Donald Trump spent the final weeks of the campaign telling Americans whom to fear. Somali immigrants were "low IQ". A Muslim doctor running for the Senate in Michigan was "a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member" who should pass through a metal detector to enter the chamber. The Justice Department sent about 1,000 monitors to the polls, many of them to cities with large Black electorates. On Tuesday, voters delivered the bill.
Democrats won the Senate, flipping at least six seats, among them Texas, Ohio and Kansas, states the party had all but written off. They are projected to take the House as well. Georgia elected its first Black woman governor. A president who promised to bring prices down from his first day now faces a Congress that can investigate his administration, write its budgets and refuse his laws.
Prices, not prejudice
The reason is not mysterious. Petrol averaged $4.17 a gallon on the eve of the vote, more than a dollar higher than a year earlier, after a war with Iran that most Americans never wanted. Sixty-five per cent of voters told exit pollsters that Mr Trump's policies had made the economy worse. Nearly eight in ten said rising prices were causing their families hardship. Faced with that record, the White House chose to change the subject. Voters refused to follow.
That is the lesson for every government tempted by the same strategy, in Washington or elsewhere. Scapegoats do not lower the price of diesel. Insulting a religion does not refill a pension. Fear can mobilise a base for a while, but it cannot pay a household's bills, and sooner or later the bills arrive.
What markets heard
Investors' first reaction was nervous: overnight, Nasdaq futures fell by about 2 per cent and the dollar weakened. By the morning they had changed their minds. Stock futures turned higher, European shares rose and the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped sharply at the open. The relief owed something to Mr Trump himself, who said he was "absolutely willing to accept those results" and that Democrats "did a good job".
He should be held to those words. For two years, policy has been made by decree: tariffs imposed and lifted overnight, a war launched without a vote, institutions tested by a president who treated their independence as an obstacle. Markets can price risk. What they cannot price is arbitrariness. A Congress that insists on debate, oversight and the rule of law is not a threat to investors; it is the closest thing to stability that America's politics can now offer.
What Democrats owe
The victors should resist triumphalism. Voters like them only marginally more than they like the Republicans, and many voted against Mr Trump rather than for an alternative. Democrats now share responsibility for the cost of living. They will need a credible plan to bring down energy prices, to end a war that is draining household budgets and to restore a trade policy that businesses can plan around, not merely a programme of hearings.
They should also use their power with restraint. Oversight is a duty; vengeance is not. The best answer to a politics of fear is a politics of competence.
On Tuesday, Americans said they wanted a government that asks what things cost, not whom to blame. Every story has a price. This one has just been paid.
