HATE IS A TOUGH SELL IN AMERICA:

Republicans had every reason to believe they would have a strong showing in the midterm elections: Inflation is near a 40-year high, a recession appears to be in the forecast, and Joe Biden's approval rating is about as low as Donald Trump's was in 2018, when Democrats made their biggest gains in the House since the 1970s. And yet in spite of all of those political advantages, Tuesday's results, while incomplete, indicate that Republicans will have underperformed both expectations and historical trends once the vote counts are complete.

Whatever the final makeup of the next Congress, the results appear to be good news for democracy. And that's not simply because Republicans' anticipated red wave didn't materialize. It's because of how it didn't: Trump-backed candidates proved too extreme in some of the most competitive states, showing that neither Trump nor election denialism ought to be the path forward for the GOP. It's time, in other words, for Republicans to finally break away from Trump's grip on their party and elect a new standard bearer come 2024 -- not just for the sake of the country, but for the sake of their own electoral prospects.

Just look at some of the races that have already been called: In New Hampshire, Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate candidate who helped spread lies about the 2020 election, lost his bid to unseat Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan, who polls showed was vulnerable. Down the ballot, Republican Karoline Leavitt, another election denier, lost her race against Democrat Chris Pappas in a purple swing district.

Elsewhere in the country, some of Trump's highest-profile candidates proved burdensome for the GOP: Mehmet Oz, whom Trump not only endorsed but actively campaigned for, lost the Pennsylvania Senate race, giving Democrats a seat that was previously in Republicans' hands. And Republican gubernatorial candidates Doug Mastriano, Tim Michels, and Tudor Dixon, all of whom are election deniers endorsed by Trump, lost their races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, respectively.

Meanwhile, some officials from both parties who stood up for the rule of law and the will of the American voters in 2020 despite Trump's pressure to overturn the results -- like Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia or Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of Michigan -- were rewarded for their courage in the face of death threats and won their reelection bids.

"How are these Republican voters going to perceive Donald Trump going forward, considering how poor of a job Trump's handpicked candidates did last night?" Ramer said.

In Pennsylvania's gubernatorial race, far right state lawmaker Doug Mastriano, whose conspiracy-theory-laden efforts to challenge the 2020 election results there won him Trump's primary endorsement, got blown out by Democrat Josh Shapiro.

Two other GOP gubernatorial candidates in battleground states who also earned Trump's backing and embraced election denialism, Tudor Dixon of Michigan and Tim Michels of Wisconsin, also lost on Tuesday. Their concession calls to their Democratic opponents were a relief to democracy experts who worried they might try to challenge the results.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped a Senate seat when John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz, a celebrity TV doctor from New Jersey. Oz had won Trump's endorsement late in a divisive primary, but wasn't able to overcome dismal favorability ratings caused in part by Fetterman portraying him as a slick out-of-towner.

Georgia offered yet another example of Trump's struggles.

In the last runoff, in January 2021, two Republican Senate incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, each lost after embracing Trump and his burgeoning claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The wins then by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock gave Democrats narrow control of the Senate.

Earlier this year, the former president handpicked challengers to the state's GOP Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who had refused to go along with Trump's election falsehoods. But those incumbents won their primaries and sailed to reelection Tuesday despite being on the outs with Trump.

Meanwhile, the Trump-blessed Republican football star Herschel Walker, while fighting Warnock to a runoff, nonetheless ran well behind Kemp in the vote count -- an indication that a swath of voters split their tickets between Kemp and Warnock.

"The ones that Trump opposed had the best nights," said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist here. "There's now more of an ability for candidates to be independent. You can survive being on the other side of Trump, where you couldn't a few years ago."

After three straight national tallies in which either he or his party or both were hammered by the national electorate, it's time for even his stans to accept the truth: Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a can of Raid.

What Tuesday night's results suggest is that Trump is perhaps the most profound vote-repellant in modern American history.

The surest way to lose in these midterms was to be a politician endorsed by Trump.

This is not hyperbole.

Except for deep red states where a Republican corpse would have beaten a Democrat, voters choosing in actually competitive races -- who everyone expected would behave like midterm voters usually do and lean toward the out party -- took one look at Trump's hand-picked acolytes and gagged.

Liberal fundraisers actually put money behind Trump-endorsed candidates in GOP primaries all over the place to help them prevail so that Democrats could face them in the general election. It was transparently cynical and an abuse of our political process. But it worked like gangbusters.

As Kevin Robillard of the Huffington Post noted on Wednesday afternoon when a Michigan Democrat named Hilary Scholten was finally declared the winner of her House seat against a raving lunatic named John Gibbs: "With this race call, every single Republican who won their primary with help from Democratic meddling has lost in the general election."

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