At long last, the vaunted “red wave” that eluded the Republican Party two years ago washed over the United States and carried President-elect Donald Trump back to the White House and likely with it a Republican-controlled Congress.
Two years ago, Republicans stood at their election night watch parties in disbelief as the sizable House and Senate majorities that the party expected voters would hand them failed to materialize. Instead, Democrats, despite facing the headwinds of an unpopular President Joe Biden, managed to overperform expectations and maintain control of the Senate while holding Republicans to a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives. The red wave that was promised fizzled into a trickle.
Much was made of that being the result of a backlash to the end to a national right to abortion — after all, the election took place months after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But in hindsight, it may have been that the electorate that would have delivered a sweeping Republican victory just stayed home.
But in 2024, stay home they did not. Trump’s victory in the presidential election was the sweeping electoral mandate that has largely eluded Republicans since George H.W. Bush won a landslide in 1988. The red wave that was promised in 2022 was merely delayed until 2024, when it delivered a definitive repudiation of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party’s four years of governance.
The scale of the Republican triumph is astounding. From coast to coast, Trump improved on his margins from 2020 and even 2016. In the deep-blue states of Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, Connecticut, and elsewhere, Trump and Republicans drastically cut into Democratic advantages, to the point that several of those states swung by double digits to the right. Republicans also took back control of the U.S. Senate and are poised to hold their majority in the House of Representatives. It was a thorough and decisive victory.
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Republicans now find themselves in a position where high-turnout elections such as the presidential election are to their benefit. But lower-turnout elections, such as a midterm election, put them at a distinct disadvantage. For better or worse, the party has traded high-propensity college-educated voters for low-propensity noncollege-educated voters. And while the latter outnumbers the former, it means nothing if those voters do not turn out to vote.
But when they do, it truly reflects the mood of the country. And on Tuesday night, the voices of an angry and fed-up electorate finally delivered the wave election that the Republican Party was waiting for since Biden took office, and in decisive fashion, the electorate repudiated the four years of failure that his administration wrought.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
