Late Tuesday night, Independent candidate David Catania (I-At Large) conceded the D.C. mayoral race to Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), confirming her as the District’s seventh successive Democratic mayor since it achieved home rule in 1975. Though Bowser won in a numerical landslide, the race was largely characterized by a thorough sense of disappointment. Despite what the Washington Post dubbed as a “laundry list” of policies, the prevailing sentiment was that neither candidate offered the city significant prospects for positive political change.
The D.C. mayoral race reflects a larger ironic—or perhaps tragic—trend that underwrote every vote cast at the nationwide ballot box on Tuesday. Identifying a deeper malaise among the wreckage of a particularly upsetting election is a favorite pastime of political punditry, but this time their case may not be so overstated. With two-thirds of voters nationwide failing to turn out, the election saw the GOP pick up more seats in the Republican controlled House and win a majority in the Senate. Far more than simple backlash against an increasingly unpopular incumbent president, however, the midterm displays an increasing lack of agency for American voters thanks to a lack of real political choice.
While midterm elections often batter the incumbent party, this election illustrates a systemic theft of genuine voter ability to effect change. Voters have been left with a forced, binary choice between an incumbent party that has failed to break gridlock in Washington and an opposing party that has played a significant role in creating gridlock in the first place. The irony—again, perhaps better termed a tragedy—is that, despite Congressional changeover, little is likely to change.
This oscillating pattern between Republican and Democratic leadership is likely to persist through 2016. Democrats had—and have—no counter-narrative to Republican efforts to lump them in wholesale with the president’s floundering approval ratings. Republicans, despite their victory, have no core strategy to back up their win. As noted by William Saleton for Slate, the electorate is inexorably moving toward greater liberalism—just look at increasing support for marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage. But the GOP has yet to present policies that will be able to sway growing populations of minority voters enough to sustain the party into the future.
Though newly reelected and re-anointed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pledged some compromise with the president and cohesion among Republicans in a Time interview yesterday, keeping those promises may prove difficult. Loose-cannon senators, such as Ted Cruz (R-Texas), caused last year’s government shutdown, and it may be difficult to channel Republicans’ disparate ideas on Obamacare, immigration, and fiscal reform into policy. And, as the only government entity consistently polling lower than even the president, Congress has its own image to rehabilitate.
Insofar as politics is about inventing, framing, or embellishing a narrative, Republicans won this round. Insofar as it’s about representing and responding to an electorate, both parties—and Republicans especially—have yet again been handed a mandate they may be unable to deliver. Voters want Washington to get to work as it should. This change in leadership, unfortunately, brings few assurances that it will.
