Four False Claims Republicans Are Spouting About Their Crushing Defeat

This was the biggest blue wave in 50 years, but Republicans are already trying to rewrite midterms to buy time to regroup. Don’t fall for it.

Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It's The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. Subscribe to his Substack.

Donald Trump looked out at an anxious America and told us that he alone stood between us and chaos. Never mind that, increasingly, the chaos was his doing. The worse things seemed, the story went, the more we needed him to fight for us. That’s every autocrat’s narrative, but American soil (please pay attention in class, J.D.) proved inhospitable.

Instead, Americans looked at all that threatened us — outdated immigration laws, climate change, public corruption, Donald Trump himself — and we said, “These are problems we can solve together.” That’s a very different narrative. And it helped us close the door on the accelerating autocratic consolidation of Trump 2.0.

With its story of standing bravely between all of us and COMMUNISM, or whatever, in tatters, the right is trying to reframe the results in ways that give it room to regroup.

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The truth is, we will not know what the election meant for some time. Results that lead to better health, education, prosperity and well-being for Americans broadly will mean something quite different than results further concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. Results that hold corrupt and lawless government officials to account mean something different than ones that do not.

This is the fork we find in front of us. And to influence our choice of paths, people are arguing about what just happened.

The Reframing Is Underway

Four false claims from Republicans are already being tested.

First, they say, “See, the Democrats had a big win. That proves they were lying about Republican attempts to rig the election and subvert democracy.”

It does not.

Over the past two years, America has endured a massive and well-funded effort at autocratic consolidation. From the almost universal right-wing lies about the 2020 election, to the effort to spread panic about supposed non-citizen voting, Donald Trump and his allies worked to break our faith in elections.

Then they offered “solutions” to restore that confidence — solutions that would, in fact, create for Republicans permanent partisan advantages. These ranged from mid-decade gerrymandering, to executive orders restricting mail-in ballots, to litigation seeking disqualify voters or discard their ballots and to block certification. Each brought to the national stage efforts Republican have already deployed in the states.

When autocratic sympathizers tell us our victory proves they didn’t try to end our democracy, tell them that putting out the fire does not exonerate the arsonist.

Second, they remind us that the pendulum always swings in America.

The party that holds the White House typically loses in the midterms. Nothing unusual happened this time.

Wrong again.

To claim this election was a normal oscillation in our politics is to hide the very abnormal things the Trump administration has been doing. The catastrophic governing failure that has led to higher prices, poorer health outcomes, greater wealth inequality, and federal police called ICE attacking Americans on our streets. The unprecedented personal corruption and grift of the President and his family. The weaponization of the coercive branches of government and the subsequent erosion of the rule of law. The sheer number of precedents broken by Donald Trump make his rebuke different than a normal course correction.

The election was not a pendulum swing but a reentering — not of policy, but of sovereignty. Americans reasserted their control. Calling that a routine transfer of power between parties misses the point.

Tuesday was not a partisan election. I know that’s hard to see because Democrats were elected everywhere. But the election itself cannot be reduced to partisan allegiance. Republicans outnumber Democrats in many districts where Democrats won. Those Republicans did not decide to become Democrats last Tuesday. Independents have not suddenly decided political parties are a great idea.

The victory owes its massive size to Americans saying there are a lot of things that matter more than political parties. It was an affirmation that government is meant to work for us.

Third, they argue that we were alarmist to claim that attacks on voting rights would disenfranchise Black Americans.

After all, Black Americans won seats in large numbers, even in racially gerrymandered districts. But the argument was never that Black candidates could not win in districts where Black voters are a minority. Barack Obama was twice elected president.

The Supreme Court weakened something different: the ability of Black Americans, living in close proximity to one another, to exert political power as a community. Gutting the voting rights made that harder, and nothing in last week’s results says otherwise.

Fourth, there’s J.D. Vance blaming the Iran war.

This one is trickier, because he is correct that ill-conceived and poorly executed military adventurism was deeply unpopular. But blaming the loss on a single bad policy decision, or a single failure of execution hides the breadth of the administration’s governing failures, ignores Republican indifference to human suffering, and denies right-wing efforts to consolidate autocratic power. It is like saying the night is dark because one streetlamp is out.

We must not let them own the narrative of their own collapse any more than we should have allowed the confederacy the myth of the Lost Cause.

At the same time, I want to caution my friends on the left. See this election for what it was: a centering of sovereignty rather than a wholesale adoption of any set of policies. To win the policy fights ahead, we must respect the sovereignty Americans have just asserted and organize anew to push the newly empowered Democrats to govern for us.

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