2018 Senate (& House)

bystander said:
Trump "screwed" up on immigration by 1) Insulting Mexicans 2) the kids being separated from their parents.
Click to expand...

He screwed up in some respects, but the issue isn't big enough to be decisive. Obama passed a bad healthcare bill that looked even worse when it was passed and had the potential to impact hundreds of millions of people. Bush led us into war on a basis that turned out to be false, and to compound the problem, he executed the war terribly.

Trump insulted Mexicans, but he has been doing that since 2015. I'm not saying it helped, but if he had handled the immigration issue the same way but acted like a serious adult about it, I don't think it would have hurt him very much, if at all and likely wouldn't have tarnished the entire Republican brand.

bystander said:
He did pull us from the Paris Agreement. That flew in the face of the Left. But engaging North Korea should be seen as a good thing. The tax cuts should be seen as a good thing. It definitely put money in everybody's pockets. However, there is the national debt to consider. How many people are truly concerned about that?
Click to expand...

The Paris Agreement pissed off the Left, but I don't believe it motivated voters who weren't already hostile to any Republican. Furthermore, he did that early on. I don't think it was on suburban moms' minds in Nov. 2018. And nobody cares about the national debt. They do superficially, but nobody votes on that.

bystander said:
What am I missing other than his tweets? Kavanaugh? He got blind-sided on that one. It's no surprise he'd pick a Conservative. He stuck with Kavanaugh so that was not so much policy as politics. Maybe that offended some moderates who as I said like the feeling of being "good."
Click to expand...

I actually think Kavanaugh, if anything, helped, because of how terribly the Democrats handled it and because it amped up the GOP base.

To me, the Tweets (as well as the stupid statements, picking juvenile cultural battles for no reason) hurt him more than anything. If he had got into office, pushed the same policy agenda, but basically acted like a regular guy, I think we'd still control the House.
 
Here is a wapo oped link which illustrates history and the reality of impact.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...31dcd53ca6b_story.html?utm_term=.0734f3bf8608

It was expected that the Republicans would lose a significant number of seats, irrespective of public opinions about Trump. Republicans had many more difficult House seats to defend than Democrats overall. There were twice as many Republican incumbents defending House seats in states Hillary Clinton won in 2016 than there were Democrats defending seats in states Trump won.

Republicans also had more than twice as many “open” House seats to hold on to as their Democratic rivals had: 36 Republican representatives chose not to stand for reelection this year because they were retiring or seeking another office. Seven others either resigned or otherwise left office before the election. As a result, Republicans had 43 House seats to defend without the benefit of a true incumbent candidate. On top of this, Republicans had three “open” Senate seats, and one more with a pseudo-incumbent (interim Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith took office in April).

Yet Democrats managed to win surprisingly few of these “open” contests. In the vast majority of cases, a new Republican was elected instead, and they tended to be even closer to Trump than their predecessors. So Trump actually cemented his hold over the Republican Party: Most of his staunchest Republican critics have either stepped down, been removed through a primary challenge or otherwise failed to win reelection. On top of this, many of the Senate Democrats who voted against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh from the states that Trump won in 2016 were voted out of office and replaced by Republicans.

Historically speaking, Democrats delivered a thoroughly average result in their first round as Trump’s opposition. Going all the way back to the Civil War, there were only two instances when a new party seized the presidency but didn’t lose seats in the House during their first midterm elections: Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the Great Depression), and President George W. Bush in 2002 (in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Even including these outliers, the average attrition during a party’s inaugural midterms is 35 House seats; excluding these two exceptions, the average loss is 41. Regardless of which number we run with, Trump could end up performing better than average in preserving his party’s influence in the House. He performed much better than his last two Democratic predecessors: Bill Clinton lost control of both chambers in the 1994 midterm elections. Barack Obama saw historic losses in the House in 2010, and lost seats in the Senate as well — the most sweeping congressional reversal in 62 years. "
 
Horn6721 said:
MrD
Historically the new party in power loses seats. Right? Not sure why anyone would think history would not repeat.
Click to expand...

Lose seats? Yes. Lose almost 40 seats? No. Obama and Clinton suffered bigger routs in their first midterms after screwing up or almost screwing up the nation's healthcare system. Bush's 2006 loss was smaller even though he was screwing up a war with thousands of people dying. In much tougher conditions, Trump? Major victories on foreign policy and no significant blunders, roaring economy, big tax cut. Very hard to screw that up. Under much tougher conditions, George H.W. Bush, Reagan, and Jimmy Carter never lost as many.

Horn6721 said:
Trump didn't do as bad as the "experts" projected. Don't forget there was a large number of open GOP Representative seats. IIRC 40.
Click to expand...

Why do you think there were so many open GOP seats?

Horn6721 said:
All in all the expected blue wave dribbled in.
Click to expand...

It was big enough to shutdown the GOP agenda for at least the next two years.

Horn6721 said:
And picking up some Senate seats is a positive for Trump.
Click to expand...

It is a positive, but it mostly happened because of a lopsidedly pro-GOP map. Furthermore, if you think about our performance, it was mediocre. With the exception of Florida, we flipped only the easiest seats. We lost one in Nevada, choked in Arizona and Montana, and we never even put Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Wisconsin into serious competition.
 
Mr. Deez said:
Of course, when it looked like she would lose, Trump suggested that she lost because she distanced herself from him. Will he now have to say that she won because she distanced herself or that she didn't actually distance herself?
Click to expand...

She did lose
Now what?
 
Mr. Deez said:
Couldn't distance herself enough.
Click to expand...

Now that it is official, Love says she is now “unleashed, untethered and unshackled” and can now freely speak her mind.

Who does that sound like?

Trump has always had this attitude and rode it all the way to the White House. If Love was as smart as she thinks she is, she would have figured this all out a long time ago and just copied his playbook.
 
Joe Fan said:
Now that it is official, Love says she is now “unleashed, untethered and unshackled” and can now freely speak her mind.

Who does that sound like?

Trump has always had this attitude and rode it all the way to the White House. If Love was as smart as she thinks she is, she would have figured this all out a long time ago and just copied his playbook.
Click to expand...

The problem wasn't that he spoke his mind. It's what was on his mind.
 
Mr. Deez said:
No, that almost 40 Republicans lost.
Click to expand...

It seems to me (without any peer-reviewed studies to back me up) that the air surrounding Trump makes people too uncomfortable. It's not something that drifts away harmlessly into the atmosphere. It instead feels like a change in the climate and causes uneasiness as to what is going on in that mind as you put it. They may agree with the policies but not the tone because it sounds too domineering and cold-blooded. People want to feel that America is a sanctuary; that the outstretched torch actually means something. And even if his policies are exactly the same as Obama's (give or take the separation of children from their parents hiccup) it doesn't feel the same at all. We know how the Left takes it; an opportunity to exploit something for political gain. But the moderates apparently can't see beyond the rhetoric. And how they feel is how they vote.
 
Joe Fan said:
The House voting wont be a huge difference
As well as what gets to a vote and what doesnt
The bulk of that group was never-Trumpers
Click to expand...

Except they supported most of his agenda. No tax cuts with Democrats in their place, and congressional investigations will get much nastier.
 
Losing 40 seats is never a good thing. No reasonable way to spin that as a neutral outcome. Gridlock will be the name of the game.
 
The National Review/Kevin Williamson takes a whack at explaining what they call Beto's "enduring appeal" among lefties

"Some of my conservative friends are mystified by the apparently enduring appeal of Robert Francis O’Rourke, a.k.a. “Beto,” the faux-Hispanic progressive from El Paso who failed to unseat conservative stalwart Senator Ted Cruz in spite of a flood of money and a tsunami of media adulation. “He lost, didn’t he?” they ask, perplexed.

There is an answer to this riddle: snobbery.

The Democratic party is the political home of snobbery, a word and a concept often misunderstood. Snobbery does not refer to the cultivated preferences of those refined persons who order the ’82 Bordeaux because it is their mothers’ milk or who have an iTunes library full of Liszt because the sound of Cardi B fills them with discomfort and anxiety. The genuinely refined — particularly those cocooned by wealth — usually are not much interested in the enthusiasms or tastes of others, whereas the snob is obsessed with his own discernment relative to the low and vulgar tastes of those around him. The snob is the kind of man who sees a pair of Wranglers and sneers at the life he imagines they represent: $42,000 a year, tract house, SUV, work boots, Garth Brooks, Donald Trump. The snob isn’t a man of exacting tastes, but a poseur: The word derives from an older English word for a shoemaker’s apprentice and is intended to convey contempt for vulgar social climbers who aped the manners and tastes of the upper classes.
* * *

Which brings us back to Señor O’Rourke, the most oleaginous, condescending, and sanctimonious man in American politics at the moment. He talks a good man-of-the-people game, as most progressives do, but who he is, is who progressives are and who they want to be: a rich white liberal with political power, from a family of rich white liberals with political power. He has the prep-school diploma and the Ivy League imprimatur, too.

As one does."​

Democrats, the Snob Party, Adore Beto | National Review
 
Joe Fan said:
That group did love tax cuts, this is true

But they also dig open borders and amnesty
Click to expand...

And they're being replaced by far bigger open borders and amnesty advocates, tax hikers, socialized medicine advocates, even bigger deficit exploders, lunatics on most social issues, and kneejerk Trump impeachers. That's a net loss.
 
How come the people advocating illegal immigration aren’t being accused of neo-colonialism? Using cheap migrant labor (typically from a rural province) to serve you food and clean your house in urban areas is what the colonialists did back in the day. Imagine what blue state city dwellers have to pay for labor if migrants weren’t living 15 people to an apartment?
 
mchammer said:
How come the people advocating illegal immigration aren’t being accused of neo-colonialism? Using cheap migrant labor (typically from a rural province) to serve you food and clean your house in urban areas is what the colonialists did back in the day. Imagine what blue state city dwellers have to pay for labor if migrants weren’t living 15 people to an apartment?
Click to expand...

Because it isn't that similar to colonialism and because of who wins and who loses.

Colonialism usually involved the home country (of Westernized white people) sending its own people to a land of non-Westerners to settle it and exploit it. The Westernized country won in this equation and really didn't have any losers. The colonized land was a mixed bag. Some won. Some lost.

Illegal immigration involves the US (a country of Westernized white people) taking people who are less Westernized and less white and whose home countries largely don't want them and allowing them to compete with and potentially harm citizens who are disfavored by illegal immigrant advocates for the benefit of favored elites in both countries.
 
Joe Fan said:
The National Review/Kevin Williamson takes a whack at explaining what they call Beto's "enduring appeal" among lefties

"Some of my conservative friends are mystified by the apparently enduring appeal of Robert Francis O’Rourke, a.k.a. “Beto,” the faux-Hispanic progressive from El Paso who failed to unseat conservative stalwart Senator Ted Cruz in spite of a flood of money and a tsunami of media adulation. “He lost, didn’t he?” they ask, perplexed.

There is an answer to this riddle: snobbery.

The Democratic party is the political home of snobbery, a word and a concept often misunderstood. Snobbery does not refer to the cultivated preferences of those refined persons who order the ’82 Bordeaux because it is their mothers’ milk or who have an iTunes library full of Liszt because the sound of Cardi B fills them with discomfort and anxiety. The genuinely refined — particularly those cocooned by wealth — usually are not much interested in the enthusiasms or tastes of others, whereas the snob is obsessed with his own discernment relative to the low and vulgar tastes of those around him. The snob is the kind of man who sees a pair of Wranglers and sneers at the life he imagines they represent: $42,000 a year, tract house, SUV, work boots, Garth Brooks, Donald Trump. The snob isn’t a man of exacting tastes, but a poseur: The word derives from an older English word for a shoemaker’s apprentice and is intended to convey contempt for vulgar social climbers who aped the manners and tastes of the upper classes.
* * *

Which brings us back to Señor O’Rourke, the most oleaginous, condescending, and sanctimonious man in American politics at the moment. He talks a good man-of-the-people game, as most progressives do, but who he is, is who progressives are and who they want to be: a rich white liberal with political power, from a family of rich white liberals with political power. He has the prep-school diploma and the Ivy League imprimatur, too.

As one does."​

Democrats, the Snob Party, Adore Beto | National Review
Click to expand...

It sounds like his definition snob fits the prototypical Austin hipster to a T.
 
Mr. Deez said:
And they're being replaced by far bigger open borders and amnesty advocates, tax hikers, socialized medicine advocates, even bigger deficit exploders, lunatics on most social issues, and kneejerk Trump impeachers. That's a net loss.
Click to expand...

There is a factor you guys are not considering in this loss of the House talk. Yes, losing the House hurts and it will create a mess with all these new (dumbass) committee chairs. Still, most of that group of 40-or-so Republican Never-Trump seats that were lost retired. Many of them were committee chairs. Which meant Ryan had a bunch of Trump-haters in prime potions to gum up the legislative works. They only let through what Ryan allowed. I asked the question above, but got no reply -- given that most brand new Presidents get the bulk of their agenda through in Year 1, what did the House accomplish in Trump's first year? It was almost nothing. It was exactly nothing until the very end. They could not even pass the same bills they had passed multiple times under Obama. Why was that? I dont think you guys ever asked that question.

Here are the two main points I think you guys are missing --
(1) Trump left the House races to Paul Ryan who had a large financial warchest. Ryan personally made the call on which races to spend that money on and which races not to spend on. Trump obviously did not want to risk political capital on people who hate him, and made the wise choice to focus all his energy on the Senate (with mostly good results); and
(2) On top of that, many of the House seats that were lost were the seats of the retiring incumbent (Trump-hating) Republicans. In other words, the bulk of the seats lost were lost with brand new candidates who had zero name recognition. Had those well-known incumbents decided to stay, maybe the 2018 midterm would have had a different result in the House? We will never know.

Which raises another question. Which way was better? Is Trump better off now or worse off with the House this way? The good news is that this election cleared out much of the Resistance from within Trump's own party. If they had stayed and the Rs did keep the House, they were going to stymie Trump again anyway - so what would be the point? This way, Trump has a nice fat, old target to aim at in the 2020 election -- anything bad that happens will be the fault of Pelosi and the House Dems (these new Dem comm. chairs are the same tired old faces). The bad side is just as obvious -- non-stop subpoenas and hearings. Yuck. But impeachment is going nowhere, as I have maintained since the issue first arose. To borrow from Gertrude Stein, there's no there there.

Meanwhile, at the same time the House Dems will be making a spectacle of themselves, Trump can keep accomplishing those things that dont need the House such as (a) loading up the federal judiciary, (b) reworking trade deals, and (c) fixing immigration. On this last point, I would argue Hawaii v. Trump gave him the plenary power to almost do whatever he wants in this area of the law. I think what we see now is his preference that the issue be solved through the more appriate channel - legislation. Plus, I dont think he really minds all this media and national focus on immigration. It's a good issue for him. Perhaps his best with the voters. Why not just let it stay front and center?

Then get some better people involved in 2020 and move forward.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf
 
Last edited:
Should he go the full Fidel?
That would drive both the conspiracy theorists and Kennedy Democrats completely nuts

 
Mr. Deez said:
Because it isn't that similar to colonialism and because of who wins and who loses.

Colonialism usually involved the home country (of Westernized white people) sending its own people to a land of non-Westerners to settle it and exploit it. The Westernized country won in this equation and really didn't have any losers. The colonized land was a mixed bag. Some won. Some lost.

Illegal immigration involves the US (a country of Westernized white people) taking people who are less Westernized and less white and whose home countries largely don't want them and allowing them to compete with and potentially harm citizens who are disfavored by illegal immigrant advocates for the benefit of favored elites in both countries.
Click to expand...
The antidote to colonialism was to leave people in other countries alone and let them live their non-capitalist lives in peace. In spirit, I think the current practice is exploitative on a personal level as it was back then.
 
JF, the points you bring up are good. Long term the situation could end up helping Trump in 2020, but it will definitely be more painful in 2019. And it depends on how the Dems act. I think they will embarrass themselves, but the R's and Trump's behavior needs to contrast the D's. They can't fight dirty and misbehave or the suburbs will simply not vote (or maybe start to vote Libertarian, not sure about that). In that case the trend will continue negative for Rs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Recent Threads

Prediction Results Threads

2024 Schedules

Back
Top