Wednesday, November 7, 2018

2018 Midterms: appears that Trumpism won and progressivism lost

So, where are we the morning after? Not sure if things ended up with anyone fully satisfied, certainly not for Dems, and we didn't get the routing we'd hoped for. However, in the most general of terms, Trumpism won and progressivism lost...
Democrats are getting the party they want, and it can’t win in purple and red states. Republicans are getting the party they didn’t want, and it can. And that made all the difference last night, in an election that turned out to be profoundly disappointing for progressives. How disappointing? Josh Kraushaar and “Abolish ICE” progressive Sean McElwee had drawn up a list pre-election of the key races as he saw them for the evening – Republicans won all nine of them.

The Blue Wave that had been so highly anticipated last night never materialized. A wave election, however you define it, does more than elect 30-35 House members and flip at this juncture just one Senate seat. A wave election is a combo punch of wins all over the place, including in places that push the margins of where you thought a party could win. We saw a true wave election in 2010 for Republicans. There was no such repudiation offered by Resistance Democrats in 2018.

Yes, Democrats took the House, as anticipated – the combination of retirements and the backlash of suburban voters overwhelmed a GOP where many of its members had become lackadaisical in their approach to doing the work required to win elections. But when your most significant statewide victories for Democrats are defeating Scott Walker and Dean Heller, it’s a far cry from how things looked pre-Kavanaugh.

So today we wake up to a Republican Party that is decidedly more Trumpian, having seen the elimination of its most moderate and Trump-critical members, and the support of those who embraced Trump emphatically on the campaign trail and in policy preferences. The only candidate to win statewide who could be fairly described as a Trump critic is Mitt Romney, and even he will arrive in Washington to play the balancing game in a period of investigations and confirmations. And on both scores, it’s full speed ahead, with subpoena power for the House and an emboldened majority in the Senate. ...

This election featured the metropolitan backlash we expected, and it delivered the House to Democrats and eradicated the suburban moderates from the GOP. It just wasn’t enough to form a wave, hampered by the economy, by Kavanaugh, and by a challenging map. It furthered President Trump’s goals of the kind of coalition he wants. After two years of often uncomfortable relationships with Paul Ryan and Congress, he now has a foil in Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats. We shall see what use he makes of them.
And about that 'blue wave'...yeah, NO. Dems won the House, but Trump won the election...
While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled. Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.

As I always say, in politics, what is supposed to happen tends to happen. I predicted in August that the Democrats would take the House but that alone was not enough for most Democrats. As much as this year’s midterms offered an obvious opportunity to rebuke President Trump, little of what the arrogant Democrats and members of the mainstream media expected would happen actually did. So much of what they said turned out to be wrong that it will take a while before the significance becomes clear. And if the 2018 midterms prove anything, it is that Trump is standing strong while Democrats and their allies who thought Trump would have been affirmatively rejected are in fact the ones who have themselves been denied.

Democrats have underperformed in comparison with the historical markers and general expectations of a midterm cycle. The president’s party loses 37 seats in the House on average in midterm elections when his approval is below 50 percent — but Democrats aren’t projected to pick up nearly that many seats. No liberal will want to admit it, but Trump is an asset to the Republican Party, while President Barack Obama was a disaster for the Democratic Party.
In general terms though (which seem to historically equate to a loss of 30 House seats for a president's midterm), Obama's first midterm loss was rather historic (-63) compared to Trump's, who defied the odds with -27, averting disaster and making a little history of his own...
The 2018 midterm election wasn’t a disaster for Donald Trump like it usually is for the president’s party: Republicans strengthened their control over the Senate even as the lost command of the House for the first time in eight years.

How unusual is that? It’s only the third time in the past 104 years that the party holding the White House has gained seats in the Senate in a mid-term election while losing seats the House. The same split outcome also occurred in 1970, 1962 and 1914.
That's not without saying things won't be challenging for the president's agenda (and for Washington to simply work for the people, instead of the ensuing special interest vindettas!), but that does put things in perspective. Also in perspective, not all of the added Democratic House members were progressive darlings. Blue Dogs were certainly added to the mix. And Nance may face an impending battle of her own...
Nancy Pelosi won’t have much time to relish her party’s takeover of the House.

Though she played a key role in helping Democrats regain the majority for the first time since 2011, Pelosi faces a new battle: regaining the speaker’s gavel amid grumbling from a growing minority of rank-and-file Democrats about the need for new leadership.

The San Francisco Democrat, who has led her party in the House since 2003 including four years as speaker, said Tuesday night that she’s confident she will be elected speaker.
Despite the hearsay, I'm pretty confident that Democrats will re-seat her as Speaker out of spite! But another term of Pelosi re-wrecking the House might be what's required for a realignment in a few short years. We'll have to wait and see.

In hindsight, and despite the close races (in which we undoubtedly have work to improve), House members got the short end of the stick. Campaign promises that were passed through the Republican House often fizzled in the Senate under Mitch McConnell's leadership; yet with poor leadership of its own (quitting Ryan, I'm coining that one) and equally poor optics, regional representatives took the daggers for it. Providentially, Senate Dems made complete ASSES of themselves during the Kavanaugh hearings that woke Republican voters up (in addition to the border crisis, despite the media's insistence that it did more harm) to the kind of wacko birds that were seeking power in the U.S. Senate, thus enabling common sense Americans to assemble a Red Wall to stop their trajectory of overthrowing government under a Trump administration.

President Trump responded to the midterm results this morning...


ADDENDUM: Hmm, there could also be something to this line of thought concerning House losses...
Posted by an ebb and flow at 1:05 PM