Sure just about every President see’s loses in midterm elections rot their political party….
Donald Trump thought he was immune to that…
He made some silly stuff about a ‘Red Wave’….Some Republicans even echoed his crazy made up view….
But smart ones knew….
Although they have fallen in behind him
Politics is about reality….
Not about made up shit…..
A few hours into election night 2018, it felt like it was happening again — Donald Trump and the GOP were about to defy political gravity.
Republicans were ahead in Florida’s gubernatorial and Senate contests (and it would stay that way); Stacey Abrams was losing in Georgia; the GOP was cruising to victory in Indiana’s Senate race; and Republicans took the first marquee House bellwether of the night in KY-6.
But by 11:00 p.m. ET — and especially in three weeks since the midterm elections, as races have been called and more votes have come in — it was clear that political gravity caught up to Trump. And that might have been one of the more consequential outcomes of the 2018 midterms:
- that being a president with a 45 percent job rating (or lower) will hurt your party, like it did to Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2010;
- that focusing ONLY on your base can’t save your party from losing up to 40 House seats and control of Congress, even when the unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent;
- and that the most favorable Senate map in generations couldn’t net the GOP more than two net pickups.
To be sure, Trump and Republicans turned out their voters, ensuring that the GOP didn’t lose more House seats and control of the U.S. Senate. They won key Senate and gubernatorial contests in Florida, Iowa and Ohio — all important presidential battleground states. And they crushed Democrats in rural America, as the The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin wrote over the weekend.
But that the laws of political gravity applied to Trump in 2018 — and we also saw this play out in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in 2017, in Alabama’s Senate contest in December 2017 and the special PA-18 race in 2018 — provide an important lesson for 2020: Political fundamentals still matter.
Looking ahead to 2020, can Trump broaden his popularity and raise his job rating? And can he do so if the U.S. economy is no longer firing on all cylinders? Those might be two of the most important questions to answer over the next two years.
And remember this: The political fundamentals always pointed to a close election in 2016, especially after the Democrats had been in charge of the White House for eight years. (A party holding on to the White House for more than two terms has happened only once since FDR and Truman.) Much of the political world, however, discounted that political reality in 2016…..