the party didn’t offer one. Candidates chanted “Trump” like an incantation and then talked about costs and corruption. They offered little specificity about how to reduce costs.
I’d like to offer a brief “unified theory” of voter behavior in the last elections that include not just those listed by the WaPo editors but those in California, Washington, and elsewhere. Voters tend to favor policies whose benefits they can identify and whose costs they believe they can avoid. They resist policies that impose visible costs or threaten arrangements they regard as personally important.
- people don’t like rising prices, particularly a rising price for gasoline
- people don’t like paying more in taxes
- people don’t mind other people paying more in taxes as long as they’re confident those taxes won’t ultimately fall on them
- most people don’t think that sexual identities compete in athletic events—bodies do
- parents are protective of their authority over their children
One final observation. American voters are a lot less tribal and more pragmatic than many seem to think.
