How the House fell

[John F]

We in the northeast did our part.

How the House Fell: Republican Chaos and Democratic Focus
By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin
Nov. 7, 2018

The message from Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, was urgent and unsparing. In a meeting with Republican lawmakers before they left Washington for the August congressional recess, Mr. McCarthy warned that time was running short: Unless they intensified their campaign efforts and forcefully delivered a coherent message, he said, Republicans would suffer grievous losses in November. Instead of arresting their political decline, House Republicans proved unable at every turn to stay ahead of their troubles — including many of their own making.

By Labor Day, Republicans were fatally unprepared for an onslaught of Democratic campaign spending that overwhelmed their candidates from South Florida to Seattle. Party leaders on Capitol Hill and in the White House soon turned on one another and against their candidates with growing intensity. Two key groups — the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s campaign arm in the House, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful Republican super PAC — plunged into all but open warfare over messaging and money.

Democrats, in turn, delivered a message about health care with the repetitive force of a jackhammer. They cracked congressional maps drawn to favor Republicans and seized an array of open seats, while also felling longtime incumbents who had grown complacent.

And in the end, President Trump may have delivered the final blow to his party across the diverse and growing metropolitan communities that decided control of the House. In the last weeks of the campaign, Mr. Trump cast aside a positive Republican message about economic prosperity in favor of stoking racial panic about immigration — with appeals that veered into overt racism, alienating moderate swing voters and further enraging Democrats.

Republicans lost control of the House Tuesday night after eight years in power, with Democrats picking up seats in several suburban districts where the party traditionally did well. But if House Republicans were badly shaken by their defeat, few party leaders were genuinely surprised at the nature of their losses. In interviews with dozens of lawmakers, campaign strategists, activists and donors in both parties, a clear consensus emerged about the arc of the 2018 election.

It was a campaign defined early by Mr. Trump’s divisive persona and hard-right ideology, and by Republican leaders’ unswerving decision to align themselves with Mr. Trump and his overwhelmingly white, rural base rather than politically vulnerable moderates in Congress who hailed from the country’s population centers and represented the political middle.

A campaign of retribution against Republicans who did not pledge fealty to Mr. Trump — and to Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s legislative agenda — triggered an exodus of senior legislators that opened the way for a Democratic takeover...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/us/p ... house.html

[jbuck919]

All that Democratic control of the House has achieved is to make Trump resort even more to executive order backed up by what he considers national security or emergency reasons. He may not be able to gut Medicare that way, but let's just wait and see what happens when the Caravan arrives at the Rio Grande. They are entitled by law to have their cases for asylum heard, one-by-one. Trump might very well nullify this, which would end up in a suit against him in court for abusing his prerogative. And guess where the Supreme Court, now under his thumb, will come down.

[John F]

Wait and see.

[barney]

I really love the Trump cartoon in the Australian yesterday.
At present it's the second along, Trump playing golf. Captures him perfectly.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinio ... 596589f6db

[John F]

According to this story in today's NY Times, the result may be even better than it first appeared. Given the Times's liberal bias - that's one reason why I like it - we'd probably wait for the final certified vote counts before counting our chickens.

A Week After the Election, Democratic Gains Grow Stronger
By Alexander Burns
Nov. 13, 2018

The 2018 midterm election looked last Tuesday like a serious but not crippling setback for Republicans, yet the picture has grown grimmer for the party since then as a more complete tally of votes has come in across the country. What looked at first like a modest Democratic majority in the House has grown into a stronger one: The party has gained 33 seats so far and appears on track to gain between 35 and 40 once all the counting is complete. And Democratic losses in the Senate look less serious than they did a week ago, after Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner in Arizona on Monday. It now looks like Democrats are likely to lose a net of one or two seats, rather than three or four as they feared last Tuesday.

The underlying shifts in the electorate suggest President Trump may have to walk a precarious path to re-election in 2020, as several Midwestern states he won in 2016 threaten to slip away, and once-red states in the Southwest turn a purpler hue. The president’s strategy of sowing racial division and stoking alarm about immigration failed to lift his party, and Democratic messaging about health care undercut the benefit Republicans hoped to gain from a strong economy.

David Winston, a Republican pollster who advises congressional leaders, said his party should not use victories in the Senate to paper over severe losses with women, young people, independent voters and Latino voters, and Democratic gains with suburbanites and seniors. “We didn’t lose the Senate, but losing by the margins that we did with a lot of these groups is unsustainable,” Mr. Winston said.

Ballot counting continues in close contests across the nation, and deadlines for final results, or recounts, are weeks away in some cases.

There are warning signs for Democrats, too: Mr. Trump’s party remains ascendant in rural America, giving Republicans a durable advantage in the Senate, where less-populous states have influence greatly disproportionate to their voting numbers. If Democrats cannot cut into Republicans’ strength in areas far from major cities, they may struggle mightily to take back the upper chamber in 2020. And Republicans demonstrated a tenacious hold on two of the country’s biggest swing states, Ohio and Florida, giving Mr. Trump an important foothold on the presidential map.

Midterms are imperfect guideposts for presidential elections: In 2010, Democrats were defeated across Midwestern swing states and Florida and lost control of the House, only to prevail convincingly in the presidential race two years later. But for now, the big picture of the 2018 midterms is of a country in political flux, changing primarily to Mr. Trump’s disadvantage...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/us/p ... gains.html