What Went Down In The 2018 Midterms

To get back to the what-do-political-scientists-make-of-all-this question: I wrote yesterday about what the lessons will be from today’s election. Specifically, Trump has made a point of running a strongly racialized campaign in the past few weeks. If Republicans do better than expected, they might draw a lesson that that’s the right path to go in 2020. But if they underperform, can they draw the opposite lesson, that they should be less explicitly racist in their campaigning style? That was theoretically the lesson the party learned in 2012, as expressed in its postmortem, but Trump ran the other way from that in 2016. I feel like 2016 really pushed a lot of boundaries, and today’s election is an attempt to divine whether that’s simply where the new normal is, or if we’re pulling back a bit toward previous norms.