Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution. Trumpists losts on Tuesday. Last night, Democrats clinched the 50 seats they need to control the Senate, and they have a nontrivial chance of holding the House.
Voters in the six major battlegrounds where Donald Trump tried to reverse his defeat in 2020 rejected election-denying candidates seeking to control their states’ election systems this year, a resounding signal that Americans have grown weary of the former president’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud.
Candidates for secretary of state in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada who had echoed Trump’s false accusations lost their contests on Tuesday, with the latter race called Saturday night. A fourth candidate never made it out of his May primary in Georgia. In Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers lost his bid for governor, a job that would have given him the power to appoint the secretary of state. And in Wisconsin, an election-denying contender’s loss in the governor’s race effectively blocked a move to put election administration under partisan control.
The first reverberations of the biggest political earthquake of the cycle were felt online. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, upending a half-century of federally guaranteed abortion rights. Almost immediately, money came pouring into ActBlue, the Democratic online donation site.
An analysis of federal records showed that since the fall of Roe, Democrats had raised $627.7 million through ActBlue — more than two and a half times the $239.3 million Republican haul on WinRed, the G.O.P. donation portal — expanding an existing money edge.
The cash disparity served as an early warning sign for Republican enthusiasm. In contrast to other midterms, the party in power was the one most energized by what was being taken away from it. From coast to coast, Democratic campaigns ran abortion ads over the summer, casting Republicans as extremists and then winning some key races, including an abortion-related referendum in Kansas and a special House election in New York.
