From today’s The Guardian:
Democrats will retain control of the US Senate, and maybe even the House. There was no red wave. But there was no blue wave, either. Americans chose not to make any more waves.
This was not a change election. It was a stability election.
Even though Joe Biden’s approval rating on Tuesday averaged 41% and 72% of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction, at least for now Americans have chosen steadiness over tumult.
The past few years have been too hair-raising: four wild years of Donald Trump, two horrible years of pandemic, a deep recession followed by steep inflation, climate catastrophes, a violent attack on the US Capitol, a rogue US supreme court untethered from precedent and eager to take away reproductive rights assumed sacrosanct for almost 50 years, a war in Ukraine where the Russian president speaks of using nuclear weapons.
Americans want to keep politics pretty much as is because everything else is so unpredictable.
This is bad news for Trump and Trumpism – the quasi-religious personal cult of authoritarianism, political violence and QAnon conspiracy theories that Trump has fostered, whose fundamental goal is to upend American politics with Trump at its head.
There will be no upending. In fact, as the dust now settles, it appears there was only one clear loser last week: Trumpism.
Read the complete story here.