Tuesday night’s midterms were a bit of a mixed bag for both parties. Efforts by Republican leadership, and especially by President Trump, to spin the night as a clear-cut win for the GOP were clearly unfounded. Any time the party in power loses control of a chamber of Congress, it isn’t a great time to break out the champagne.
But Tuesday wasn’t an all-out win for Democrats either, and the most politically salient question to consider as the dust settles — aside from “Why did these races turn out the way they did?” — is “Where do we go from here?” And for a Democratic party eyeing 2020, in particular, what lessons will presidential hopefuls, party leadership, and the Left’s most zealous advocates draw from what happened on Tuesday?
The Senate election map this year was, of course, favorable to the GOP, with ten Democrats up for reelection in states that Trump won in 2016, and many of which he claimed by double-digit margins. But losing four Senate seats to GOP challengers (pending a recount in Florida) and flipping only one Republican-held seat (pending the ongoing count in Arizona) isn’t a very thrilling outcome in what was widely billed as The Year of the Anti-Trump Blue Wave.
Given that the Trump administration and GOP Congress have set an agenda during the first half of the president’s term that, aside from last year’s tax reform, has focused almost solely on reshaping the courts, pickups in the Senate are just what the doctor ordered. And the Democratic candidates who flipped congressional districts in the House don’t necessarily foreshadow a host of suburban voters rejecting the entire GOP as a result of Trump — so Democrats shouldn’t count on having the upper hand heading into 2020.
In short: If Tuesday night can be considered the first real fruits of the Resistance, they’ve still got some work to do. Bret Stephens considered some of these questions in his latest New York Times column:
Are you interested in seeing Donald Trump voted out of office in two years? I hope so — which is why you should think hard about that “meh.” This week’s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal democracy at home and abroad. The American people don’t entirely agree.
We might consider listening to them a bit more — and to ourselves somewhat less.
It also underscores that while “the Resistance” is good at generating lots of votes, it hasn’t figured out how to turn the votes into seats. Liberals are free to bellyache all they want that they have repeatedly won the overall popular vote for the presidency and Congress while still losing elections, and that the system is therefore “rigged.”
Stephens is exactly right about how liberal bellyaching comes across to those outside the progressive movement. The activist portions of the left, whose overblown rhetoric has undoubtedly bled over into how Democratic politicians portray themselves to voters, despise Trump and have radical ideas for what they want their government officials to do in response. There’s no doubt Resistance voters will show up to the polls to vote against Trump as a result, and that matters. But especially after Tuesday — which showed that GOP voters, and Trump voters to the extent they’re a different bloc, will turn out, too — it’s less clear that the Resistance has the ability to convert. More from Stephens on this point:
It didn’t convert when it nominated left-wing candidates in right-leaning states like Florida and Georgia. It didn’t convert when it poured its money into where its heart was — a lithesome Texas hopeful with scant chance of victory — rather than where the dollars were most needed. . . .
It didn’t convert when Chuck Schumer chose to make Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court the decisive political test of the year. It didn’t convert when it turned his initial confirmation hearing into a circus. It didn’t convert when media liberals repeatedly violated ordinary journalistic standards by reporting the uncorroborated accusations against Kavanaugh that followed Christine Blasey Ford’s.
Above all, it didn’t convert the unconverted.
As Stephens rightly notes, this isn’t the most prudent strategy for a party that will need to win folks over in addition to motivating an already-loyal base if it wishes to take down Trump in 2020.
A Showdown with No Winner: Donald Trump vs. Jim Acosta
Wednesday’s power struggle between President Trump and CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta serves as a helpful microcosm of the melodrama we’ve been dealing with since the moment Trump rode down his golden escalator and into the presidency. Absolutely no one benefits from the vicious cycle of Trump fighting with the press — no one, that is, except for Trump . . . and the press.
In the post-midterms press briefing, Acosta’s regular showboating routine went a little too far for the president’s liking and ended with the White House revoking his press pass until further notice. Acosta — who has become known for questions that are less interrogative than they are assertions of his own opinion followed by, “So then why did you say the opposite?” — began badgering Trump when the president failed to satisfactorily answer Acosta’s “question” about the migrant caravan.
The exchange ended with the reporter making some kind of effort to prevent a White House intern from taking away the microphone. (This newsletter will not delve into close readings of whether Acosta “placed his hands” on her, as the White House communications team now attests.) Trump, for his part, responded characteristically, labeling Acosta “a rude, terrible person” and instructing him to “run CNN” and let him run the country.
CNN, always on the lookout for Trumpian threats to the First Amendment, described the White House’s revocation of Acosta’s pass in the starkest of terms: “This unprecedented decision is a threat to our democracy and the country deserves better.” As usual, both sides of the Trump–media skirmish are wrong, although to differing degrees. A president who often calls the press “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” ought to know better; and a journalist who decides to argue with the president ought to know he doesn’t have a constitutional right to be in the room.
These constant, meaningless dustups are a battle with no winner that we’re all forced to watch, a foolish spectacle posing as our politics. As we’ve learned again and again and again over the last several years, a reality-television president will turn our government into reality television, and he’s been aided in that quest by no one more than the press that claims to hate him.
Lest anyone notice how low the stakes in this battle really are, Trump and his media critics behave as if they’ve formed a silent pact to continuously escalate the drama between them, allowing us no time to pause and ask ourselves why we even care.
These theatrics are detrimental to everyone except for Trump and the press: Acosta is now one step closer to hosting his own primetime show on CNN, and the White House has one more anecdote to bolster its narrative of a hostile, disingenuous press corps. Meanwhile, the nation suffers from increasing opacity and a lack of truth.
ADDENDUM: Glad to be filling in for Jim Geraghty this morning. While I have you, I’ll also be filling in for Jim on today’s Three Martini Lunch podcast with Greg Corombos. And if you enjoy that . . . you’re always welcome over at Ordered Liberty, the National Review podcast I cohost twice a week with David French.