5 Takeaways From the 2022 Midterms
There were a few bright spots for liberty.
Election Night has come and gone.
Though votes are still being counted in a few congressional races and Georgia is looking at a runoff in a key US Senate race, a clear electoral picture has finally emerged. Democrats kept the US Senate and Republicans reclaimed the House.
As the dust settles, there will be endless discussion and analysis over the results. Here are five things we already know.
1. Biden Defied History
While Democrats had hoped to hold control over both Chambers of Congress, that did not happen. Nevertheless, the much-discussed Red Wave never appeared, defying the recent historical trend. Midterm elections are usually bruising for the political party of a first-term president. Democrats lost 54 House seats in the 1994 midterm elections during Bill Clinton’s first term and 60 House seats during Barack Obama’s. Republicans, meanwhile, lost 40 House seats in Donald Trump’s first term. (George W. Bush, like Biden on Tuesday, defied the midterm trend, actually winning eight seats.)
Considering the economic climate—40-year high inflation and a bloody stock market—holding the Senate was a win for the White House, even though Republicans will now hold a slim majority in the House.
2. DeSantis Shines, Trump Whines
One of the only people in America who may have had a better night than Biden was Ron DeSeantis. The Florida governor cruised to reelection, beating former Republican Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points.
Florida became a mecca for citizens fleeing lockdowns, and on Tuesday voters rewarded DeSantis, who was excoriated by the media for reopening the Sunshine State in the summer of 2020 and accused of leading “his state to the morgue.” The so-called death march never happened, however. Even without adjusting for age, Florida’s Covid mortality rate today is lower than lockdown states such as Michigan and New Jersey.
The popular governor emerged Tuesday as the favorite to be the next president, and the praise DeSantis received appeared to irritate Donald Trump, who attacked the Florida governor the following day even though the former president had stumped DeSantis days earlier.
3. Drug Legalization Remains on the March
The drug legalization trend in the United States continued, as voters in Missouri and Maryland passed initiatives legalizing possession of marijuana. In Maryland, the legal amount is 1.5 ounces; in Missouri, it’s 3 ounces. (Voters in the more conservatives states of South Dakota, North Dakota, and Arkansas rejected marijuana legalization proposals.)
Drug legalization did not end there, however. In Colorado, voters took up Proposition 122, which would decriminalize psilocybin mushroom possession. The initiative passed by a comfortable margin—52.3 percent to 47.7 percent.
All in all, it was a good day for drug legalization, which would have pleased the philosopher Lysander Spooner, who famously noted that “vices are not crimes.”
4. Education Freedom Was a Winning Message
One of the biggest issues coming into Election Day was education, which many in the liberty movement argue is the most pressing issue in the country. Public school satisfaction has fallen in recent years, polling shows, and confidence in schools has plummeted.
A 2022 Gallup poll found that just 9 percent of US parents said they had a “great deal” of confidence in their public school, down from 18 percent prior to the pandemic and down from 30 percent when the poll was started in 1973. Just 28 percent answered “a great deal” or “quite a lot.” Confidence in public schools is not the only thing plummeting. ACT test scores among high school graduates recently hit a 30-year low.
All of this might explain why school choice became an election focal point, with many blaming teachers unions for extended school closures and the embrace of gender ideology and critical race theory in public schools.
"I ran this campaign .. for parents who just want to choose the school that’s best for their child," said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Like DeSantis, Abbott cruised to victory on Tuesday, trouncing challenger Beto O'Rourke by more than 10 points. Abbott’s victory was no mirage.
As the left-leaning New Yorker glumly reported, school board and superintendent candidates across the country who hammered against CRT and teachers unions “fared depressingly well.”
5. Young People Decided the Election
One of the GOP’s goals in recent years has been to broaden its appeal to women and people of color, and data suggest they have. CNN exit polling shows Democrats lost substantial ground with women (-11) and people of color, particularly Latino voters (-14 women, -21 men).
Young people (18-29), however, remain closely aligned with Democrats. They turned out in large numbers—27 percent, the second highest rate in recent decades, according to CIRCLE, a Tufts University election initiative—and voted for Democrats by an impressive margin (+28).
Why younger voters voted for Democrats is not yet clear. Perhaps it’s because they still associate the GOP with Trump, who is an unpopular figure with young people. Perhaps it's because young people trust Democrats more on issues important to them, like the environment. Some speculated that the impressive turnout might have stemmed from Biden’s executive order that seeks to “cancel” massive amounts of student debt.
“I thought student debt relief was bad policy and bad politics. I still think it bad policy - but looking at the youth vote surge, hard to deny its political impact,” mused David Frum of The Atlantic.
We don’t yet know if Biden’s $500 billion student debt forgiveness scheme—which recently was struck down by a federal court—is why young people voted for Democrats; but if it is, it’s cause for alarm. Organizations like mine (the Foundation for Economic Education) exist to teach young people that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the debts piled up today will ultimately be paid down the road—by them.
The great French economist Frédéric Bastiat once said government is “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Living at the expense of others is how the national debt has climbed to $31.27 trillion, nearly $250,000 per taxpayer. If younger generations are beginning to believe that more government spending is the solution to their financial problems, we need to do a better job of showing them this is actually the road to serfdom.