A big GOP win, but not really a mandate
At both the national and state level, Republicans mostly won seats they should have already held.
After the dust has settled from the 2024 elections, Republicans are feeling triumphant, and with good reason.
At the national level, Donald Trump obtained a decisive Electoral College victory in the presidential race and, it appears, a narrow popular vote one as well. The GOP took over the Senate and retained the House.
At the state level, Republicans defied a concentrated and well-funded attempt by Democrats to take over the Arizona Legislature and in fact increased their numbers in both chambers. Republicans won nearly all the Arizona races thought competitive, including for the U.S. House and Maricopa County offices.
As all successful politicians do after every election, the GOP is claiming the election results as a mandate for the entirety of their agenda which, in today’s Republican Party, is MAGA-style national populism. This is a serious misreading of the election results. It is likely to lead to the sort of miscalculation that has swing voters constantly toggling between the two dominant parties, expressing sequential dissatisfactions.
In analyses both before and after elections, there is a tendency to focus on minutiae – how this or that strategy targeted at this or that demographic subgroup played out. In my view, high-visibility campaigns tend to get decided based, instead, on some broad, general theme or phenomenon.
In the presidential race, the best explanation, in my view, is that a critical mass of swing voters were dissatisfied with the condition and direction of the country and, to a lesser extent, worried about the world situation. They didn’t think the Biden administration was managing either well. And, for this critical mass of swing voters, Donald Trump wasn’t an unacceptable alternative to a continuation of the status quo.
The best evidence that this election was more a repudiation of the Biden administration than a mandate for Trump and MAGAism are the results in U.S. Senate races in swing states. Trump won all seven of the denominated swing states. There were five Senate seats up for grabs in those states. Democrats won four of them. If this were a mandate election for Trump and MAGAism, GOP candidates should have fared better in these races. In fact, except for Pennsylvania, the Senate seats the GOP picked up were in deep red areas where they should have been winning all along: West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio.
The same phenomenon was at work in state legislative races here in Arizona: Republicans mostly picked up seats they should have been holding all along.
The GOP has the registration advantage in 18 of the state’s 30 legislative districts. If both parties held serve, won the seats in which they have a registration advantage, Republicans would have an 18-12 majority in the Arizona Senate and a 36-24 advantage in the Arizona House.
Going into this election, Republicans controlled both chambers by a solitary seat, 16-14 in the Senate and 31-29 in the House. So, the GOP was down two seats in the Senate from what their registration advantage should produce and five seats in the House. In this election, they recovered one of those seats in the Senate and two in the House. But they are still down measured against the registration benchmark.
In the 2024 election for the Legislature, Democrats won five seats in which they faced a registration disadvantage, four in the House and one in the Senate. By way of contrast, Republicans only won one seat in the House where they had the registration disadvantage.
Rather than a thumping GOP victory, the 2024 legislative results are best seen as a partial recovery from three consecutive election cycles of substantial underperformance.
The GOP’s large and expanding registration advantage wasn’t enough to rescue Kari Lake in the race to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate. In the overall evaluation of where the Arizona political landscape rests after the 2024 election, too little weight is being given to this race.
In 2016, John McCain, running for re-election, obtained 107,000 more votes than Donald Trump did in carrying the state in the presidential race. This year, Kari Lake ran 173,000 votes behind Trump. And she lost to a progressive Democrat, Ruben Gallego, who would have had no chance against a traditional, Reaganite conservative.
As registration trends indicate, Arizona isn’t really a purple state. It is a red state that has, in recent elections, had purple results because of the kind of candidates the GOP is fielding in high-visibility races.
Although the GOP registration advantage has never been greater, Democrats occupy all the most important offices elected statewide: the two U.S. senators, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. Republicans occupy the state treasurer’s office, all the Corporation Commission positions, and have a still slender majority in both legislative chambers. Politically, I don’t think Democrats would trade places with the Republicans.
At the national level, Trump is obviously acting as though he has a mandate for the entirety of the MAGA agenda. He wants the U.S. Senate to abdicate its constitutional duty to vet and approve his nominees for important government posts by creating an artificial recess. His proposed appointees are purebred MAGAites. Some of them are qualified. Several are not, and raise serious questions about possible misuse of their positions.
On policy, there is likely to be an early full-court press on mass deportations, tariffs, and taxes. There will be an expectation by Trump that congressional Republicans will rubber-stamp whatever he proposes, rather than exercise the independent judgment the Constitution contemplates. In fact, the Constitution gives the legislative branch the superior role in these matters. If the filibuster ends up standing in the way, which is inevitable, Trump is likely to revive his first-term demand that Senate Republicans junk it.
The independence of the legislative branch is due for a severe test. And the second Trump administration is likely to be even more chaotic and messy than the first, which led to swing voters opting not to renew his contract in 2020.
At the state level, the 2026 election will cast a shadow over everything. The state offices that the Democrats hold against their registration disadvantage – governor, secretary of state, and attorney general – will be on the ballot. As will a new, utterly useless, political appendage, a lieutenant governor.
MAGA politicians dominate the Republican caucuses in the Legislature. They have already made hobbling and thwarting Katie Hobbs’s governorship a priority at least equal to actually governing, including denying her the ability to staff her administration with agency heads who support her policies.
The MAGA position on executive branch appointees seems to be that the legislative branch should just wave them through without close examination at the federal level, but subject them to a political proctology exam and an undisclosed MAGA litmus test at the state level. I’m old enough to remember when social conservatives disparaged situational ethics.
Now, jockeying for political advantage in advance of an election is inevitable in a partisan system. Both parties do it. Hobbs will undoubtedly be doing some jockeying of her own.
However, the relative success of state Republicans in this election was primarily due to cascading down-ballot effects from the framing in the presidential race. There is no mandate for legislative Republicans to be obstructionist or for any particular MAGA policy position.
While Republicans in Arizona have a significant registration advantage, the balance of power still rests with what can usefully be called the Sinema-Ducey voters. In 2018, there were roughly 225,000 Arizonans who voted for the Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, for U.S. senator, and the Republican, Doug Ducey, for governor. Independents have remained roughly a third of registered voters, although a smaller percentage of actual turnout. The number of voters who are not automatic supporters of one of the parties is undoubtedly higher today than in 2018. Where they land in any particular race can easily exceed the effect of registration or turnout advantages.
Nationally, voter identification with the two dominant political parties has approached parity, eroding what had long been a Democratic advantage. But swing voters still decide the outcome in many states, as demonstrated by the Trump for president but the Democrat for U.S. Senate outcome in most of the battleground states, including Arizona.
The swing voters are toggling between the parties primarily to express dissatisfaction, not to confer a mandate on one party or the other. Not understanding, or disregarding, this sets the groundwork for a reversal in a subsequent election.
That said, overreading election results when victorious seems to be an insuperable occupational hazard for politicians.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.