America has just experienced an electoral revolution, and it is still playing out in Washington’s 5th Congressional District race, where incumbent Republican Michael Baumgartner leads his Democratic challenger, Carmela Conroy, by just a single percentage point with many more ballots to be counted.
Yes, it always takes forever to count votes in Washington, but only in tight races — and there have been no tight races in Baumgartner’s heavily Republican Eastern Washington district for decades.
This year is radically different. Democrats won a long list of races all over the country that they were not supposed to win. Supposedly endangered Democratic incumbents, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington’s 3rd District, easily won reelection. In fact, no incumbent Democratic member of congress lost this year.
Conroy definitely was not expected to win the 5th District contest, but she just might. Anything is possible in the wake of an election that saw Texas dramatically shift from red to blue, Democrats win U.S. Senate seats in Republican strongholds like Kansas and South Carolina, legislatures and governorships in major swing states switch to Democratic control, and Democrats take over both houses of Congress.
Pollsters explain this upheaval by saying voters were motivated by bad feelings about the economy and opposition to the war with Iran, but there was something deeper that created the massive turnout, something that Republicans, so far, seem unable to accept, or, at least, say out loud: A majority of Americans loathe President Donald Trump.
It is Trump’s disastrous imposition of extreme tariffs on trading partners that has hit border states especially hard and drove votes for Democrats in places like Minnesota, Maine and Michigan. It is Trump’s foolish Iran adventure that has sent gas, diesel and fertilizer prices through the roof and led to Democratic victories in farm states like Iowa and Kansas.
Additionally, Trump’s draconian assault on immigrant workers caused a massive shift of Latino voters away from Republicans in places like Texas and Arizona.
Beyond that, according to polls, the issue at the top of voters’ minds was corruption in high places. They finally had enough of Trump’s blatant aggrandizement of himself, his family and his rich cronies. They were sick and tired, as well, of his boorish, vindictive behavior and coarse, petty meanness.
Unless Republicans face up to the fact that they have followed a con man down a dark path toward this startling reckoning, they will be hard pressed to sell themselves as anything but toadies and apologists for a deeply unpopular, dangerously inept buffoon.
During the campaign, Trump bounced around the country giving weird, incoherent speeches at sparsely attended rallies and ended his efforts with a very odd appearance at the Lincoln Memorial, where he shared photos of the poorly restored Reflecting Pool. Then, the day after an election in which his party took a historic drubbing, his one public appearance was a construction site tour of his gilded, gargantuan ballroom. As former President Barack Obama observed at his own October campaign events, Trump seems far more interested in home renovation than in doing anything to ease the struggles of the citizens he was elected to serve.
Trump has taken no responsibility for the GOP’s election debacle, showing no sign of caring about the fate of his fellow Republicans. Why they still care about him can only be explained by the psychology of cults.
Republicans are akin to devoted followers of a charismatic guru who find it nearly impossible to admit they have been bamboozled by a narcissistic charlatan, even when it is obvious to the rest of the world.
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