Former President Donald Trump was not a candidate in the US elections, whose results were declared on Wednesday. But he cast a long shadow over them

The midterm elections held halfway through a president’s four-year term usually go badly for the president’s party. Seen from that perspective, President Joe Biden and the Democrats have done better than expected in Tuesday’s midterm elections. With cost-of-living issues—surging food, energy, and housing prices—rising in saliency and Biden’s approval rating at a record low, few expected Democrats to buck this historical trend. Yet while the Democrats are on track to lose their narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the widely predicted Republican wave did not materialize.

A few Senate races are still too tight to call. But Democrats may hold on to their slim majority in the Senate. It is now split 50:50 between Democrats and Republicans. But Vice President Kamala Harris, who presides over the Senate, can cast the deciding vote when there is a tie, which gives Democrats their razor-thin majority. Democrats got a big boost by winning the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, earlier held by Republicans. We may not know the outcome of one key Senate race in Georgia till December. The state’s law calls for a run-off election if no candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote.

Also read: John Fetter man flips Pennsylvania Senate seat as Democrats show surprising strength Even though the election results are mixed, they could still change the US political landscape. During the last two years, despite their narrow majority in Congress, the Democrats could pass important pieces of legislation in areas such as climate change, infrastructure investment, gun control, and child poverty. That era of Democratic legislative victories may end. If it does, President Biden may still veto Republican attempts to dismantle Democratic policy priorities. But, even with a narrow majority, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives could mean hearings and investigations of the Biden administration on a range of issues that would cause important political damage to Biden and the Democrats in the run-up to the next presidential election.

If Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate, they will thwart President Biden’s political agenda. A Republican-majority Senate will hold up presidential appointments to positions requiring Senate approval. Biden will issue executive orders, but they will be open to challenges in court.

Former President Donald Trump was not a candidate in these elections. But he cast a long shadow over them. As expected, he has already tried to take credit for the Republican victory. But a few of the high-profile unconventional candidates that he hand-picked have lost, which will undoubtedly weaken his position as the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

Also read: Biden warns of the dangers to democracy; Trump teases another run on the eve of the midterm elections.

An analysis by CBS News found that more than half of the Republican contestants in the midterm elections (308 of the 597 Republican candidates for congressional and state-wide offices) are "election deniers." They publicly deny or question the 2020 presidential election results. They either believe or go along with the "big lie": Trump’s absurd claim that the 2020 election—only the presidential election and not the elections to other offices held that day—was rigged.

The courts had, of course, dismissed Trump’s many lawsuits, claiming widespread voter fraud as baseless. But thanks to the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories in pro-Trump media outlets, the stolen election narrative that animated the January 6 assault on the Capitol continues to energize Trump’s political base.

"The false claim of a stolen election," says election law scholar Richard L. Ha sen, "metastasized into an election to NIST movement far worse than even those of us who worried deeply about the future of American democracy in 2020 ever imagined."

The election results appear to attest to the remarkable success of this movement.

With the Republicans in control of the House, the findings of the congressional committee that investigated the events of January 6 will now become moot. However, the election of a large group of election deniers to Congress less than a year after the political violence at the US Capitol is important for reasons other than Trump's political fortunes. These elected representatives do not accept the legitimacy of the Biden presidency. This is a remarkable thing to happen in a constitutional democracy.

Also see: In Photos: Campaigning for the US midterm elections heats Indeed, two-thirds of US adults say that their democracy is "in danger of collapsing." A widely respected Quinnipiac University poll conducted last August found they share this view across the political spectrum. Almost the same proportion of Democrats, Republicans, and independents expressed this view. But the apparent agreement between Democrats and Republicans only serves to emphasize the fundamental difference in the way they perceive the danger.

Democrats see the Make America Great Again Republicans as the primary threat to democracy. In President Biden’s words, "Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or I cheated them." The Truman perception of the danger is, of course, very different. It is best summed up by the problems of "election integrity"—code for election denial.

In the name of protecting election integrity, the last two years have seen an extraordinary level of legislative activity around voting rights. The narrative of a stolen election has been extremely important for the Republican Party’s political mobilization. Republican-led states have passed laws making voting more difficult. Another set of laws has shifted authority over elections, from non-partisan election administrators to partisan election boards. Since some of them disproportionately burden racial minority groups, critics call these efforts "voter suppression."

Journalist and editor Monika Bauerlein once said that the default mode of political reporting in the US is that of sports coverage. It tells us which team is winning and by how much, about the actions of star players, and about coaches and their game strategies. I assume all parties know the rules and mostly follow them. This kind of reporting, however, has a blind spot: "play-by-play coverage means we don’t see what happens of the game." Perhaps, this way of following elections cannot make connections and see the big picture as it unfolds before our eyes—the storm clouds that have been gathering around the institutions of American democracy.