Dan McLaughlin
National Review, Nov. 9, 2022
“There will be no Republican agenda: A major question often posed during the campaign was what Republicans would do when they retook Congress. This was always a bit of an unfair question: Republicans were never going to get close to 60 votes in the Senate, and there was no chance that Joe Biden would sign anything they passed.”
What happened? That’s always the question after an election, but especially after one that didn’t go as many people expected. It will take some time to pour through the data and consider what worked and what didn’t, but here are some key early takeaways on what happened and what it means going forward.
A good night for incumbents: With 68 percent of voters’ thinking the country was on the wrong track and only 24 percent saying otherwise, you might have thought that the difference between a good Republican night and a mediocre one would be that Democrats succeeded in turning a sour mood into a bipartisan anti-incumbent outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. At this writing, it appears that all the incumbents in both parties in the Senate and gubernatorial races won, with the possible exceptions of Nevada governor Steve Sisolak, Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski. Those are far from certain losses: Neither Nevada race has been called yet, Warnock currently leads and will go to a runoff against Herschel Walker, and the Alaska race is nowhere near counted.
The good news on the Republican side is thumping, landslide victories for stars such as Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott, Kim Reynolds, Chris Sununu, and Kristi Noem. Ron Johnson seems to have survived yet another close race, and for all the hype and fretting after some ugly local polling, Mike Lee is winning by 14 points at this counting, and so is Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt. The wins for incumbents even justified Charles Grassley’s decision to seek yet another term at age 89 when he had a ready-made heir lined up in his grandson, Pat, the speaker of the Iowa House. … Source