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As the dust from Tuesday’s elections continues to settle, Republicans are looking around their shrunken ranks and wondering precisely where they went wrong on this one. 

President Donald Trump, who’s been generally (and surprisingly) mellow about his party’s loss, said it was because he wasn’t on the ballot.

Vice President JD Vance, who hopes to lead MAGA into its post-Trump future, squarely blamed the war in Iran. 

Republican operatives, meanwhile, have pointed to the affordability crisis, the appearance of corruption, and a slate of uninspiring candidates. And observers outside the party are floating multiple theories of their own, from the rise of the Christian left to the newly (or renewedly) blued youth vote. 

Multiple things can be true at once, of course — and, in this case, they plainly are. It’s hard to look at the more than 44,000 races that played out across the country Tuesday and come away with a single unified theory of Democrats’ blowout. 

But if you wanted to try, why not go with a theory that will make you feel better about other people? My colleague Christian Paz surveyed the landscape and came away with the conclusion that voters finally turned on cruelty this election.

Go a little deeper

Christian reports on politics and religion for Vox, and even before the midterms, he had some firsthand experience with the anti-cruelty camp. In October, he flew to Kansas to spend some time on the campaign trail with Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor who ran on a platform of “radical love,” mercy and kindness. 

Hamilton’s chances looked remote when he launched his campaign: Kansas hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in almost a century. But on the trail, Christian met a lot of people — including registered Republicans — who liked the generous, neighborly way that Hamilton talked about politics and morality.

On Tuesday, Hamilton won his Senate seat by roughly 5 points. And he celebrated in a characteristically gracious manner: “I want us to model what it looks like when thoughtful people actually work together to solve problems,” he said, “instead of slinging mud at each other.”

For much of American history, that would have been a fairly anodyne comment. But this isn’t much of American history: We’re living in the age of Trump and Vance. 

Meanness, incivility, and outright cruelty have been the political mode for the past 10 years, not just in how lawmakers speak and campaign (with insults, curses, epithets, innuendos, and undisguised racial animus) but also in how they legislate (namely, by pursuing and celebrating policies that cause distress to their political opponents and marginalized groups). 

The clearest, cruelest example of both is probably Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which has seen almost 1 million largely law-abiding people ejected from the US. As part of that campaign, the Trump administration also regularly mocks and humiliates its targets in social media posts.

As Christian explains in a forthcoming article for Vox, however, the midterms suggest that many voters find this nastiness off-putting, even if they’re concerned about immigration. In Colorado, where roughly half of residents surveyed last year called illegal immigration a “very serious” problem, 55 percent of voters nevertheless rejected a measure that would have required law enforcement to coordinate with federal immigration agents. 

Voters also swung hard against the GOP in places that saw ICE raids or stricter enforcement, including heavily Hispanic areas of Florida, Kansas, and Texas.

“These are voters who were very supportive of securing the border, very supportive of Border Patrol. … But the cruelty of what ICE was doing, tearing apart families and communities, was just a bridge too far” for them, the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told Vox.

Elsewhere, candidates like Hamilton, Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, and Ohio Gov.-elect Amy Acton prevailed over opponents known for their morally dubious pasts or ugly attack ads.

Does this mean we’ve entered a new political era? A world where the nice guys…do sometimes win?! The midterms weren’t all sunshine and drum circles, after all: Some bona-fide jerks were also elected. 

“I do anticipate a more conciliatory tone from the new voices heading into Congress — but when the 2028 primary season starts, I wonder how much these calmer heads will prevail,” Christian told me. “And at least for the GOP, everyone I’ve talked to seems to hope a new page will turn and a calmer politics will be embodied by the right — but at least not until Trump leaves office.” 

One link for later

➨ Life is too short to finish bad books. So…don’t do it! I wish I’d taken this advice before slogging through a creepy, underplotted historical romance for a book club I probably won’t even stick with. Other tips to help you read more, even in our era of boundless distractions: Experiment with different formats — print, ebooks, audio — and take breaks to help shore up your attention span. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the original Pledge of Allegiance didn’t include the words “under God”? President Dwight D. Eisenhower made that little edit during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s.
• Today’s trivia: Which planet takes 165 Earth years to orbit around the sun? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you which e-commerce site bars users from selling their souls. That would be eBay, which first confronted this thorny metaphysical problem more than 25 years ago. 

Source: Vox.