JOHN DAVENPORT: Democrats have Trump to thank for midterms

For the party that holds the White House, the US midterm elections are always a disaster. That is something that is well known. There are various reasons for it, but chief among them seems to that people are generally unhappy with things most of the time, and in political terms that translates into voting against the status quo.

Another thing we all know is that as Bill Clinton’s strategist, James Carville, famously said about politics: “it’s the economy, Stupid” — meaning that virtually no issues outrank economic ones when it comes to voting.

So given that US inflation is the highest it’s been since the catastrophic stagflation of the 1970s and the world economy is currently so far down the toilet that teams of skilled plumbers have failed to find it, and it is a midterm election, the Democrats were widely expected by everyone to experience a sound shellacking at the polls.

This annihilation was widely thought to have been made even worse by President Joe Biden’s personal unpopularity, which is at record-breaking levels even in his home state of Delaware.

Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that a “red wave” lay ahead. There had been optimism among Democrats that this wave would be tempered by the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, but polling indicated that anger against that had been largely replaced by economic concerns, and that a red wave would be on the menu after all.

Except that didn’t happen. Final results show the Democrats will retain the Senate, and will only narrowly lose in Congress. In fact, it is only recent redistricting decisions by the courts over gerrymandering in Florida and New York that will mean the Republicans win a majority at all — without that they may not have taken either chamber.

How did that happen? It certainly wasn’t Biden. His unpopularity stayed where it was, but voters voted for his party nonetheless. Remarkably, according to the New York Times, Democrats actually won among voters who “largely disapproved” of Biden, a very different situation from that in the 2010 and 2018 midterms, when those who “largely disapproved” of Barack Obama and Trump voted against that party by 30 or 40 points.

The reason for this gradually became clear last week. It was Donald Trump. He saved the Democrats, and America. Of course that wasn’t his plan. But that was how it worked out. He did it in two ways.

First, there was Roe v Wade. As a reward to his evangelical far-right base Trump packed the supreme court with judges so right wing that they make Ronald Reagan look like Nancy Pelosi’s art school nephew (if she has one). And though polling indicated that this didn’t have as much impact on independent women voters as Democrats were hoping, it fired up the Democratic base and younger voters to a real extent.

Then there were the candidates he threw his weight behind. They were a genuinely lunatic bunch of weirdos. They reminded me a lot of the Suicide Squad Marvel movies, where mysterious CIS operatives go to prisons and recruit a group of freaks who include (something like) a giant talking weasel, a lunatic who kills people with coloured balls shot from his mouth, a murderous clown/prostitute and a schizophrenic assassin who breaths knives.

This motley crew included: Dr Oz, a celebrity television doctor who has had an extreme amount of plastic surgery even by TV standards; and Herschel Walker, a football star who was institutionalised, threatened his ex-wife with knives and guns, has three to four unacknowledged children, marketed bogus Covid-19 medication and paid for abortions despite campaigning on an anti-abortion platform.

• Davenport, a former chief creative officer at Havas Southern Africa and war correspondent in Ukraine, is currently based in Hong Kong.