What Did We Learn From the Midterms?

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This week's election left America with a split government, Republican control of the Senate, Democratic control of the House, along with a number of dramatic developments in state and local politics.

It would be artificial to impose one single story onto the midterm results.

So, today we discuss five different lessons from the midterms

and what they might mean for 2020.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Today we're going to talk about Tuesday's midterm elections.

Given the many different results, what does it all mean for American democracy?

We're talking with five Atlantic journalists, each of whom has been focused on a different theme or question related to Tuesday's election.

First up, how did voter purges and other battles over voter rights play into the results?

When we convened last week to preview the midterms, this was one of the big factors that our reporters were watching.

Now, after the election, one of the biggest unresolved questions is in Georgia, where the Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp went up against the Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams.

The race had already been rife with allegations of voter suppression as thousands of voters were purged from the ballot.

Then on Tuesday, many voters reported difficulty casting their ballots, both in person and absentee.

And now that race may be headed for a runoff.

Our reporter, our staff writer Van Newkirk, was in Georgia this week.

Van, what was your biggest takeaway?

What did you see in Georgia this week?

What I saw on the ground in Georgia, not just in Atlanta, across the Atlanta metro area, picking up on reports from people out in rural counties.

This was one of the most,

the election with the most irregularities on the ground that I've ever heard of or seen.

People waiting three or four hours in line to go vote in the morning.

You had places where, in Fulton County, Atlanta, where you expected thousands and thousands of voters to come during a rush hour where they had three machines and were supposed to have something like nine.

I went to one elementary school out in Snellville where they had forgotten the power cords for the voting machines and had to extend the hours.

You had things like students in Morehouse and Spelman being denied access to

the polls, were given provisional ballots.

I cannot list all the different discrepancies that just me, that I came across, that people told me about while I was down there.

And there are several more from other reporters who were finding them.

So those are that's the backdrop.

And before that, in the weeks before, you know, you had all of the voter purges from Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who's also the GOP nominee.

Regardless of how this thing ends,

there are going to be plenty questions after the fact.

Aaron Powell, Aaron Powell, How illustrative of

the conditions around voter rights, voter suppression happening nationwide, do you think Georgia was?

Was Georgia a crazy outlier in all of those irregularities?

I think Georgia is both an outlier and is also representative of where the country is headed.

One of the big issues in Georgia,

the common themes on Election Day, was the fact that its electronic voting infrastructure was just terrible.

Nothing worked.

And

that's the case for other states is their digital voting infrastructure is weakening.

It is vulnerable to attacks and it will only get worse.

I think every state now is moving towards a more difficult electoral, not every state, but many states are moving towards a more difficult voting

structure and process.

So you have voter ID, which has been in effect in Georgia for some time.

And we know that voter ID was a difficulty for people.

We know that elections officials who weren't properly trained is a big problem.

And as states lose the money to train their

volunteers, that's going to happen there too, as their electronic systems get weak.

And so we see the confluence of basically every single piece of

Georgia's electoral system is, I think, emblematic of where lots of states, especially in the South, especially post-Shelby County versus Holder, now that we don't really have any type of proactive oversight of elections laws there, they're going to get more difficult.

They're going to be less secure and less reliable on Election Day.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: This is the third

nationwide election since the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County versus Holder.

Can you just remind us what happened in that decision?

The Voting Rights Act has a provision called a pre-clearance, which was the method by which federal courts and the Department of Justice were given preemptive oversight over any elections law in places where the old Jim Crow existed.

So where they had poll taxes and literacy tests, every place that had those under the VRA had to submit any new elections law.

So not just big things like voter ID, but whether a place was going to move a polling site.

They had to submit that to federal overview.

And the federal government would not accept changes to elections law that they predicted would decrease minority turnout.

And that was the gist, the most powerful piece actually, of the Voting Rights Act.

So in Shelby County versus Holder, the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, decided that the formula by which

the Congress decided that the courts and the DOJ would have that oversight was invalid

and essentially made it so that oversight is gone.

Aaron Powell, and right after that decision went through, jurisdictions that had been restricted from changing their elections laws without the sanction from the DOJ started saying, hey, we got some changes we want to make.

Is that right?

Yeah.

North Carolina's voter ID law passed that week.

And lots of other states moved to implement voter ID changes.

They moved to make more aggressive gerrymanders in the remedy maps.

You see people start purging voters at an alarming rate.

The Brennan Center for Justice found I think there were something on the order of 2 million more people who were purged than projected if Shelby County versus Holder had not happened.

Georgia lost something on the order of 8% of all its polling places since Shelby County versus Holder.

Way elections are administered has changed markedly, especially in the South since Shelby County v.

Holder.

Wow.

So this midterm election is happening in that context.

Let's go back to Tuesday night then.

What lessons, given that a lot of these

counties that were making these decisions about

restrictions on voting

were led by Republicans, what lessons do you think the GOP took away from Tuesday night?

Well, I've talked to actually quite a few Republican strategists on this.

None of them on on the record, of course.

But

when we talk, you know, I think the real politic of it is that Republicans win elections when fewer people vote.

And that's the game.

And especially in a place like Georgia, which is something in the order of 30% black,

if you can ensure, and not even by illegal means, you know, by legal methods,

ensure that fewer black people are going to vote, Republicans are going to stay in control.

And that's the gist of the political game as being played in places that have significant black and Latino populations.

How well did that strategy work on Tuesday night?

Seems like it worked pretty well.

I think you can see Abrams, she was always going against the weight of suppression.

She was always trying to pick up unlikely voters, people who had not voted before, people who were having trouble with their polling places.

And as we know, those are much more difficult, time and resources intensive people to get out to the poll.

So she was always fighting an uphill battle of sorts.

And essentially all Kemp has to do, all the Republicans in that state have to do is preserve the status quo.

And they did, seems like.

So

what do you expect?

Given what we saw on Tuesday, it's the first time that we've heard from

the American electorate in a big way since 2016.

And so

take some of what you saw in the results of Tuesday's elections and point that forward.

What might we expect if Tuesday's patterns hold looking ahead to 2020?

Well,

undoubtedly, 2018 showed us that voter suppression works.

And it showed us also that there aren't really any penalties for doing it.

Even if it is illegal, if you do something illegal, nobody goes to jail for it.

There's no federal penalties for disenfranchising people.

And

right now, due to the fact that we don't have federal pre-clearance, there is no preemptive oversight.

So essentially, unless somebody can see what's happening and can sue and a federal court says, oh, wait, and it gives you an injunction, most of what we are doing, most of what we're seeing is people suing after they've already been disenfranchised.

So

there's a strong incentive right now to make things more difficult for people to vote within the bounds of legality.

And there are lots and lots of ways to do that if you want to get creative.

Well, all I know is that whatever happens, I'm going to be looking for you to

explain to me what it was.

I need a nap first.

Well, may you get it.

Van Newkirk, thank you once again for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So we are going to pick up our conversation about Tuesday's elections next with staff writer, the Atlantic staff writer, Emma Green.

Emma, hello.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, Hey, Matt.

Now folks have been bandying around this phrase, year of the woman, once again.

You know, here in the American pedantry class, we love a good moniker.

And here in the age of the remake, we love a good recycled moniker.

So we are bringing back terms from 1992, the year when there were four new female senators elected to the United States Senate in the wake of the Anita Hill participation in Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings.

There's a sort of interesting resonance both with the level of female participation and election this year, but also with the Supreme Court hearing and that sexual assault or misconduct allegation as the sort of prompter for female rage sweeping women into office.

So there's kind of an echo of something that went on now almost three decades ago.

Now, can you tell us what actually happened on Tuesday night?

How much did women gain in representation in American politics?

Well, the major story here is women helping Democrats to take the House of Representatives.

There were huge wins, not just in

races where seats had previously been occupied by by men, but specifically in seats where Republican men used to sit.

Women were the ones responsible for bringing the Virginia delegation, making it more blue, for bringing the Pennsylvania delegation, making it more blue.

They snagged seats in states like Iowa and Texas.

They were also able to break barriers around certain types of representation.

So we have the first two female Native Americans in Congress, the first two female Muslims in Congress, the first two Latinas representing Texas, which is a hugely Hispanic state.

So we have women across the board breaking barriers.

We also have women on the Republican side setting their own kinds of records.

For example, Christy Noam

was elected the governor of South Dakota.

We have Marcia Blackburn in Tennessee becoming the first female senator from that state.

So across the board, we see women making gains and really showing up this election.

The phrase, year of the woman, does tend to raise some eyebrows.

Tell us about some of the criticisms that folks have had of that way of thinking now and back in the salt and pepper and vogue days when it first got its start.

I love that that's how you remember the early 90s.

That's very on brand for you.

It is.

So I would say the criticisms are a few.

The first is that there is no one year of the woman that's going to fix women's underrepresentation in Congress and across government offices, lower and upper, federal and state level, because women are vastly underrepresented, period, basically across every possible office of government.

A lot of people may think, okay, it's not just the blue wave, it's the pink wave.

That's a term I saw tossed around as well, and would be disappointed to find out that the final total for women in the United States House of Representatives is still going to hover right around a quarter of seats.

There's another sense here that year of the woman tends to flatten out female voters in the United States.

We often talk about women in politics or women's gains in politics only when it comes to liberal progressive women, but conservative women have made gains as well, and they're also setting records in certain areas.

Is there a widespread sense that there's a lot of room left to keep this pattern going?

I mean, for people who study this, the answer is resoundingly yes.

What we are looking for specifically is that period that will arrive when it is unremarkable for women to be winning races around the country.

There's still a really long way to go and people may be shocked by how long

there is a road ahead.

And so I do think that people who follow this from a reporting perspective, people who do research on this, basically people, no matter what their political affiliation, who generally believe that it's good for women to be represented in government,

they all think that there is a lot of work left to do.

What do you think this means for 2020?

Yeah, so a few things here.

I think the first is definitely that women's power and empowerment is shown to be a hugely potent factor in American politics.

We have seen these crowds of older, middle-aged white ladies who will sit around on a Sunday afternoon sending postcards to try to move the needle on state-level elections.

We have seen a campaign in Texas for Beto O'Rourke that was largely supported and organized by women.

We have seen female candidates who are coming out for the first time who will be more experienced in the next election round.

So that empowerment, if it can be maintained, and that energy and rage in some cases, if it can be maintained, I think will be a potent force.

And the second thing is just that there is an electoral truth here that women tend to be more Democratic.

And the Democratic Party in general tends to be the party of women who are represented in government.

And the fact that we had this huge huge surge of women in the U.S.

House of Representatives is just going to remake the electoral math and the electoral dynamics for 2020.

So I think the women who got into office on Tuesday night are going to be hugely consequential for shaping the electoral atmosphere in the next 18 to 24 months.

Well, Emma, thank you very much for all your insights this afternoon.

Thanks for taking time out of a very busy afternoon to speak with us.

Yeah, sure.

This is the most fun thing I'll do all day.

Now we're going to talk about some of the demographic characteristics of Tuesday's election and the turnout with one of the Atlantic's experts on demographics and how they apply to American politics, our senior editor Ron Brownstein.

So Ron, a lot happened on Tuesday.

What is the divide that you think mattered most in the midterm elections?

Well, look, I think the, you know, we are living through an overlapping demographic and geographic sorting out of the country.

And I think the fundamental divide in American politics is between the voters who are most comfortable with the way the country is changing economically, culturally, and demographically, and those who are most uneasy about it.

And this is, you know, expressed, as I say, both demographically and geographically.

What I call the Coalition of Transformation is based in the large metros.

It tends to be white-collar.

It tends to be younger, more diverse, often more secular.

And the coalition of restoration

is the, you know, the alternative.

It's outside of metro areas.

It's older.

It's preponderantly white.

It's more religiously traditional.

It's blue-collar.

Three-quarters of self-identified Republicans today are white Christians.

That was last true for the country in 1984 when Ronald Reagan got re-elected.

And what we saw was each of these disparate, very disparate coalitions, geographically and demographically, making a diametrically opposed statement about what they think about Trump and what they think about the country's overall direction.

It was really like two elections, two Americas, one that repudiated him, I think, about as forcefully as it could, and one that reaffirmed their commitment to him about as forcefully as it could.

We often talk about the divide between urban and rural voters, but the suburbs played a pretty big role in voter behavior last night.

How does the suburban voter fit in?

Yeah, I kind of think of it as metro and non-metro because I think the suburban, you know,

we cover a lot under that label.

And I really think it's these inner suburbs, these white, predominantly white-collar suburbs, often diverse suburbs that are tight in the major metro areas.

And we just saw astonishing movement among them yesterday.

I mean, essentially, I was looking at the CNN magic wall this morning,

you know, playing around with it.

And

every metro area in the country, every metro area in the country increasingly looks blue.

I mean, what was striking about last night was not only did Republicans lose suburban, affluent, well-educated seats in New Jersey and Philadelphia and Chicago, Minneapolis, almost certainly the one in Seattle, Denver.

I mean, those are kind of places that we're all accustomed to expect to be leaning toward the Democrats.

They lost seats like that in Kansas City, in Houston, in Dallas, in Charleston, in Des Moines,

likely in Atlanta, you know, pending the final count.

I mean, this was something that was happening everywhere.

And I think if you look at Betto O'Rourke's margins, for example,

Houston and Dallas County and Bear County, which is San Antonio, now don't look that different than Austin.

And what that tells you is the urban, non-urban, the metro, non-metro politics

are basically

transcending what we think of as red state and blue state.

I mean, every state.

Democrats won apparently in Salt Lake City.

Every state is seeing this divide

between

metro areas where you have voters who are connected to the information economy, basically okay with the global economy,

fine with changing demography, fine with pressing seven for Spanish, don't mind a unisex bathroom.

And then you have kind of the parts of every state that, you know, find all of that,

you know, kind of threatening or,

you know, kind of undermining what America has been.

And it's not like everybody on either side of this divide votes one way or the other, but each side is tilting more emphatically, blue or red.

Can you spin this forward for me?

What do you think that these patterns portend for 2020 and possibly beyond?

Well, first of all, I think it portends an absolute battle of the bulbs style election between what America has been and what it is becoming, as I like to say.

I think

in the long term,

the concentration of population and particular economic opportunity into the metro areas, I think creates an obvious long-term challenge for Republicans.

I mean, I believe that in American history, political power follows economic power.

And, you know, Clinton's counties, even though she won, for example, only one-sixth of the counties in the U.S., account for two-thirds of the GDP.

The problem Democrats have is that our system in a lot of different ways, you know, is built to advantage some of these small, rural,

less urban, less dense states.

And, you know, that's why we saw this remarkably divergent split-level result yesterday, in which essentially Metro America through the House rejected Trump, I think, pretty clearly, and small town, rural, heartland America embraced him pretty clearly.

And I think for 2020, we're going to see an enormous divide between metro and non-metro America.

I think you will see Democrats

really, I think that the best news for 2020 that came out of last night for them was the fact that in the three states that Trump dislodged from the blue wall, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and they made him president.

But Democrats yesterday won both a Senate and governor's race in each of those states.

And they did it by the way they used to win them in the presidential, by running just a little bit better, not some crazy improvement, but just a little bit better among working class white voters than they do elsewhere.

And I think that is, Matt, I think that's going to be the biggest takeaway.

I mean,

it looks like that is the clearest path back to the White House within those states.

But I would say say that it's going to be harder to win them against Trump than it was against Scott Walker and

Lou Barletta.

There's a lot of raw disappointment among Democrats today, but it's hard to look at these campaigns and not view them as a success in terms of the energy they brought to the Democratic Party, the number of new voters they brought in.

And

in particular, with Better Work, he won more votes in Texas than Hillary Clinton did two years earlier.

That's unimaginable.

So, you know, and he obviously helped sweep in two and maybe three in the end Democratic House members.

So I think that, you know, both pathways,

you can see the obstacles, but you can also see the opportunities of a Rust Belt path and a Sunbelt path for Democrats to try to get back over the top against Trump.

Well, Ron, thank you so much for taking the time this afternoon.

And good luck.

I hope you sleep at some point.

Yes, thank you.

We just talked about the divide between the urban and the rural vote.

That's one way of looking at the fundamental tensions in our society, but another fundamental divide was at work in part of Tuesday night's election.

Adam Harris covers higher education for the Atlantic.

Hi, Adam.

Hey, how's it going?

It's going well, thank you.

What would you say is the most striking pattern that you saw in Tuesday night's results?

So one of the things that we had been kind of monitoring in the run-up to the midterms was basically this education divide that has existed

pretty much since about 2012, but that has been kind of exacerbated in the Trump era.

And so that presumption played out actually in the results on Tuesday.

Yes, and it was pretty accurate.

You saw 61% of non-college educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans, while about 45% of college-educated white voters did so.

And then it was 53 to 37 on the Democratic side where you had white college educated voters supporting Democrats more frequently.

So I notice you talking about white college educated voters and white non-college educated voters.

How does that racial modifier affect this picture?

Is this phenomenon, what you call the diploma divide, limited to white folks?

Yeah, the reason why we kind of have that qualifier there is because this divide doesn't exist among other racial populations.

And one of the most interesting things here is that the divide was the exact opposite about 50 or 60 years ago.

So in 1952, you had the majority of non-college educated whites supporting Democrats.

You know, they were still the party of Lincoln, but they had kind of moved away from kind of civil rights and were focused on attracting southern white voters.

And essentially, as the Democrats become known as the Party of Civil Rights, so the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, when those policies become the things that the Democrats are hanging their hats on, you start to see a precipitous decline in the amount of non-college-educated white voters who are supporting the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the college-educated whites had been kind of firmly in the grasp of the Republican Party, and that had been pretty consistent up until about 2008, when,

as academics say, Obama simplifies the racial question.

You have the first black president, and it identifies the Democratic Party as kind of a party of progressive racial politics.

And then as you move into 2016,

you get...

President Trump, who has kind of built his legacy and built his political bona fides on questioning the legitimacy of the first black president and these anti-immigrant sentiments.

And so what you're actually seeing here,

there is an education divide, but it's also a divide over racial resentment and attitudes about how people feel about immigrants and minorities.

So is this divide, would you say, really about education, or is it a proxy for something else?

Well, I think...

Kind of like most things in America, it's always a proxy for something else, right?

But this is specifically,

you know, I spoke with several academics who had done studies on what's actually animating this.

Is it demographics?

Is it whether they're married?

Is it their race?

Is it their education?

Is it their gender?

And they said all of those things are important.

However, when you add in racial attitudes,

the diploma divide essentially disappears.

So when you add in the fact that you have racial resentment or anti-immigrant sentiments or you want a kind of aggressive,

kind of arrogant leader, when you take all of the people who hold those attitudes away from those who may have supported Trump, whether they have a college degree or whether they don't,

that kind of bucket disappears.

There aren't many people who voted for Trump who also don't have those sentiments.

So the argument is that

the education divide really is just kind of a proxy for this racial divide and this divide and racial attitudes among white voters.

So it kind of closes that education gap and it kind of shows that this is more of a mask for a racial gap than it is necessarily an education divide in itself.

Aaron Powell, what do you think that this pattern within the U.S.

means for 2020?

Most experts are kind of assuming that

this trend will continue.

I mean, as long as Trump is the candidate, as long as the Republican Party is kind of embracing his ideas, and then you may see a pulling away.

It's always kind of dangerous to predict, but you may see a further pulling away of college-educated voters from the Republican Party.

Once again, Adam Harris, the Atlantic's staff writer on higher education, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

So we've been talking about what Tuesday was about, but we haven't yet talked much about about the president.

David Graham is here.

He's a staff writer covering politics for the Atlantic.

David, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

And thank you for joining us.

So, David, was Tuesday a referendum on Trump?

It was.

I mean, exit polls showed that many voters considered it a referendum on him.

But also, it's just, it stands to reason.

Watching the landscape and seeing the issues that were big, he was the central thing in so many of these races.

In a Wednesday press conference, he said said the election had been a big win for him.

Was it?

You know, it could have been a lot bigger loss than it was, but I think that that is either spin or else maybe he has not yet reckoned with how difficult it will be for him to deal with a Democratic House.

But it was not a big win for him by any means.

What,

looking at Tuesday, what is the strength of President Trump's hold on the GOP in general?

I think we see it in a couple ways.

One One of them is, you know, he pursued this strategy of running a lot of rallies in places where he is popular and on hitting issues that are popular with his base, but not with a lot of other people.

So you think about the sort of fear-mongering on illegal immigration that we saw in the caravan.

That's something that really resonates with people who voted for Trump and really doesn't seem to resonate with most other Americans.

And a lot of reporters, including me, thought that that had a good chance of backfiring simply because of the limited appeal.

And, you you know, what we saw is in the House, it didn't help.

Democrats seem to be pretty much on target for what a lot of analysts thought.

But in, say, Florida or maybe in Georgia and in some of these Senate races, it does seem to have helped to gin up turnout and to help Republicans win in Senate and gubernatorial races.

Is it fair to say that the Republican Party is now essentially Trump's party?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was probably fair to say that even before the election, and that will be even more true now.

You know, first of all, a lot of the moderates in the House who were kind of Trump skeptical, and even Dean Heller in the Senate, who's a little bit Trump skeptical, although he'd sort of warmed up to the president,

are gone now.

And what that means is you have a caucus that is more uniformly pro-Trump.

Beyond that, I think a lot of Republicans are going to look at the results of this election and say the people who tried to run away from Trump all lost, or most of them lost.

The people who physically stood up to Trump, like Mark Sanford, lost in a primary.

And so that's a sure path to political doom.

You might not win if you embrace the president, but it does seem to work for a lot of people.

And so it's the safest path.

Now, what do you think that the results augur for the Trump administration, the outcome of Tuesday's election?

I think if you're in the executive branch, you should get ready to be producing a lot of documents and spending a lot of time sending things to the House or testifying before the House.

You know, that seems to be the big one.

Suddenly, you're going to get a lot of subpoenas and other demands for documents and investigations.

Legislatively, I mean, it's hard to know if anything really will change.

The House has already been so slow getting things through, and Congress in general has been so slow in getting Trump's legislative priorities through that, you know, a Democratic House is not going to help, but there's not a whole lot of room to get worse.

Infrastructure week.

That's right.

What do you think, based on these results, that we might expect looking forward to 2020?

Man, that's the $64,000 question.

Or given the spending on elections, the

$3 or $4 billion question or whatever.

I think it is difficult to make some strong statements, but I have a few general thoughts.

One is you see Democrats winning a lot in these suburban districts.

Those are places that Republicans have traditionally held.

If that holds up in 2020, it's really bad news for Republicans.

The other thing I'm interested in is what happens with Trump's sort of base strategy.

Everything he's done throughout his presidency, the issues he's chosen, the language he's used, it all seems to be geared toward making his base happy at the risk of really alienating a lot of other voters and doing nothing to reach out to them.

And common sense and traditional political analysis would tell you that is not a way to win.

He won the presidency with a minority of the popular vote.

A few you know, a few votes go different ways in a few states, and suddenly the result is different.

And so it seems like he has to grow his coalition.

But Tuesday's results don't really give us a clear answer on that.

Like in some cases, clearly he lost the house, so it didn't save him there.

But we did see him saving candidates probably in Florida and other places.

So there's sort of a mixed report card for that, that base-only strategy.

All right.

Well, David, thank you for taking time out of a very, very busy afternoon to share with us and to illuminate Tuesday's results.

Good luck with everything.

Oh, thank you.

It's just nice to have a little bit of respite from deadline for a few minutes.

Thanks again for joining us, as always.

Thank you.

Stick with us.

In a moment, we'll hear the one big lesson each of our journalists is taking away from Tuesday night.

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In Louis of Keepers this week, a different closing question.

Obviously, a lot happened on Tuesday.

Hundreds of different elections with lots and lots of factors, as you've heard, affecting each of them.

But I asked our guests to give us one overarching thought.

What did Tuesday's results say to them about the mood of the electorate or the state of the country?

Here's what they said.

If I were to take one thing about the mood of the electorate is that there is a sense of urgency.

I can't tell you exactly what's causing a sense of urgency.

Lots of people are going to tell you Trump.

Lots of people are going to tell you, you know, oh, it was progressive candidates.

I can't tell you exactly why.

But the fact that we had record midterm turnout

in the last 50 years, that people were going out to vote like this was a presidential election in lots of places, that tells me that there is something pretty big at stake that maybe the polls did not quite pick up in advance.

And I think it's going to be interesting to watch how that

I don't want to call it enthusiasm, but urgency is going to map over the next couple years.

In the run-up to the election, election, we had some pretty terrible things happen.

We had a person arrested for sending mail bombs to candidates.

We had

two or three hate crimes that week.

It seems

the urgency is not only connected to enthusiasm and optimism, but a sense of

maybe a fire being lit under people's feet because they are afraid.

There is urgency in some direction happening.

And I think it's going to be interesting, especially after 2016, when you saw a global drop in turnout, how that's going to shape elections going forward.

I do think that all of the predictions about a blue wave were somewhat overstated in the sense that we did see huge pickups by Democrats in the United States House of Representatives, but it wasn't a total wrecking of the Republican Party.

And the Republican Party was able to hold on in the Senate, which has consequences in all sorts of other ways.

So I think that's one.

The blue wave was probably a replay.

I think another is that

although there are places where Democrats had hoped to bring that wrecking ball to Republican majorities to Republican seats and failed, they made progress or were able to get close in a way that a lot of people were skeptical about.

And the final thing, which is particular to me, is watching what's happening in the South.

Obviously, we're still waiting for some of the outcomes in Georgia, but we saw in Tennessee, for example, that Marsha Blackburn essentially gutted Phil Bredesen, the popular moderate Democrat former governor of the state.

And what that says to me and some of the outcomes in other places like Florida suggests that all of these promises of a new South or a showing of diversity in that region maybe have been overplayed or are premature.

We haven't quite seen the outcomes that people have predicted.

So I'm going to be watching what happens in the South to see if this really red year, in fact,

predicts more red to come or was just a blip on an ultimate path that the South is taking back towards being more purple.

I think we are, you know, we are basically pulling apart is the lesson, is the clear message.

The divergence is the point.

That, you know, if you look at the exit poll, Trump's approval rating among white voters with a college education was 40%.

Among minority voters, it was significantly lower than that.

Among college-educated white voters, it was 60%.

Among evangelical white voters, it was higher than that.

I mean, we really are separating.

And

that is, I think,

is the underlying reality that American politics is now organized, I believe, above all,

by voters' attitudes about all of the big changes we are living through.

People go through this elaborate exercise of whether Trump voters were drawn to him because they were feeling they don't like the economic change or they don't like the cultural change or they don't like more brown and black people and the demographic change.

I feel like that's a false choice because by and large, the same people are comfortable or uncomfortable in a broad sense with what America is becoming.

And I think this election

to a remarkable degree underscored 2016, pushed further in the directions we saw in 2016 with Republicans winning even more, you know, kind of interior, older white states in the Senate, but Democrats expanding their advantage in these white-collar suburbs and among college educated white voters.

All of this points toward this kind of sense of enormous anxiety, which Trump feeds off of.

I was talking to a source in Montana, and he said that people just seem angry and they want to break things.

And I think what yesterday showed kind of a little bit more than 2016

is that even though people may want to break things, they still kind of like things the way that they are.

So I think one of the things that this is saying is that,

yeah, there may be some changes that are happening.

but they're not the wild ebbs that we saw in 2016.

This is just kind of in a longer pattern of ebbs and flows that seems to dot American politics.

Often, in these elections where you have a lot of toss-ups, what ends up happening is they all fall one way or the other.

Either most of the Democratic candidates in toss-ups win, or most of the Republican candidates win.

And that's not really the case last night.

Despite the Democratic

wave in the House, there are a lot of places where races went both ways.

And I think that speaks to the ongoing divisions, which are not, you know, are clearly not going to abate anytime soon.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thanks again to our journalists, Ron Brownstein, Adam Harris, Emma Green, David Graham, and Van Newkirk.

Thanks as always to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our wonderful fellow, Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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