American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  On the evening of November 6, the Map Room was used to track a different sort of battle—one between Republicans and Democrats, with control of the federal government on the line.

  The Office of Political Affairs transformed the space into an impressive Election Night war room. Running down the middle of the floor was one enormous table featuring power strips and docking stations, allowing everyone to project their laptops onto large monitors. A pair of fifty-inch high-definition televisions were situated on either end of the table, resting on roller carts; one showed a four-way split between ABC and the three cable networks; the other was tuned exclusively to Fox News.

  True to the room’s tradition, maps and charts were plastered across every vacant inch of the walls and table, guiding the president’s team through the nearly one hundred races they would be monitoring at the House, Senate, and gubernatorial levels: poll closing times; historical results by state and district; heat maps showing areas of targeted turnout; bellwether counties; contacts for every candidate and campaign; election attorneys by state; and opposition research briefs on Republican candidates whom they suspected might lose, allowing for quick spinning by White House surrogates.

  A number of VIPs drifted in and out of the election bunker: Trump’s children and their spouses, Pence and his wife, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders, among others. The vice president took a particular interest in Indiana, asking for maps to be zoomed in so that he could examine county returns and determine whether Democratic senator Joe Donnelly, one of the GOP’s top targets, could survive. Other visitors zeroed in on specific states where the president had campaigned, praying for good news to bring him.

  In fact, the only prominent official who avoided the Map Room was the president himself. He remained upstairs in the East Room, where a small party was being hosted for friends of the administration, who snacked on pizza and watched the returns come in on Fox News. Trump seemed dour and fatalistic; he made no speech and seemed less conversational than usual, eyeing the bank of televisions and awaiting updates from Stepien, his anxious political director. The president seemed to know that the night would not be one to celebrate.

  Downstairs in the Map Room, his team clung to a more optimistic outlook. Word had gotten around that the previous night, Steve Stivers, the chairman of the NRCC, had called Ryan, McCarthy, and Scalise with great news: Republicans were going to keep the House. Ryan was skeptical; all the polling from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP’s allied super PAC, showed losses approaching 30. Stivers was adamant that his projections were more accurate, that Republicans would hold on. McCarthy, always eager to deliver good news to Trump, had passed along the message to the president and his team.

  In the first three hours following the initial wave of poll closings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern, Republicans were encouraged: Marsha Blackburn had won the Tennessee Senate race, which had been surprisingly competitive all year; and Andy Barr, the GOP incumbent in Kentucky’s Sixth District, had fended off a tough Democratic opponent in what was widely viewed as a bellwether race for control of the House of Representatives. Nothing encouraged the president and his team more than the result in Missouri, a state Trump had visited seven times, where Republican challenger Josh Hawley knocked off Democratic senator Claire McCaskill.

  On CBS, John Dickerson declared that “Planet House is not spinning the way the Democrats want it to.” On ABC, George Stephanopoulos predicted a “disappointing night” for Democrats. On CNN, the liberal commentator Van Jones described the early returns as “heartbreaking.” Indeed, by 9:00 p.m. in Washington, things were looking up for the White House.

  Thirty-three minutes later, however, a familiar voice pierced through the din. “We are now ready to make one of the biggest calls of the night,” announced Bret Baier. “The Fox News Decision Desk can now project the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.”

  The Map Room fell silent. Then, after what might have been less than one full second, it ignited with shouted expletives and strewn papers. The president’s staff could not process what they had just heard: Early races had broken their way, polls on the West Coast were still open, and no other network or news service had yet made the call for control of the House. Some were sure it was a mistake and shushed their colleagues so they could hear more. “A lot of listeners out there, their heads are exploding,” Chris Wallace said, staring straight into the ground floor of the White House. “But this is going to be a very different Washington.”

  Trump was equally aghast upstairs in the East Room. It felt unreal to everyone watching from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All the “Fake News” organizations were holding back, recognizing the GOP’s strong showing early in the night, while Fox News, which typically operated as the president’s personal Pravda, was sticking a fork in his party.

  Trump wanted answers. Sanders, the press secretary, agreed to have White House communications director Bill Shine, a longtime Fox News executive who was still being paid by the network after joining the administration, reach out to his former colleagues for an explanation. What he got was short and sweet: The network was using, for the first time on an Election Night, new and advanced modeling that spliced AP election returns with advanced polling statistics to get a better picture of where certain races were headed. It was clear in their modeling, by the time Fox News made the call at 9:33 p.m., that Democrats would regain control of the House.

  It wasn’t until 10:22 p.m. that NBC News followed suit. CNN, which had been the first to call the Senate for Republicans (a far less controversial projection), did not join Fox News and NBC News in calling the House for Democrats until after 11:00 p.m.

  As the losses for House Republicans piled up, the result was sweet vindication for the election team at Fox News. It was a valuable reminder that, for all the brainwashing practiced by the likes of Hannity, Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, the network also employed some outstanding journalists: Baier, whose anchoring is strong and rigidly objective; Chris Wallace, the best interviewer in the business; Chris Stirewalt, the razor-sharp politics editor; Shepard Smith; Bill Hemmer; and several others.

  The contrast between the journalism and entertainment wings of the network had been a source of running tension for years, with Baier and Wallace known to apologize to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill for the antics of their colleagues. Wallace, for one, seemed to savor the occasion to shut one of them up on Election Night. When Ingraham opined that the election results showed “the Democrats are going to more of an Ocasio-Cortez party,” a reference to the Democratic Socialist in New York, Wallace stopped her.

  “I don’t think that is a fair thing to say about the Democrats. I think that is a complete mischaracterization,” he said, pointing out how the majority was won with moderate Democrats hugging the center. “You know, if you’re going to give the Republicans credit for holding on to the Senate, then I think you have to give Democrats credit for actually flipping the House.”

  As Trump’s staff went into full spin mode, saying the House was lost due to factors beyond the president’s control, and crediting Trump with saving the Senate majority, Wallace produced a fresh bucket of cold water.

  “I think we are . . . giving too much credit to Donald Trump for holding onto the Senate,” he said. “The fact is, this was a historically difficult year for the Democrats. The Democrats had twenty-six seats that they had to defend. The Republicans had nine seats they had to defend.”

  “So, yes, it’s a victory for Donald Trump,” Wallace continued, “but this was something he should have been expected to do.”

  A POLITICAL PARTY CAN ONLY PLAY THE HAND IT IS DEALT, AND REPUBLICANS took advantage of the friendly Senate map, knocking off numerous Democratic incumbents: McCaskill of Missouri, Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and most important to Trump, Bill Nelson of Florida, in a race he’d been personally invested in because of his friendship with Republican Rick Scott.

  There were
also a handful of marquee governor’s victories to celebrate, including in Florida (where Trump had gone all-in behind Republican Ron DeSantis) and Georgia (where Brian Kemp, the GOP nominee and secretary of state, came under intense scrutiny for purging disproportionate numbers of minority voters from the rolls, only to defeat Democrat Stacey Abrams by 55,000 votes).

  More striking were the gubernatorial election results in Maryland and Massachusetts. In Maryland, Republican incumbent Larry Hogan won reelection by a comfortable 12 points; and in Massachusetts, Republican incumbent Charlie Baker won another term by a whopping 34 points. The common denominator: Both men had governed as pragmatic problem solvers in two of the nation’s bluest states, setting aside divisive cultural fights and emphasizing kitchen table concerns: schools, roads, housing and health care costs, and the opioid epidemic. Even as the national GOP was addicted to dysfunction for much of the previous decade, some of its state parties were models of competence, and Hogan and Baker were at the forefront.

  On the whole, however, Democrats increased their number of governorships. The most celebrated win came in Wisconsin, knocking off Governor Scott Walker, who, friends worried, had gotten greedy in seeking a third term. The left’s most symbolic victory came in Kansas, where Democrats toppled the longtime immigration provocateur and Trump ally Kris Kobach, who ran what Republicans described as the worst campaign of the entire election cycle, focusing more on issues of voter fraud and border security than education and health care.

  Senate and gubernatorial contests aside, Election Night 2018 was defined by the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives—the statement it made about the appeal of Trump’s party, and the implications for the government moving forward.

  When all the votes were counted—which took weeks, considering the molasses mechanics of California—Democrats had won a net gain of 40 seats, well above the preelection forecasts in both parties that ranged between 25 and 30. This result was the culmination of two years of shrewd, self-controlled campaigning that took advantage of the president’s unpopularity in the suburbs by straddling the middle of the electorate and not giving in to the tribal nuttiness of the day.

  One notable casualty was Dave Brat in the Virginia suburbs. The Freedom Caucus board member lost to Abigail Spanberger, a sharp, centrist former CIA officer who had promised to bridge the divide between the two parties and bring down the decibel level in DC. The symmetry was striking: The man who had slayed Eric Cantor by running an anti-Washington, talk radio–backed campaign pounding the issue of immigration, was ejected from office because of his district’s adverse reaction to the president who followed that very blueprint. (Brat was promptly rewarded with a job running the business school at Liberty University.)

  While Republicans stood their ground in exurban and rural areas (and in some cases, even grew their support there), the story of the midterms was the Democrats’ supremacy in the suburbs. From New York to Philadelphia to Washington to Richmond to Atlanta to Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Houston to Oklahoma City to Denver to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Republicans bled support in America’s suburbs, giving away dozens of districts that had been drawn by GOP lawmakers not long before under the impression that those voters were party lifers.

  Driving this transformation of the suburbs was women—and particularly college-educated women. According to national exit polling, Democrats won 59 percent of women overall compared to Republicans’ 40 percent. (That 19-point margin was nearly double the 10-point spread by which Republicans lost women in 2016.) And among white women with a college degree, Democrats beat Republicans by 20 points.6

  The bulk of GOP losses came in districts where Trump’s numbers were insurmountably low. In these areas, Republicans witnessed a wipeout of some of their most effective members—including Mike Coffman of Colorado, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Peter Roskam of Illinois, and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, among others—whose strong individual brands back home were not sufficient to overcome the president’s devastating unpopularity. In Orange County alone, Democrats flipped all four of the remaining Republican-held congressional seats. The GOP had been wiped out in the heart of Reagan Country.

  Trump could not be held solely responsible for this realignment of the electorate. As the journalist Ron Brownstein has written, the “class inversion” of white-collar suburbanites moving toward the Democrats and blue-collar exurban and rural voters moving toward the Republicans has been under way for a generation. Yet the Trump presidency proved an explosive accelerant: According to the national exit poll of House races, Democrats won whites with a college degree by 8 points; Republicans won whites without a college degree by 24 points.

  These demographic splits, statistically speaking, would have been unimaginable one decade earlier.

  FOR ALL THE TALK OF TRUMP REMAKING THE ELECTORAL MAP IN 2016 and defying the prescriptions of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus and his “autopsy” were haunting the party from the grave. Republicans won white votes overall, 54 percent to 44 percent, according to the exit polls, but Democrats won nonwhites by a margin of 76 percent to 22 percent. Meanwhile, the overall vote share of whites fell 3 percentage points from the 2014 midterms, which itself had been down 3 points from the 2010 midterms.

  Trump had won the White House with an inside straight, sweeping the Rust Belt and notching impossibly narrow victories in the three predominantly white states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But repeating that path looked a lot more difficult as the returns came in on Election Night: In the statewide races for governor and U.S. Senate in those states, Democrats went six for six, patching the holes in their “Blue Wall” and regaining control over certain key functions of government, including voting regulations, that could prove decisive in 2020.

  Even setting aside the particulars of the Electoral College and Trump’s path to reelection, the warnings of the post-2012 RNC autopsy—that the aggregate demographic tradeoffs hurt Republicans long term—rang true once again. Trump’s party performed splendidly among the fastest-declining groups of voters and the decreasingly populated parts of the country in 2016, but Democrats dominated among the fastest-growing groups of voters and increasingly populated parts of the country.

  This was unsustainable over the long term, and possibly unworkable even in the short term. Exhibit A: Texas.

  In a state no Democrat had won statewide since 1994, and where the GOP incumbent, Ted Cruz, was better financed and better organized than almost any Republican in the country, the result was a 2.5-point win for Cruz. If ever there was a moral victory for Democrats, this was it. Cruz won 66 percent of whites, who made up 56 percent of the electorate; but O’Rourke won 69 percent of nonwhites, who made up 44 percent of the electorate. It wouldn’t be long before those composition statistics are inverted, with nonwhites comprising the majority of Texas voters; when that happens, the state will cease to be red unless Republicans dramatically improve their performance with minorities.

  Harris County, the home of Houston, offered a distillation of the GOP’s dilemma. With roughly equal proportions of Hispanics, blacks, and whites—and the whites increasingly college-educated—the county is viewed by both parties as a harbinger of America’s demographic future. Cruz lost it by more than 200,000 votes.

  It’s true that O’Rourke was an exciting candidate who mobilized the Texas Democratic base in unprecedented ways. But it’s also true that trend lines in the state bode ominously for the GOP. Back in 2016, not a single House Republican in Texas lost reelection; the only one who came close was Will Hurd, the former CIA agent representing a 71 percent Hispanic district on the southern border. Two years later, a pair of Texas Republicans lost their seats to Democratic challengers, and Hurd, widely viewed as the best campaigner in the House GOP, came dangerously close, winning by fewer than 1,000 votes despite an approval rating in the 70s.

  “It was near-presidential turnout in 2018. The Republican base showed up, but it’s shrinking as a percentage of the voti
ng population,” Hurd said after the election. “In 2016, only one Texas Republican got less than fifty-five percent of the vote; that was me. In 2018, twelve [of us] got less than fifty-five percent of the vote. Two of them lost. The average difference in our margins from 2016 to 2018 was negative fifteen points. This is a trend that has to be stopped, and the only way you stop that trend is by appealing to a broader base of people. If the Republican Party in Texas ceases to look like voters in Texas, there will not be a Republican Party in Texas.”

  It goes without saying, but if there’s not a Republican Party in Texas, there won’t be much of a Republican Party in America. The state’s 36 Electoral votes have been the foundation of the GOP’s path to the White House since 1980. Without Texas, the GOP’s presidential math becomes unworkable—period.

  It’s a similar, albeit less dire situation, in Arizona. Having won sixteen of the past seventeen presidential elections there, Republicans have come to depend on the state’s 11 Electoral votes as a red bulwark in the dauntingly blue West Coast. Yet Trump won the state by less than four points in 2016, the smallest margin in two decades, thanks to poor performance with the state’s nonwhite population. And unlike in Texas, the Democrats broke through in 2018, winning the Arizona Senate race by a relatively comfortable margin, with the Democratic nominee, Kyrsten Sinema, carrying 68 percent of the state’s nonwhite voters.

  Georgia represented a final red flag for the Republican Party. Despite carrying the state in six consecutive presidential elections, Republicans have seen its shifting demographics (increasingly urban, college-educated, and nonwhite) yield shrinking margins over the past decade. In 2018, with Abrams vying to become the nation’s first black female governor, Republicans hung on by less than 2 percentage points. The reason: Kemp, the GOP nominee, won 74 percent of whites, who made up 60 percent of the electorate; but he lost 84 percent of nonwhites, who made up 40 percent of the electorate. As in Texas, it’s only a matter of time until these composition ratios are reversed.