Disclaimer: Not all races have been decided as of this writing.  Also, I am just a person making observations.  I have no special access to election data.

At this time, Nevada is still teasing Republicans that it may give them nearly everything they could ask for, barring more House representatives.  However, given the direction the vote tallies are leaning in most of the important races, we can make some reasonable observations.

The first one is that there is no clear direction coming from the country as a whole.  The partisan breakdown has been pretty strong, with Democrat voters backing their slate of candidates at 95% according to Fox News.  Republicans did similarly with their people at 94%, whereas independents edged to Democrats slightly.  In my experience, voters are more likely to forgive Democrats than Republicans at the ballot box.

An example of partisan voting can be seen in Indiana, where, as I learned coincidentally, the Republican Party decided not to run the incumbent secretary of state and primaried her out at the convention.  The sec of state in Indiana should not be a competitive seat for Republicans, but polling was very negative even in September.  In the end, while underperforming Republican Senator Todd Young, Diego Morales has gone on to win, in spite of both men being opposites on certain issues.

Similarly, after her district was redrawn to favor Democrats, Mayra Flores lost her seat after her historic upset.  This was predictable since summertime.  However, that special election and the data gathered by Fox News, as well as Ron DeSantis's win in Florida, indicate that Hispanic voters are leaning more and more in the GOP's direction.

Suburbs also came back a little mixed.  One area of note to me — you'll just have to take my word on it — voted against Trump by a little in 2020 but this year has returned to the red column.  However, not entirely.  One of the important cities in the suburban area has not returned with as many of the Republican local seats one might have expected in a "normal" year, whereas the rest of them have returned pretty faithfully along the ballot.  Fox News's data seem to vindicate my experience somewhat, with Democrats winning suburbs by a point.

Some states were more positive for the Republican, while others were for the Democrats.  Iowa, for example, will be in the red column entirely for its House members, kicking out its lone Democrat incumbent.  By contrast, New Mexico kicked its lone Republican House member.

The voting public does not seem to be especially rewarding or especially punishing according to COVID measures.  Michigan might have seemed upset at Gretchen Whitmer once upon a time, but the people there must have gotten over it, re-electing her comfortably.  Kansas, too, did not meaningfully punish its governor, nor did Ohio in spite of the impeachment its state house attempted.  One can point to DeSantis and Kristi Noem to say that resisting COVID restrictions was vindicated, but then one can look back and see that Eric Holcomb was not punished for COVID restrictions closer to the event despite messaging against him over the issue, and Gavin Newsom likewise was not punished with a recall.

In the past, midterms have been used to repudiate the sitting president, which always struck me as being silly, since the same people oftentimes also voted for that incumbent hardly any time prior.  Regardless, whether or not the Republicans can take the Senate by one or two seats remains to be seen.  They will, however, get fifty seats as soon as they decide Lisa Murkowski is or is not coming back to Washington as a senator.  But the House is not flipping dramatically, if at all, as Democrats performed pretty well in many competitive races.  This is not surprising to me, since the way the districts were drawn recently meant that many seats were shored up by both Democrats and Republicans, and a dramatic wave was not likely.

That said, it is my opinion that not having an agenda or a nationwide platform hurt Republican candidates across the board.  I discovered that, apparently, Kevin McCarthy put out a "Commitment to America" in September, in contrast to Mitch McConnell hoping that not being in charge was enough to get anyone to vote for you.  However, the messaging was not very strong, if there was anything.  It seemed to me that it was the usual talking points from every Republican campaign since I was a kid — crime and spending, with inflation the main issue Republicans clung to.

Without anything like a true platform or agenda to rally behind, it seems to me that many races became more about how voters felt about the individual candidates.  Josh Shapiro has been credited by normal people I see online with being a good and decent attorney general, one who held the Catholic Church accountable for its sexual abuses.  That article is not friendly to Josh, but literally none of the chat rooms or comments sections I have visited had anything bad to say about him on this.  Granted, I mostly went to left-leaning boards and purportedly neutral websites, but the mood of the room was essentially the same.

The mixed signals continue.  Kansas and Wisconsin both are returning the same Republicans to the Senate but are having the same Democrats govern the states themselves.  One might be tempted to say that local politics have nothing to do with voters in other states, but governors, secretaries of state, and attorneys general in one state affect elections and the enforcement of legislation, which other states may take issue with.

Abortion as an issue is also a mixed bag.  On the one hand, pro-life-ish governors like DeSantis, DeWine, and Sununu won re-election.  Then again, Michigan has taken steps to enshrine abortion, and Kentuckians rejected the notion that there is no right to an abortion.  Likewise, Kansas did not punish its governor for her abortion stance while also voting for a pro-life senator.  Personally, this tells me that Americans are generally folk libertarians on this issue — finding abortion generally appalling but not wanting to infringe on others' rights at the same time.  You do not have to agree, but that is the message one gets.

I suppose my main takeaway is that I am having a hard time taking any real message from this.

Just a couple predictions, if I may: I think that even though it looks as though we will win in Nevada this time, we will not win it in the future.  Nevada just approved ranked voting, which usually benefits Democrats.  Lastly, I want to mark it here: I think 2024 will come down to Newsom versus DeSantis.

Breason Jacak is a pen name.

Image via Max Pixel.