When he went to bed at Mar-a-Lago last Monday evening, Donald Trump was certain that he would be consecrated as the big winner of the mid-term elections which would take place the next day.
After all, he had picked and funded many candidates, held large rallies of his supporters across the country, and not a single Republican could match his popularity with party voters. He even said that he was going to announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2024 next week.
He wasn’t the only one to think so. Among the Republicans, the only question that seemed to arise is: should we call it an earthquake or a red tsunami?
Nearly a week later, the chips are not yet down, although it seems likely that Republicans will narrowly control the House of Representatives and the Senate majority will be settled later, in a second round of the election in Georgia.
The Democrats hardly believe their luck. They will lose between 10 and 20 seats in the House of Representatives, while the average for the party that has held the White House since the end of the Second World War is minus 27. For the record, Barack Obama had lost 63 in the elections. of 2010.
However, everything had to play for the Republicans this year. Voters seemed ready to blame Democrats and President Joe Biden for inflation and record gas prices.
That was counting without the question of abortion. Since the judgment of the Supreme Court in the case Dobbswhich invalidated the famous judgment Roe v. wadestates that want to can recriminalize abortion.
Democrats, who traditionally vote less than Republicans in midterm elections, had great motivation to vote this year.
It was believed that the effect of the cause Dobbs was going to fade through the summer and fall and that the economic situation was going to be “the question of the ballot box”. But the exit polls show the opposite.
If the economy was the main motivation of voters with 31%, abortion was a close second, with 27%.
Since the 1980s, Republicans had made an alliance with the religious right, promising it judges who would overturn the judgment Roe v. wade legalizing abortion. It was a powerful driving force for the Republican electorate.
But Democrats now have an equally motivated electorate on their side. One of the most discerning observers of the American electorate, Tim Alberta of the magazine The Atlanticeven wrote that it is “a new universe” for American politics.
But there was plenty of other bad news for Donald Trump last Tuesday evening.
First, many of the candidates he had personally chosen, funded and supported have bitten the dust. Whether in the Senate, Mehmet Öz in Pennsylvania or former football star Herschel Walker – on waivers in Georgia – or several candidates in the House.
What we notice everywhere in the United States is that the mere fact of claiming to be Trump is no longer successful. Trumpism has morphed into a sort of personality cult whose only credo is that the 2020 election was stolen from it. Except now, he’s been saying it for two years, and we still haven’t got a shred of proof.
Mr. Trump has tried to elect his supporters to important positions in the organization of the next election – such as secretaries of state – and most of them have also been defeated.
It must be said that President Joe Biden used the argument of the threat that this posed to democracy itself during the last days of the campaign to mobilize the Democrats, who answered the call.
So much so that after this campaign dominated by the image of Mr. Trump, even his supporters were beginning to wonder about his future and the usefulness for the party of offering him the rematch he is asking for.
“Every time he [Trump] talk about 2020, we lose,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of his staunchest allies.
IMAGE FROM THE NEW YORK POST WEBSITE
The one of New York Post from November 9
But Mr. Trump’s main problem is that he now has an opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, one who believed he was crushing potential contenders from the starting line.
Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, is just as acceptable to conservatives as Mr. Trump, but without the ego and inordinate need to be idolized. His results in Florida were impressive, with a decisive victory in the very Democratic city of Miami, including in the Latino community.
We only had to see the front page New York Post – one of the few newspapers that Donald Trump likes – with a photo of DeSantis and the headline “DeFUTURE” to understand that, for many, the Trump era is now over.