By Chris Satullo

I happened to be watching MSNBC last Saturday evening at the moment when the Nevada Senate race was called for Catherine Cortez Masto, ensuring that Democrats would keep control of the U.S. Senate. What ensued was a spate of on-air chortling, high-fiving and triumphant rhetoric that struck me as decidedly out of sync with the reality of the Democratic party’s meager accomplishments in these mid-terms.

Yes, the Dems had dodged one big bullet – OK, a cannonball. Mitch McConnell will not be able to stymie Joe Biden’s judicial nominations for the next two years. Even more consequentially, MAGA election deniers lost their bids for governor and secretary of state in all the key battleground states. The threat of an actual steal of a presidential election in 2024 – with the MAGA crowd executing the heist – has dropped precipitously.

For both developments, I’m grateful and relieved. Along with many others, I’d worried that these midterms posed an existential threat to our democracy. So, yeah, a big exhale.

Still, to recall an iconic phrase from the 1990s, there’s scant cause for “irrational exuberance” about the health or savvy of the Democratic party – or the wisdom of the American voter. Let’s look at the election results through another lens:

In the 2022 midterms, the party of insurrection and election denial won more nationwide votes than the Democrats.

The party of insurrection reclaimed control of the U.S. House that was attacked on Jan. 6. This sets up two years of grim policy gridlock and maniacal focus on Hunter Biden’s laptop and drug habits. Not to mention Jim Jordan, the shirt-sleeve Savonarola, leading frothing-at-the-mouth probes that pretend normal policy differences equal impeachable offenses.

The party of insurrection pulled this off despite offering a pathetic roster littered with nutjobs, nincompoops and notorious hypocrites.

An exemplar of the latter category, J.D. Vance, crushed Tim Ryan, a sound, centrist congressman, in the Senate race in my native state of Ohio, which is now dead to me.  

Greg Abbott, as flamingly incompetent and nastily partisan a governor as you’ll find, demolished MSNBC darling Beto O’Rourke – along with any nonsense about Texas trending purple.

Ron Johnson – a man who gives a good impersonation of how Herschel Walker would perform in the Senate if he ever, God forbid, gets there – somehow won another six years of federal employment from Wisconsin voters. And the old Bulldog running back, who has yet to put two coherent sentences back-to-back on the campaign trail, still has a shot in the coming Georgia runoff.

It wasn’t pretty, even if it wasn’t catastrophic. The midterm results were surely no cause for the progressive activists and strategists who are implicated in this weak performance to say to themselves: Nothing to see here; let us proceed as before.

Though that is, of course, precisely what many of them are doing. 

The underlying conditions for these midterms were nowhere near as dire for Democrats as the political media, prone to Twitter groupthink, thought. Dems could have done even better if not for a lot of unforced errors (“defund the police,” “abolish ICE” and so much more). And their close escape happened for reasons that have nothing to do with progressive fever dreams about the rise of an impregnable coalition of young voters and “people of color.”

Here are three against-the-grain observations:

People misinterpreted Biden’s approval rating

The political media regularly attached adjectives like drooping, sagging, dire and rock-bottom to the incumbent’s approval index, which hovered around the low 40s for most of the campaign. But you know what? Every president for the last 60 years had moments where his rating dropped into the 30s or even lower. You must go back to JFK to find one who eluded such a low. The sainted Ronald Reagan dipped to 35 percent before he faced his first mid-term referendum. Donald Trump averaged 41 percent over his term in the Gallup Poll, yet pundits often styled him as an imposing political force. 

Now, it’s true that the party of the incumbent president tends to take a bath in midterms. But history is not destiny, and Biden wasn’t as weak as the pundit mob decided he was.

A point lurked inside Biden’s approval rating that many seemed to miss – one I’m kicking myself for not stressing before the election. I confess: I felt a little cowed by the consensus and afraid that I was repeating a familial tendency to whistle past the political graveyard. (My dad, a Democratic activist, bet me $20 on the eve of the 1972 election that McGovern would beat Nixon. (Note for the kids: He didn’t. You can look it up. Lost 49 states to 1.)

What was missed? Well, a substantial portion of those negative ratings of Uncle Joe likely came from progressive Democrats who are still pissed he whipped Bernie and whose weak grasp of how American government works doesn’t allow them to understand why Bidem can’t push their dream agenda through with a 50-member caucus that includes Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.  

These people may not love Joe, but they sure were not going to vote MAGA. The young ones might not have voted at all – being inclined to lazy cynicism about politics – so getting them to the polls became the Democrats’ challenge, which to their credit they tackled vigorously.

Gerrymandering was blunted this time

This is an under-appreciated driver of these “surprisingly” close U.S. House results. Of course I’d think this, having spent three recent years of my life founding and running an anti-gerrymandering initiative in Pennsylvania.

So listen instead to Sam Wang of Princeton University, the data guru of the gerrymandering reform movement. He just wrote a good chock-full-of-facts piece in The Atlantic. It’s worth reading, but to summarize: Citizen-driven and state-court-supported anti-gerrymandering efforts in several purple states – Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, and Virginia along with Pennsylvania – created fairer, nonpartisan election maps that expanded the number of truly competitive districts.  

Let’s acknowledge that both parties gerrymander like crazy when they get the chance. And it’s wrong no matter who’s doing it. But realize, as well, that the GOP held the whip hand in the 2012 redistricting, wielding it fiercely to create the most tilted congressional playing field in memory. The citizen-driven reforms this time around undid some of that rightward tilt.

On the less-good side, the U.S. Supreme Court – acting in its current role as a wholly owned subsidiary of the conservative movement – punted on the whole issue, letting racially biased gerrymanders stand in several Southern states. (This court regards the Voting Rights Act with the same exasperated disdain that a hip-hop devotee would have for any relic of the ’60s like, say, James Taylor.)

Also: Democrats, never being ones to miss an opportunity, bungled some redistricting stuff, notably the New York congressional map. Ignoring the political adage that “pigs get fed but hogs get slaughtered,” the Albany crowd overdid their gerrymander and got stopped by the state courts. The ensuing, fairer election map in the Empire State was clearly a factor in the upstate House losses that cost the Dems their majority.

The Gen Z/People of Color majority is a fantasy

After every election where Democrats survive, we get a spate of stories about how it was because turnout among under-30 voters finally surged. Then, months later, when the full voter data get released and analyzed, it turns out the surge was at best a ripple. We’re seeing those stories again. I get that youthful rage over the anti-abortion Dobbs decision may have made a difference here – but color me skeptical until we know more.

And “people of color.” Sigh. Could we please move beyond the nonsense that not checking the Caucasian box on a Census form constitutes an intensely unifying bond that makes huge groups of people all vote the same way? Think: Do we assume a guy in the red-clay South is going to vote the same way as a woman in Cambridge, Mass., simply because they’re both white? Of course not.

Hispanic immigrants who vote come from many different nations and cultures;  many come from a different hemisphere. Hispanic voters (and please, please, progressives, not “Latinx” – a term preferred by a whopping 2 percent of those to whom it supposedly refers, and actively disliked by two out of five) do still vote blue more often that red. Republicans, though, have made big inroads in recent elections.  

Why might that be? A guess: Many Hispanic immigrants come to this soil seeking opportunity and economic freedom, believing America is the place to find it. Then they hear the left wing of the Democratic party telling them that, no, America is actually a cesspool of systemic racial oppression where they will never get a fair shake and never be truly accepted, no matter what lies white people tell them to their face. Compelling vision, eh? 

Hispanics also tend to be more religious and more traditional on social issues than your average American progressives, some of whom are prone to describing Christianity as bigoted nonsense and saying things like “gender is a choice.” 

For similar reasons, Republicans have been garnering increases recently in their share of the Black and Asian-American votes. After listening to years of Donald Trump’s hateful, ignorant spewing, this can seem mystifying, I know.

But perhaps Democrats should spend more energy on asking themselves which O word is more inspiring to the average voter – opportunity or oppression – and less on instructing people about what word they should use to describe themselves.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia