Midterm election

Both sides will of course try to spin the results as a big win, but in fact the mid-term election results are just about what one would have expected. The Republicans seem to have picked up a couple of Senate seats, and the Democrats flipped about 30+ House seats to take narrow control of the House. As I mentioned yesterday, a 30 seat shift against the current president's party is right on the historical average for midterm elections. For a president with approval ratings below 50% (as Trump has) a 37 seat gain is the historical average. A "Blue Wave" would have been 40 or 50 or more seats, and that didn't happen. For comparison, the Republican "wave" of 2010 picked up 63 House seats, and the Republican "wave" of 1994 picked up 54 House seats.

The media will analyze the results endlessly and in minute detail, but my own reading of the situation is that Democrats once again shot themselves in the foot, an uncomfortably common occurrence these days. Midterm elections, with generally low turnouts, are often determined by who is energized to turn out to vote.  Until the Kavanaugh debacle, polls show that Republicans weren't very enthusiastic about the midterms while Democrats were. The Democrat's down-and-dirty street fight on the Supreme Court nomination energized Republicans, and probably stopped what might well have been a "Blue Wave" in the making.

With Congressional political control split between the two parties now, not too much will get done in Congress - and is that any different than the last two years?  The one major bipartisan issue that might possibly get through both the House and Senate is a infrastructure bill, if either party can get its act together. The question now is whether Democrats, with narrow control of the House, will focus on policy issues that might help them on the 2020 elections, or will waste the next two years in fruitless attacks and investigations of Trump.

By the way, Democratic pundits were so sure they would do better because of Trump's low approval ratings. But at the point of recent midterms the approval ratings of  recent presidents have all been below 50% (2018 Trump 41%, 2014 Obama 38.7%, 2010 Obama 45.7%, and 2006 Bush 30.3%). It seems to me Democrats have spent too much time making up fantasies about how they were going surely to beat Trump and believing their own propaganda, and not enough time in realistic hard-headed planning on regaining power.

What this election should have made clear to Democrats is that just being "against Trump" is not a winning strategy - it takes more; it takes some real policy proposals. Another thing that this election seems to me to have demonstrated is that far left candidates don't do well in America. Most of the ultra-liberal candidates that were the darlings of the party - Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams etc - lost despite the enormous amount of money spent on their campaigns.