‘Democracy is on the ballot, this election.’

This was the lie that parted the red sea and helped turn an anticipated Republican tsunami into a trickle in the US mid-term elections.

Almost all Americans agree these are unprecedented times and that their nation stands divided. But they’re equally divided on who is to blame for this.

Democrats fear a January 6-style ‘insurgency’ of gigantic proportions, while Republicans fear Black Lives Matter-esque riots in every city and nobody to police them. I know which Armageddon narrative I find most likely, but reality isn’t at play here.

The image of ‘MAGA insurrectionist deplorables’ ruling the entire nation, repeated over and over by Democrat spokespeople and media pundits, presented a message of fear that seems to have worked.

It will be weeks before analysts have a clear picture of what tipped the scales a little more back to the Democrats’ favour, but early indications are that an unusually high turnout of younger voters – particularly young women – was one important factor. Turnout generally for these mid-terms was 46 per cent. The second highest in recent history.

The US mid-terms can be confusing for us Aussies to understand. Like our Parliament, America has two Houses of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. But unlike Australia, US members of the House of Reps, face re-election every two years. Senators get six years, with around one-third of the 100 Senators sent to the polls at each two-yearly election.

In addition, the US votes in many other contests on the day of the mid-terms. For example, 36 states elected their Governors (the equivalent of our Premiers) and several other state and local government contents ran simultaneously.

The Democrats’ late-stage fear campaign was launched two months prior to election day with Joe Biden’s bizarre nationally televised rare ‘prime-time Presidential address’ in Philadelphia on September 2. The carefully stage-managed event painted a clear – but false – picture of the nation.

‘Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,’ the President dramatically warned Americans, while bathed in a sea of anxiety-inducing red light and flanked by two marine guards.

And thus the narrative was delivered. Democrats must turn out in force to prevent the nation falling into the hands of millions of scary MAGA people, coming to take away your rights, freedoms, and the very soul of the nation. Add an amplification and distortion of the threat posed by the overturning of Roe v Wade to young women’s right to abortion, and the narrative gets just the hysterical boost it needs.

The strategy worked everywhere, except in the states with strong Republican (GOP) leaders who consistently communicate their intentions and walk the talk, thereby building enormous public trust (Liberal Party strategists take note). In the races for Governor of Texas and Florida, GOP incumbents Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis were both convincingly returned to office, the latter increasing his winning margin from 50-50 at the 2018 poll to 60-40 this year.

In an interview with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson on his podcast, US conservative historian and academic Victor Davis Hanson noted that in the final two weeks of the election campaign, President Biden significantly ramped up the ‘scary MAGA’ narrative.

Despite the Democrats heavily pushing the ‘right to choose’ abortion message, there had been a shift in the polls which had the Republicans in front by early October. A change of plan was needed.

‘What apparently happened was Joe Biden … tried a radically different tack. He decided he was going to run on insurrection and “democracy dies in darkness” and he made the premise in a series of sharp speeches that if Democrats lost, then democracy was over with.’

Davis Hanson says the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, boosted this narrative.

‘They said this deranged ex-hippy, nudist, homeless, illegal alien was actually a MAGA adherent and … he acted out of right-wing rhetoric of the sort that Joe Biden said we had to crush,’ Hanson noted. ‘Then they went full hog on abortion and framed the abortion debate as “we want to protect young women who will die … trying to have back alley abortions”. Those two issues galvanised young people, and single women aged 20-30 got very enthused and angry and turned out,’ he said.

Professor Hanson notes that Republicans thought they had issues that everybody cared about: the price of petrol, inflation, and crime, but learned that younger people did not care about them as much as they had hoped. ‘And more importantly, they never came out with a contract for Americans of “if you vote for us this is what we’re going to do”.’

In addition, he says, Donald Trump’s attacks on Republican’s brightest spark, Ron DeSantis, didn’t help matters on the Republican side, discouraging many conservative voters from turning out.

One stand-out winner on the conservative side was Donald Trump’s former press secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders who took the Governorship of the small southern state of Arkansas.

Her father and former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, told Fox Business that Republicans must realise that the Democrats are not their only enemy.

‘How in the world did a party so out of touch with American day-to-day living end up doing as well as they did?’ Huckabee mused. ‘I think we have to accept we’re not just running against the Democratic Party. The social media and the mainstream media are a monolithic wall for the Democrats. They protect them and they advocate for them. Add to that the bureaucracy of the government – you have the justice Department and the FBI – and they’re no longer striped-shirt referees … they’re advocates wearing team jerseys and they’re rooting for the Democrats and calling penalties against Republicans all the time.’

Compared to the Australian media landscape, the range of conservative views on prominent US channels seems far more comprehensive. But Huckabee laments America’s descent into an apparent monopoly of ideas. ‘When good ideas and different ideas never see the light of day because they’re suppressed and censored,’ he notes.

‘When people talk about a threat to democracy, that is a threat to democracy.’