This Election Day, one thought again dominates my thinking. “America, prove me right.”
It is a plea to my country to follow through on what I think it is going to do: Rebuke President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress and restore some semblance of checks and balances by at least returning the House of Representatives to Democratic control.
Opinion from the Washington Post
Trump Gambles He Can Shatter Political Norms — and Keep Winning
Most presidents face a midterm thumping. But rarely do they make it so much about themselves.
By JOHN F. HARRIS and ELIANA JOHNSON November 06, 2018
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One constant of Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency and his two years in power is how behavior that would be not just risky but downright stupid for any normal politician ends up working smartly for him.
This is the essence of the Trump Mystique—a three-year record in which he regularly demonstrated that many of the normal precedents, patterns and truisms of American politics simply do not apply to him. This mystique—Is it real or illusion? Is his patented sorcery still working?—is among the big questions being tested in Tuesday’s elections.
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Trump’s own decisions over the past month have put the issue—whether Trump has defied political gravity or merely delayed its impact—in even sharper relief than it would have been anyway.
It would be smart, viewed through a conventional prism, for a president who has never commanded majority support to try to float above the midterms and allow politicians of his own party to keep their elections locally focused. It seems stupid to unite and energize the opposition in their loathing by insisting that congressional elections are a national referendum on himself.
It would be smart, if playing by normal rules, for a leader presiding over the best employment numbers in decades to make an economic argument his main push against the headwind that the incumbent president’s party historically faces in midterm elections. It seems stupid to reduce this to secondary status in favor of picking scabs over immigration and societal violence in the days before voting.
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In the disoriented state of contemporary politics, however, it seems stupid for anyone to pretend to be smart in predicting the results of Trump’s decision to turn the volume up to 11 on Trumpism.
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As Trump himself cast the implications for Tuesday in a weekend stop in Georgia: “I wouldn’t say it’s as important as ’16, but it’s right up there.”
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Some dynamics seem inescapably true. One is that at nearly every important turn when traditional political logic would have pointed toward softening the tone and broadening support—from his 2016 acceptance speech to the 2017 inaugural address and countless other occasions since—Trump took the opposite path and along the way tightened his connection to his most devoted supporters.
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A vivid recent example was over the sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh. For a few days Trump deferred to prevailing wisdom that he needed to treat accuser Christine Blasey Ford respectfully and project an open mind on the merits. Before long he returned to his customary instincts and attacked Ford, Democrats and the media, while cheering on Kavanaugh’s own attacks on Democrats.
For every Republican operative who thinks Trump’s midterm strategy is nuts—one senior GOP strategist running competitive statewide races said the president’s image took a 15-point hit in internal campaign polling over the past 10 days—there is a Democratic operative who worries that Trump’s polarizing approach just might allow him to beat the odds as he did in 2016.
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But that same approach raises the cost of GOP setbacks for Trump, who has often made clear his own view that power is partly a matter of perception, and preserving an aura of strength and success. A narrow House loss, for instance, would surely be explained as the result of normal historical patterns. In the case of a national blowout, no matter if Trump blamed others, the result would be like a baby with a paunch and comb-over: No way to deny paternity.
“I do think it’s a little unfair to put it all on him, because you start behind the eight-ball,” said a senior GOP Senate strategist, pointing to the usual historical pattern with a president’s first midterm election. “What I think is different [in 2018] is that while the president always has the ability to define the agenda, he takes all of the oxygen out of the air. The reality is, these races are completely national. And while there’s always a national bent to congressional races, there’s really no escaping it this time.”
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A senior White House official said political advisers applied a three-prong test this fall in deciding where to send Trump. One was whether they could find good rally venues. Two was data suggesting which districts were especially promising if Trump could manage to ignite GOP-leaning voters who might normally vote in presidential elections but not midterms. Third was protectiveness, trying to avoid races where Trump would risk being blamed for a race that was a likely loser anyway.
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The president’s vituperative attacks on Democrats and race-baiting immigration rhetoric broke new ground on divisiveness, but in one sense he was making a calculation—can a president influence the midterms to advantage?—familiar to three of his recent predecessors.
In 1994, Bill Clinton’s advisers urged him to take it easy and mostly stay off the campaign trail in favor of the White House and overseas trips. He didn’t buy it—convinced he could persuade voters to back him and Democrats if he could just get in front of enough of them. Polling suggested otherwise, and political aides later concluded that an unseasoned president’s own efforts helped fuel the GOP’s historic congressional takeover that year.
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In 2002, the backdrop of 9/11 one year earlier changed the landscape for George W. Bush. Stressing national security themes, he helped Republicans make historically unusual congressional gains.
In 2010, Barack Obama saw a conservative backlash over spending to combat recession and the financial crash, as well as the Affordable Care Act. He campaigned in some districts where he was welcome, but he knew it wasn’t doing much good. “There’s no doubt this is a difficult election,” he said at a Cleveland rally. He was right: November brought a “shellacking,” as he called it, that lost the House and reached deep into statehouses around the country.
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Similar results in the opposite direction against Republicans on Tuesday will not only put subpoena power in the hands of the president’s political foes—it could lead the handful of prominent Trump dissenters in the national GOP to urge others to join their cause.
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“Yeah, he’s going to lose the House,” said Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Weekly Standard and a leading Trump critic. “They’re gonna lose eight to 10 governorships probably. So, where is the brilliance? Where is the political magic? … He got 46 percent of the vote in 2016. It looks like Republicans are going to get, if they’re lucky, 46 percent of the vote [or lower]. … So what has Trump done for the party?”
Not that Trump will admit as much. Terry Sullivan, who managed Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign, suggested that one key aspect of Trump’s mystique is that he will argue that his mystique is undimmed no matter the result. “Don’t take my word for it. Ask him tomorrow,” Sullivan said Monday. “Don’t take my word for it, ask his supporters. He will say that candidates that he campaigned with won and the ones who didn’t want to campaign with him lost. And the ones that lost that he campaigned with did better than they would have if they hadn’t campaigned with him—he made the race closer, so much closer.”
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For all Sullivan’s evident sarcasm, Michael Strain, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute, effectively agreed that Trump’s activities in the closing days of the campaign might help in some districts but won’t be the decisive factor if the evening ends in a big GOP defeat. “I think that the cake on the president is kind of baked—that people have a view of the Republican Party under Donald Trump” that won’t swing widely based on any day’s headlines, he said. “That suggests to me that if the president were talking about the economy and not talking about the caravan, that wouldn’t necessarily be a better strategy to get Republicans to win.”
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Probable election results today : CNN analysis
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The (Final) Forecast: A Democratic House and a Republican Senate, but still some uncertainty
Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN
Updated 7:55 PM EST, Tue November 06, 2018
(CNN) (Note from Harry: Follow me along live on Election Night here.)
The 2018 campaign (mostly) comes to an end today. If the polls and our forecasts are right, the Democrats and Republicans will each have something to be happy about.
Democrats are favored to take back the House, while Republicans are favored to maintain control of the Senate.
Our final House forecast has Democrats earning 227 seats to the Republicans 208. That’s a net gain of 32 seats from the 195 they hold right now. Democrats only need a net gain of 23 to win the 218 seats necessary for a majority.
But as we have noted all along, our forecasts come with a margin of error. Specifically, our 95% confidence interval finds that Democrats could win as few as 207 seats (11 short of a majority) to 259, according to our latest estimate.
There are two things you should note about the range. The first is that it’s wide because there are so many close races.
View this interactive content on CNN.com
There are, for example, 32 races that we think will have a margin of 4 points or less. There are 97 races in which the margin of error (95% confidence interval) is wider than the margin by which one of the candidates is projected to win.
Of those 32 races that are within 4 points, 19 are forecasted to be won by the Democratic candidate. If only about half of these 19 go the other way, Republicans could conceivably maintain control.
The second thing you should note is that the margin of error is asymmetric. That is, the difference between our median estimate (227) and the bottom range of our margin of error (207) is only 20 seats, while the difference between our median and the top range of our margin of error (259) is 32 seats.
There are an astounding 61 races where the Republicans are favored, but where we think the Democratic candidate is within the margin of error of winning. If there is a small, but systematic, error in the polling, it’s not inconceivable that Democrats could do far better than we have forecasted them to do.
The asymmetric range of our results is why if we were projecting our midpoint using an average instead of a median that would forecast a net gain of 34 seats for the Democrats.
Make no mistake though, the House race is still close enough that Republicans could win. The closeness of the result is such that the seven races within 4 points in California, Maine and Washington could be determinative. It may take some time to count the ballot for various reasons (e.g. mail-in ballots and ranked choice voting) in these contests. That means we may not know the winner for days.
Our final Senate forecast is something else altogether. It has Republicans controlling 52 seats and Democrats (and Independents who caucus with them) holding 48 seats in the next Congress. If this forecast were exactly right, it would mean that Republicans would have a net gain of a seat since the last Congress.
This overall forecast takes into account each state’s forecast, the margin of error of each state’s forecast and the correlation between the different state results. In cases where one side is expected to win many close victories, the overall forecast thinks there’s a good chance they will lose a few of these contests.
That’s exactly what’s going on this year. Right now, our forecast has Democratic candidates winning by 2 points or less in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada. No Republican is forecasted to win by less than 6 points. Based upon past history, the model expects that two of these close forecasted Democratic victories will turn into Democratic defeats. If all these states end up going to the Republicans, they will win 55 seats.
Indeed, we shouldn’t underrate the possibility of Democrats winning the House and Republicans doing very well in the Senate tomorrow night.
If each of our state forecasts is right, however, Democrats will end up 50 seats to the Republicans 50 seats. Vice President Mike Pence would break the tie and give Republicans the barest of majorities in the Senate in this case.
Is it possible that Democrats win control of the Senate? Yes. Our forecasted margin of error gives Democrats the possibility of controlling up to 52 Senate seats in the next Congress.
Right now, the two most likely ways Democrats win the majority in Senate elections held tomorrow involve either Democrat Phil Bredesen winning in Tennessee or Democrat Beto O’Rourke winning in Texas. Both of those races are within 6 points, which means they are within the margin of error.
Perhaps the most intriguing scenario for election night is that if neither party wins a Senate majority tomorrow. There is little doubt at this point that the Mississippi Special Senate jungle primary will require a runoff in late November between the two top vote getters on Tuesday. In the jungle primary, all Democrats and Republicans run against each other. If no one receives a majority, there will be a runoff.
There are two Republicans (Chris McDaniel and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith) who will split the Republican vote in this very red state. The question is who advances to the runoff.
For most of the campaign, the polls pointed towards Hyde-Smith making the runoff against Democrat Mike Espy. In such a scenario, Republicans would be heavily favored to hold onto the seat.
There has been some late polling though that has Hyde-Smith and McDaniel neck-and-neck. If McDaniel beats out Hyde-Smith, this seat becomes very winnable for Democrats.
And keep in mind that if we project every other state correctly and it’s a Espy-McDaniel runoff, said runoff will be for control of the Senate.
This story has been updated to reflect the most recent forecast figures.
As of 10:20 p.m. ET, NBC News projected that Democrats will win the House.
Now what?
Midterms: Trump threatens Democrats over investigations after they take House –
Don’t be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump
Cas Mudde
Republicans lost many races, but they still held on to most of their positions. And Trump will see that as a victory
But Democrats need a new strategy outside of metropolitan areas. They’re getting hammered there.
View in Browser | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. The New York Times
The New York Times
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
NYTimes.com/Opinion »
David Leonhardt
David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist
If you look at the national results, last night was a smashing win for Democrats. They retook control of the House of Representatives, putting an end to President Trump’s legislative agenda and giving them the power to investigate his corruption. Democrats did so with a runaway win in the national popular vote — likely by about seven percentage points.
“This is what happens to a party when it controls the White House and the president is unpopular,” Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein writes. Trump’s “disdain for those who didn’t vote for him has turned out to be a disastrous strategy.” Anyone who finds Trumpism to be abhorrent should be very pleased with the judgment the country just delivered: On his current path, Trump is a clear underdog to win re-election in 2020.
And yet last night did not feel like a thorough rejection of Trumpism. In one statewide race after another, Democrats suffered disappointing losses. It happened with the exciting progressive candidates in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas (pending recounts). It happened with the centrist candidates in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and elsewhere.
Why? Above all, because Democrats are getting trounced outside of metropolitan areas. “The consistent pattern you’re seeing is that Republicans are consolidating control of rural white America faster than Democrats are making inroads into educated suburbia,” the progressive writer David Klion tweeted.
I think Democrats need to take this problem more seriously than they have so far. They need a new approach to nonmetropolitan America, one that asks in an open-minded way which issues are damaging the party there. Is it about moving to the center on immigration, abortion or other issues? Or rather than specific policies, is the problem the party’s lack of a compelling story about the country’s future?
Progressives can’t simply write off these parts of the country. Last night’s results have given the Republicans a strong majority in the Senate. Until Democrats figure out a strategy for retaking it, they won’t be able to pass ambitious laws or control the confirmation process for federal judges. There is no progressive future without a better performance outside of metropolitan America.
Economic populism keeps winning. One clue may be in the continued success of the Democrats’ economic agenda. Obamacare, in particular, had a very good night.
Voters in Nebraska, Idaho and Utah all appear to have approved ballot measures to expand Medicaid. If the results stand, they would extend coverage to more than 300,000 low-income Americans, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff explains. Democrats also won the governorships of both Maine and Kansas, whose Republican governors had held up Medicaid expansions passed last year.
“Turns out people like Obamacare minus Obama,” tweeted HuffPost’s Lydia Polgreen.
Voter enfranchisement. Voting rights also had a mostly good night. Florida voters approved a ballot initiative that would restore the voting rights of nearly 1.5 million people convicted of felonies. Amazingly, this initiative gives the vote back to 40 percent of all black men in the state, according to Samuel Sinyangwe. Michigan and Maryland voters also passed measures making it easier to cast a ballot, including same-day registration.
On the flip side, North Carolina and Arkansas both passed ballot measures requiring voters to present an ID at the polls. These are laws designed to reduce voter turnout.
A year of the woman. Whether as a repudiation of Trump (as Jill Filipovic argues in The Times) or as “the aftershock from Hillary Clinton’s defeat” (as The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty writes), more than 100 women will likely win their congressional races — a high-water mark in women’s representation in Congress.
Finally, if you’re a liberal feeling down about last night, consider the possibility that your expectations were set too high, writes Slate’s Jim Newell. “If you could’ve asked Democrats to take this night at the beginning of 2017, they would have eagerly accepted it,” Newell writes. “As bleh as it all might feel, it’s a start.”
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Ross Douthat, Frank Bruni, Mimi Swartz and The Editorial Board on the midterms.
The Democrats Won the House. Now What?
Journalists outside the Capitol reported Tuesday night on the midterm elections.
Journalists outside the Capitol reported Tuesday night on the midterm elections. Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
For starters, pick policy battles wisely.
The Results Are (Mostly) In
OP-ED COLUMNIST
For Democrats — and America — a Sigh of Relief
By FRANK BRUNI
The party didn’t get everything it wanted. But it got what it and the country need.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Midterms Deliver an American Stalemate
By ROSS DOUTHAT
A rebuke to President Trump in the overall returns, but not a presidency-ending repudiation. Two years of chaos and hysteria ending in a return to standoff.
CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
The Success in Beto’s Failure
By MIMI SWARTZ
O’Rourke gave Texans who have long felt disenfranchised a glimpse of what could be.
CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
The Thrill of a Women’s Wave
By JILL FILIPOVIC
Watching anti-Trump female candidates win is exciting, but I’m worried about all they’re being asked to do.
How the Midterms Made Us Feel: Afraid, Then Upset
By THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION
The midterm election has been divisive and difficult for many Americans. Now that it’s coming to an end, how do we feel? This live map shows reactions from readers across the country through Election Day.
A To-Do List for Democrats in Albany
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
With control of the State Senate, they can reform the electoral system.
Winning the House Is Not Nothing
President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base early on Tuesday.
President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base early on Tuesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By KEVIN BAKER
The bumbling, exasperating Democratic Party claws back one branch of government.
…