There has been a wide spectrum of what the Blue Wave of '18 would look like: From tsunami to not-gonna-happen.
Well, as the dust finally settles, what’s your verdict for how big (or disappointing) it ended up being?
Poll to come, and you can base your opinion on anything you’d like: the opinions of Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity, the results of your state elections, the result of the Texas Senate race, the position of Venus in the pre-dawn sky, or any other criteria you choose.
So, this ain’t a prediction thread, it’s a post-election opinion thread.
I think it’s going to end up having been a near Presidential-election turnout, which would in a sense be a wave but, unfortunately, it’s matched on both sides.
The Democrats needed to convince the Republicans to stay home. They failed to do so. And the Republicans were able to crazify their base and convince them to show up despite having no big reason to do so.
For the most part, though, getting the House to flip is pretty much all you’d really need to keep sanity alive. (Though, it being the House, that’s less thrilling than one could hope for.) But I would say that the election is a strong indication of how much the communication has broken down between regions of the country and how we’ve fallen fully into the clutches of rule by the uneducated and insane - and I don’t mean that just on the side of Republicans.
Democrats needed to promise institutional change and all they mustered was “Keep ObamaCare alive!” The Democratic party is still living for the Democratic party. They need to step back and work for the nation again, because the Republican party sure ain’t. We need a solution to be offered in 2020. Now that it’s out in the wild that you can win on conspiracy theories and nonsense, we’re basically fucked unless we change how everything works and patch all the holes that we’ve put into the system over the last few decades.
The night isn’t over yet, but here’s my overall takeaway from the results so far. Democrats will take the house, but are doing so because, in the words of John King on CNN, they “recruited good candidates.” The victories are coming in normally red areas where the Democratic candidate is someone who has not run for office before and tend to have advantages such as being a veteran. They are going up against “we want to drain the swamp” type incumbents that are less popular because they have been there forever and are seen as part of the swamp. While this is a good thing for this election cycle, I don’t think it’s a viable long term strategy. Those new congresspeople will be the incumbents defending redish leaning purple seats the next go round, likely against Republicans that are going to be political outsiders who are more charismatic and have the same type advantages such as being veterans. I think the Democrats need to come up with a message that will resonate with voters in these districts rather than relying on winning with more charismatic candidates. Issues that need to be dealt with include immigration policy, a health care plan (not just let’s keep Obamacare), and an overall economic plan. Those are things this new congress will have to work on, and hopefully they will come up with ideas that resonate in 2020 rather than relying on winning with individual personalities.
I give Democratic performance a solid meh. They would have had to have done better than I thought they did to call it a wave and instead they did a bit worse. I would give them a polite golf clap for their efforts and suggest they strongly examine the significance of every angle of this election before doing anything particularly drastic.
It looks the Dems will retake the House but do poorly in the Senate and the governerships. That is pretty disappointing but given the Senate map and the vital importance of the House in keeping a check on Trump I think that qualifies as a small wave.
Lost in all this is that with a larger margin in the Senate, Republicans are likelier to nominate someone far right-wing to the Supreme Court should Ginsburg or Breyer depart. Had it stayed at 51, they would have needed to find a more centrist nominee whom either Collins or Murkowski would support. But now neither Senator will be needed by the GOP.
What happened tonight in the house is completely ordinary, precedented and expected, by realists on both sides. Never before has anything like this been considered special or a ‘wave’. It is only considered a “small wave” because it’s a lesser achievement than many hoped would happen, a “blue wave”, which clearly didn’t happen… I think the widespread adoption of that term was a mistake.
It was a wave. Not a tsunami as I had hoped and predicted, but it had to be a wave to overcome the structural disadvantages built into a gerrymandered map.
Thank fuck the Dems have prevailed in the House, and despite Republican gains in the Senate, those won’t amount to much. They’ll continue to appoint ideologue judges, but that’s about it – unless they get the chance to appoint another SCOTUS seat. The Senate was always a heavy lift for Dems in 2018.
Re-taking the House for Dems is huge. Guardrails at last.
Oh, and I hate Florida.
And I feel like I can take an unfettered breath for the first time in 2 years.
A trickle at best. Dems did about as well as expected in the House, and compared to other midterms it’s not much of a wave election at all.
It’s also looking like the worst-case scenario is occurring in the Senate.
There is a saying for when one chamber of the legislature is controlled by a different party than the other chamber & the White House… “Nothing really happens, unless something terrible happens.”
Although with the Senate even more deeply in Republican control, the Supreme Court might welcome 1 or 2 more Trump appointees. He could literally nominate anyone now and have as many as 5 republican NO votes to spare. Say hello to Justice Sarah Palin once Ginsburg croaks. And then there’s the rest of the judiciary, along with cabinet appointments… Ooph.
One thing to remember is that the Republicans never claimed Trump as one of their own in the first place. Losing the majority in the House is not that much of a negative for the President. He is still dealing with a legislative body that is as hostile to him as they have always been.
What has been the historical overturn of the house at the midterms when it and the White House are held by the same party of a new president? My recollection is that it is very common. I would not characterize tonights results as a blue wave, and not surprising.
It happened in 2010 and 1994 but not in 2002,1978 and 1962. So I don’t know if I would call it “very common”. Plus the Republicans have a structural advantage in the House partly because of geographical distribution and partly because of gerrymandering so it was far from obvious that the Democrats would win the House.
The President’s party is expected to lose in the mid-terms. So losing by a few seats is not a bad result.
However, all reports are that the turnout was very high, which means that voters on all sides are enthusiastic and engaged. So it’s a victory for democracy.