Democrats won the U.S. House last night. They also fell devastatingly short of their own expectations, and the resounding rebuke they hoped to deliver to President Trump has landed as a modest disagreement.
Their House victory will make Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the new speaker, and that will matter in how this country is governed over the next two years. But the base and most of the media had wanted so much more.
Instead, we got a normal midterm election in a year, and with a president, we were told was anything but normal.
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Should Trump feel repudiated by his party’s loss of the House? The strongest argument for this points to Republicans' poorer-than-usual performance among suburban women in key House races. This, CNN’s Mark Preston suggested, is supposed to illustrate a GOP coalition falling apart under the strain of Trump’s peculiar brand of Republicanism.
But does it really? Or does it exemplify the same problems Republicans have long had with “soccer moms” (as they were once called) at times when the political center and the mood of the country turned against them? The difference between 2006 and 2018 might just be that the losses of 2018 are far less severe, limited mostly to House races, and don’t result in Democrats having any real power over anything -- not even the power to block Trump’s nominations.
For that, thank Democrats’ excessive radicalism in calling for abolition of ICEand other extreme policies, which frankly scared the public. Thank their appalling behavior in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. And in some cases, thank Trump’s personal intervention with rallies that boosted victorious Republican candidates.
Almost without exception, voters punish the president’s party in Congress when his first midterm comes around. Recent presidents have suffered much more severe chastisements after two years of unified party control. In 1994, Bill Clinton’s party lost 54 House seats and its House (and Senate) majorities. In 2010, Barack Obama’s party lost 63 seats and its House majority.
And so in the run-up to election 2018, it seemed pretty clear that Republicans would have to take their lumps. And for those who watched or read the news, and noticed the media’s evidently infinite revulsion to Trump and all Republicans, it probably seemed like those lumps would be quite bad.
But despite an extremely hostile news media, Republicans came through it pretty well. They won key governors’ races in presidential states like Florida and Ohio. They gained a handful of Senate seats, despite being badly outspent. They also won many of the House races they were expected to lose, giving them an easier path to regain their majority in the future.
In short, Republicans’ relatively strong performance in this extremely high-turnout midterm is a strong sign that the public is not nearly as annoyed about the Trump presidency as coastal elite liberals seemed to think they were.
Maybe Trump could have done better with his campaigning. Some Republicans complained that his insistence on an immigration-focused message in the final days of the campaign, instead of an economic message, might have turned off some voters from GOP House candidates.
But given the daily shrieking on cable news about every Trump tweet and every minor development of his presidency, people rightly assumed that the whole thing should have gone much worse for him.
What’s more, most of the candidates Trump endorsed and campaigned for actually won. That’s a lot more than Barack Obama can say for any of the midterm or off-year elections in which he campaigned, including 2009, 2010, 2014, and now 2018 as well.
Democrats failed to catch the wave and fully exploit the trends in their favor. They will pay a price. Democrats now face GOP-controlled redistricting in key states. In the next few elections, they will face a GOP Senate majority with potential for further growth, which will be very hard for them to dismantle any time soon. And in the next two years, they will have to watch passively as Trump fills lifetime judicial vacancies with young conservatives at what is sure to be a record pace.
The lesson is one we've observed many times: The news media treats Trump as unprecedented and extraordinary, and the Democratic base believes it; but in the final accounting, if you ignore his tweets and speeches but instead look at his results, Trump fits well within the bounds of recent political history.
In the final analysis, Republicans lost the House. That’s bad for them. But it’s not like the bottomless defeats that Democrats suffered in 2014 and 2016. In election 2018, Republicans retained strong foothold in nearly all state governments, in the courts, and in the U.S. Senate. They also kept House losses limited enough that retaking the House is a realistic goal.
That’s about as good as Republicans could have hoped for, and not nearly as good as Democrats expected.
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