With inflation near 8% and an unpopular president in the White House, history suggested that Tuesday's midterm elections were going to be a wipeout for Democrats, as the 1994 and 2010 midterms had been. Instead, as we now know, Democrats did very well by historical standards — while, once all the votes are counted, they will likely have lost control of the House, they still have a good shot at keeping control of the Senate, and they won key governorship and Secretary of State races in swing states, while actually flipping state houses in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The two factors that had the biggest impact on the Democrats' performance were, it seems clear, candidate quality (which really means that Republicans nominated a surprising number of extremist candidates in potentially winnable races), and abortion rights. And the interesting question going forward is whether the Republican Party can do much to change the dynamics around either of those issues.

I'll look at abortion in my next post. Here, I'll focus on the question of candidate quality, where the Republican problem is pretty simple: the GOP base in swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan is much further to the right than the Democratic base in those states is to the left. The Republican base in these states (indeed, almost everywhere) is made up of very culturally conservative MAGA voters, while the Democratic base is made up mostly of moderate liberals. As a result, Republican voters in swing states nominated candidates for major statewide offices who had no real chance of winning, including governorship candidates Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Darren Bailey in Illinois, Dan Cox in Maryland, Tudor Dixon in Michigan, and Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts, and senatorial candidates Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and Blake Masters in Arizona. (Herschel Walker might also fall into this category, except his name recognition and celebrity in Georgia has kept him in the race with Raphael Warnock.) Republican Secretary of State nominees in swing states were often similarly extreme.

The Democratic Party actually spent money to help some of these extremist candidates win, which occasioned lots of lamentations from centrist pundits. But in almost all cases, the way the Democrats helped these candidates was by showcasing their extremism and their MAGA credentials (or, alternatively, their opponents' opposition to Trump), which actually made these candidates more appealing to GOP primary voters. And, in any case, almost all of these candidates won their nominations by substantial margins — Mastriano, for example, won his primary by 23 points. These were not, in other words, candidates that GOP voters were tricked into supporting. They were the candidates that the GOP base wanted to represent them.

Whether they were also candidates that the GOP base thought could win is a difficult question to answer convincingly, but the widespread conviction among Republican voters and pundits that Election Day was going to bring a massive red wave that would wash Democrats out of office across the country suggests that the GOP base was deluded enough to believe that people like Mastriano or Bolduc might actually be able to defeat their opponents.

MAGA voters live, it seems clear, largely in an echo chamber, consuming mainly right-wing media, talking mainly to right-wing voters, interacting on social media mainly with other true believers. And the politician they love most of all, Donald Trump, did win the 2016 election. So it's not entirely shocking that they would be convinced, wrongly, that MAGA candidates would be popular with the general electorate.

This is a serious problem for the Republican establishment, one it recognized and tried to counter, mostly futilely, during the primaries by funding and supporting more conventionally conservative candidates. The Republican Party in 2022 had very little control, or even influence, over the GOP base, certainly much less influence than Trump did. The hope, for establishment Republicans, has to be that the dismal performance of MAGA candidates — and the strong performance of Ron DeSantis, who is now Trump's chief rival — will change this, and convince right-wing Republicans to move a little bit back toward the middle, and to recognize that if the 2022 midterms proved anything, they proved that most American voters prefer candidates who are, in the end, normies.

That may happen. But it's far from guaranteed. The Republican Party as a whole went so far down the election-denial rabbit hole in 2020 that even this year — when GOP candidates who lost were generally much better about admitting defeat — there will be many GOP voters who convince themselves that their candidates lost because the Democrats cheated. And while Trump seems to have been taken down a couple of pegs — as evidenced by the open criticism of him in right-wing media outlets — we don't really know yet how much MAGA voters' faith in him has been shaken. It seems more than possible than many GOP voters will continue to believe that Trump can't fail — he can only be failed.

The problem of candidate quality will likely not be as big a problem for the GOP in 2024 as it was this year, simply because there will be almost no swing states up for grabs, and in red states, where three Democratic senators are going to have defend their seats, Republicans have a lot more room for error (as J.D. Vance proved this year by winning in Ohio by six points despite running a flaccid campaign). Even so, what 2022 tells us is that the GOP needs to find a way to bring its base closer to the center if it doesn't want to keep losing elections that it should have a reasonable chance of winning. And abortion, as I'll write about in my piece, presents the same dilemma in an even more irresolvable way.