Trump lost. Biden did not win. Democracy did. But Slow Joe may have damaged his 2024 options by securing democracy a place on the mid-term ballot.

At the same time, if President Biden takes the statesmanlike position and declares that he not a candidate for the 2024 election, then he is more likely to have a working relationship with a Republican-controlled Congress for his final two years.

He also ensures his place in history as the man who saw off the threat to American democracy as opposed to the 80-plus-year-old who clung to power past his sell by date.

But back to the loser. Donald Trump was not officially on the ballot. But he did everything possible to make the 2022 mid-term elections about him and his lies that the 2020 presidential elections were stolen from him in a massive fraud.

He refused to concede defeat and denied the validity of the American electoral process which is the foundation stone of the country’s democratic system.

He enthusiastically endorsed hundreds of candidates. Many were underqualified but they all shared the common platform of accepting his big election lie.

These candidates were overwhelmingly supported by Republicans in state primaries. Then they were either rejected, or barely scraped home, when their names were put to the public at large.

In Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers beat Republican Tim Michaels who promised to change the state’s electoral structures to insure Republican Party government in perpetuity. The margin was an overwhelming nine percentage points.

In the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race Democrat Josh Shapiro romped home against election denier Doug Mastriano in a state which only narrowly went to Biden in 2020. In Pennsylvania’s Senate Race, Democratic John Fetterman defeated Trump follower Dr Mehmet Oz despite the former’s inability to speak coherently due to a recent stroke.

So, if Trump is the big loser, then who is the man most likely to win the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2024. The smart money appears to be heading straight for the re-elected Governor of Florida, Ron de Santis.

De Santis is every bit as right-wing as Donald Trump. He is libertarian, anti-vac, anti-immigrant, anti-facemask, anti-Disney and anti-woke. When he was in Congress, de Santis was a founding member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus which includes such luminaries as Marjorie Taylor Greene. He was also an early supporter of Donald Trump. So far, a cookie-cut version of Trump.

But the comparisons end there. There is – so far – no suggestion of sexual impropriety, misogyny, corporate fraud or tax evasion. He bends the truth and provided some support to Trump’s election lie, but he does not appear to regularly trade in “alternative facts” and steers away from conspiracy theories. He is also a young, healthy, 44-year-old, former naval lieutenant with degrees from Harvard and Yale.

Most important, of all, from a Republican Party point of view, De Santis is seen as a winner. He narrowly won the 2016 Florida governorship, but this time around his margin of victory was nearly 20 points. On top of that, he is crediting with securing three additional Florida Republican seats in the House of Representatives.

The strength of Ron de Santis’s position is underscored by the fact that Trump is attacking his former acolyte before either of them have declared their candidacy. He has already dismissed him as “Ron de Sanctimonious” and issued the unveiled warning that he knows things about his would-be opponent which de Santis would prefer to be left unknown.

But the fact is that Trump is on the down slope. De Santis is on the up. And democracy chalked up a big win in this week’s mid-term elections.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopedia of the War” and the recently published “America Made in Britain". He has a weekly podcast, Transatlantic Riff.