You're either with Trump or against him. That was the main lesson of 2018. The economy—of the much-touted political axiom “it's the economy, stupid”—is humming along at a decent clip. But it did virtually nothing to save Trump and his eager Republican enablers from the many Americans, especially college-educated women, who would have crawled over glass to vote against him.
Oh, and about that other axiom, “all politics is local,” that pretty much got washed away in the aftermath of last Tuesday too. First of all, incumbency did not help Senate Democrats much in the red states, where conservative voters pretty definitively ousted Sens. Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota.
Also, as CNN's Ron Brownstein notes, the votes of people of similar race, gender, and socio-economic levels tended to trend similarly across the nation.
Though some important regional differences remained, voters who shared the same characteristics or resided in similar places largely voted the same way no matter what state they lived in. In virtually every state, Democrats last Tuesday displayed a clear advantage in densely populated, culturally and racially diverse white-collar metropolitan areas, while Republicans relied on elevated margins in the preponderantly white, religiously traditional, smaller places beyond them.
In essence, the election largely broke down along the lines of how much certain demographic groups either opposed or supported Trump. The good news for Democrats is that 55 to 60 percent of Americans consistently disapprove of Trump's job performance and even more often disapprove of him personally. The bad news for the nation is that Trump is simply increasing and accelerating political polarization.
And the trick for both parties in coming elections will be finding a few but important opportunities to break through the trend and become exceptions to the new rule that “all politics are national.”