Last Tuesday is shaping up to become a solid Republican electoral victory.
Former Republican President Donald Trump has won a solid Electoral College and popular vote win, and the Electoral College win may grow, with Arizona and Nevada still uncalled as I write Wednesday afternoon. If Trump gets them all, he’d have 312 Electoral College votes. His popular vote lead, 51% to 47.6%, or 4.8M votes, is unlikely to change much.
The Republicans have taken the majority in the Senate, with Senate races having been called for 52 Republicans. That margin could grow with 4 Senate races yet to be called. It’s unlikely to expand to 56 Republican Senators, though, as only 2 of the uncalled races currently have Republicans leading. Even so, the shift to the current solid majority is a major victory; a shift to 54 would be even more so.
The Republicans can still retain their House majority, given the number of uncalled races; however, it’ll remain a slim majority, which will allow the Republican Chaos Caucus to retain their outsized power. On the other hand, the Republicans are on the threshold of losing their majority to the Progressive-Democrats, which would render the Chaos Caucus irrelevant.
More importantly than a Republican victory, though, this is a victory for our nation. That’s not because the Republicans won or the Progressive-Democrats lost; rather it’s the solidity of the victory that creates the national victory. With that broad mandate—especially if the voters choose to keep the Republicans in the House majority—there now comes the possibility of putting the divisiveness of the last 16 years behind us. There now exists the possibility of our nation coming back together as a nation, and a culture, of Americans.
That possibility depends on how effectively the Republicans govern. It also depends on the Progressive-Democratic Party’s willingness to accept its defeat and work with Republicans on getting some things done and other things undone rather than being the knee-jerk obstructionist, anti anything Republican Party they have been (that the Republicans need to stop being similarly obstructionist is a part of their ability to govern objectively).
It also depends on the intrinsically mendacious press recognizing its own failures of the last several decades, made overtly manifest in the last couple of decades, and taking publicly and concretely measurable steps to rid itself of its dishonesty and return to its Fourth Estate role of objectively reporting all the news in its stories and all of the stories, while keeping its opinions out of that news reporting and in its opinion pages.