In the Missouri House congressional district in which I live, a man named Kenneth Abram was the Republican nominee. The sixty-two-year-old Boeing manager was a newcomer to politics and ran on a platform consisting largely of the platitudes around which his party has largely crafted itself in the modern era. He referred to himself as simultaneously pro-business and pro-labor without expressing a distinct opinion on, say, labor unions, for instance. When the Call Newspapers, a small news network covering issues pertaining to South St. Louis County, surveyed Abram, he gave quick and pointed answers which lacked any semblance of nuance. His opponent, Democrat Bridget Walsh Moore, gave thoughtful answers throughout; even on matters where the two fundamentally had the same stance (like a merger between St. Louis County and City), she explained that her opposition was steeped in a lack of cohesive plan that she had seen put forward rather than any sort of dogmatic opposition as a matter of principle.
If you drove through the 93rd district at any point in the last couple months, you would be inundated with Kenneth Abram signs. There were occasional Bridget Walsh Moore signs, but Abram’s far outpaced Walsh Moore’s. And when the votes were tallied on Tuesday, the voices of Lemay and Affton were loud and clear—Moore won by 9.2%.
We are coming up on over half a century of it being considered a given that the Republican Party represents the so-called “silent majority”, the Richard Nixon-era belief that while liberals will protest in the streets or on college campuses, mainstream Americans go to work, go to church, and don’t necessarily obsess or derive their identities from their political views but when they do vote, they tend to do so conservatively. Perhaps there was a point in time when the silent majority was based on reality, but that point has long since vanished, and in 2022, the exact opposite has proven to be true.
I live in a blue district in a blue county in a blue metropolitan area—granted, it is one which resides in a red state, but in every presidential election in my lifetime, the county in which I live has voted for the Democratic Party. The platonic ideal of a St. Louis County presidential candidate may not be a Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style socialist, but it quite demonstrably is not a brash, Donald Trump-style Republican. And yet, there aren’t any houses in my neighborhood with pro-Joe Biden flags hanging, or anti-Joe Biden bumper stickers. But when it comes time to actually vote, the loudest voices are coming from those in the minority.
I have never put a political bumper sticker on my car nor put a political sign in my yard, and my reasons are simultaneously pragmatic and paranoid—I’m not trying to get attacked. Do I believe police officers (who lean to the right politically) are going to specifically target people with “I’m With Her” bumper stickers? With almost no exceptions, no, but subliminal biases do exist, and can I honestly say that, if I were a traffic cop, I wouldn’t take some extra level of glee in issuing a ticket to somebody with a 2020 election denying bumper sticker? Anyway, I’ve made the decision to avoid the potential conflict of interest altogether.
Despite Joe Biden being broadly unpopular across the country, it appears that the Democratic Party did shockingly well in a midterm election cycle that for years has been assumed to be a disaster for the party. While the United States Senate is still not yet determined, it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will maintain (potentially without the “with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote” caveat) control of the Senate, and while Republicans remain favored to take control of the House of Representatives, it will hardly be the “red wave” that was repeatedly predicted. In Midwestern swing states which voted for Trump in one of his two presidential bids, things went quite well for the Democratic Party—lieutenant governor John Fetterman flipped a Pennsylvania Senate seat blue, Wisconsin reelected its Republican senator Ron Johnson but also reelected Democratic governor Tony Evers and avoided a worst-case scenario in which the state’s Democrats were gerrymandered into absolute irrelevance, and Michigan’s legislature flipped blue for the first time in decades.
Ultimately, for as unpopular as Joe Biden is, the opposition party proved to be even less popular. This was the case in St. Louis County, when not-especially-popular County Executive Sam Page was re-elected over Republican challenger Mark Mantovani, whose yard signs overwhelmed the county. I don’t know that I saw a single pro-Sam Page yard sign in the months leading up to the election. But he had his voters, and that bore out on Election Day, even if the overwhelming majority of his voters did not actively campaign on his behalf.
The juxtaposition of the 2020 presidential candidates is perhaps the most instructive example, and certainly the most famous example, I can give of how Democrats became the true silent majority. Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in any other presidential election in history, and this was despite a distinct, somehow almost aggressive lack of personality cult surrounding him. Sure, there were cutesy Onion articles about him, but unlike Hillary Clinton or especially unlike Barack Obama, a self-stylized Joe Biden superfan wasn’t really a thing—he won the nomination largely by being broadly acceptable by the majority of the party’s voters, even if he barely cracked 50% of the votes despite the primaries being largely ceremonial for the second half of it.
That Biden, an old white guy, was not historic like Clinton or dynamic (and historic) like Obama, couldn’t conjure passion, however, did not materially impact his ability to swing voters. As much press as Barack Obama’s campaign rallies received, the overwhelming majority of his voters never attended one. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed for rallies, Biden’s certainly would have been quite underwhelming compared to what Obama produced. Meanwhile, Donald Trump became his own political identity, despite never received as high of a percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney or John Kerry. I have met many, many Joe Biden voters—I have never met, and God willing never will meet, a person who identifies themselves primarily through their support of him. If you drive through any Midwestern state (this is the case in Missouri, but it is also absolutely the case in Illinois, a state which twice denied Trump electoral votes, too), you will see barns on the sides of highways painted to represent support of Donald Trump.
The impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision which unpopularly overturned Roe v. Wade, has been repeatedly cited as a thing which helped Democrats to close the gap in 2022, but abortion is hardly the only issue on which Democrats are in the majority. Most Americans support gun reform. Most Americans support funding public education and increasing taxes on the wealthy. But they do so not through big, dumb, inevitably futile gestures like painting the side of a barn or turning the back of their cars into moving billboards, but by voting and by supporting those who share their beliefs. Unlike the midterms under Barack Obama, during which Democrats got absolutely smoked, the first (and perhaps only) midterm under Joe Biden went fairly well because the party, rather than running on the public face of a charismatic leader, ran as a party guided by popular policy. And it worked.
