As of Thursday, Republicans were still projected to win a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress which controls all spending, while control of the Senate was expected to remain uncertain for up to several weeks with at least two key races still to be decided and the Georgia contest set for a runoff vote next month.
Republicans had confidently expected a massive tidal wave or tsunami of support to give them at least 30 more seats in the House and possibly far more and clear, undisputed control of the Senate. But the wave never materialized. Instead, the results may have marked the high water mark of Republican national popularity, constitutional historian and political commentator Dan Lazare said.
"I think 2022 may therefore be a tipping point in which the self-limiting nature of the Republican strategy is finally making itself felt," Lazare said. "Bear in mind that the Democrats, having won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, are by now the majority party."
Over the past 40 years, Republicans have been able to compensate for the growth of Democratic support among minorities and young people by emphasizing the inherent bias of the federal electoral system against them, Lazare said.
"If Republicans have been able to hold on during all those years, it's only because they've been able to exploit certain deep-seated constitutional advantages. These include an Electoral College biased toward thinly populated rural states and a Senate based on equal-state representation that is even more strongly tilted in the same direction," he said.
10 November 2022, 21:26 GMT
Also, in the House, the Republicans have enjoyed roughly an 11% advantage since 2010 thanks to ruthless gerrymandering, and the backing of a conservative-dominated Supreme Court, Lazare continued.
"The problem is not so much a nation that is half-free and half-slave as one that is half-democracy and half-oligarchy," he said.
However, this reliance on the manipulation of technical levers of government had remorselessly cost the Republicans majority support and future popularity and credibility, Lazare pointed out.
"For Republicans, the long-term effect is to put them on a losing path in which they get very good at gumming up the works via the filibuster, the hold, gerrymandering, and other such maneuvers, but less good at mobilizing public opinion in general. For Democrats, it's the opposite. The more they are victimized by such maneuvers, the more they succeed in winning the broad public to their side," he said.
This process had steadily entangled the Republicans in the control of their own most extremist and polarizing forces, Lazare observed.
"The upshot is that the Republican Party is increasingly dependent on a highly mobilized but fanatical minority of bigoted rural whites while Democrats are the party of the young, forward-looking, open-minded urban masses. That is still the general trend," Lazare said.
California State University Professor Emeritus of Political Science Beau Grosscup said extremist vote fraud claims, the January 6 riot, and MAGA revenge threats rallied independents, Democrats, and Lincoln Republicans to the polls to stem what could have been a huge victory by the opposition party.
Also, except in the Bible Belt in the south, fear of the Republican position against abortion energized women and youth voters in both parties, he added.
Independent journalist and political commentator Sam Husseini agreed that this range of concerns had played a crucial role in rallying voters to the Democrats.
"I think issues such as the prospect of Republican politicians determining abortion rights and concerns about democratic processes were certainly factors in minimizing Republican gains in the midterms," he said.