That's a fair description of this week's offyear elections --
and of those in 1982, the last time voters paired a Republican president with a
Democratic House and a Republican Senate. It also resembles results in 1962,
when a Democratic president's party gained four Senate seats and lost four in
the House.
We know what happened after 1982 and 1962. The economy
boomed, and Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, won
landslide victories two years later. Voters then remembered the Depression and
World War II and rewarded incumbents in time of peace and prosperity.
Voters today have no memory of those events, and there hasn't
been a presidential landslide since Reagan's in 1984. Donald Trump, ace
polarizer, is certainly not going to win one. Nor, Tuesday's results suggest,
is he likely to be beaten in one either.
Senate results support that point. At this writing,
Republicans gained three seats in heavily Trump states (Indiana, Missouri and
North Dakota), held a solid lead in Florida and a shaky one in Arizona, while
losing one seat in Nevada. Their majority, rising from 51-49 to 54-46 or 55-45,
looks maintainable into the 2020s.
The three
defeated Democrats and Florida's Bill Nelson voted against the nomination of
Brett Kavanaugh, while West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the one Democrat voting
aye, held on to win by 3 percent. Senate races seem to have become contests to
determine who gets on the Supreme Court.
Similarly, one issue helping the surprise Republican
gubernatorial winner in Florida, Ron DeSantis, is that he can appoint a
conservative majority on the state Supreme Court. Courts making public policy
can expect to be held accountable politically.
Democrats did gain a majority in the House, but the blue wave was a gentle
wash, not a tsunami, aided by redistricting. In 1982, about half the Democrats'
26-seat gain came from redistricting; this year, about a half dozen did, from
post-2012 court-forced remapping in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.
Pending final results -- astonishingly, counting can take
weeks in California -- it appears Democrats have gained 30 to 35 seats, for a
total of around 230. That's well behind Republicans' 63-seat gain to 242 in the
tea party year of 2010.
This was a Whole Foods wave, with about two-thirds (by my
count) of Democratic gains coming in upscale and suburban districts dominated
by high-income college graduates. Upscale suburbs in the Northeast, on the West
Coast and in many Midwestern metro areas started trending Democratic in the 1990s.
In 2016 and again this year, similar parts of metro areas in the South --
Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas and even Oklahoma City -- started doing so.
Other subgroups of what Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg
dubbed "America ascendant" have not moved as sharply to the
Democrats. Black turnout seems not to have been robust, even in Florida and
Georgia, where black governor nominees Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were
lavished with favorable media coverage. Both lost and ran behind their poll
numbers.
Hispanics
voted 69 to 29 percent Democratic, according to the CNN exit poll. But if
anything, that's better for Republicans than in pre-Trump years. As for young
people, the 2018 exit poll pegs under-30s as 13 percent of the electorate,
about the same as in other years.
Overall turnout was robust, as expected, but among
Republicans as well as Democrats, whose party identification edge was an
unremarkable 37 to 33 percent. This confirms polls that show the Kavanaugh
controversy raised Republicans' enthusiasm to Democrats' already high levels.
Democrats have to be disheartened by the defeats of Senate
candidates Beto O'Rourke in Texas, Gillum in Florida and Abrams in Georgia. The
nation's second-, third- and eighth-most populous states are not yet tilting as
Democratic as the states from which their new residents have fled.
"The prayers of both could not be answered,"
Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. "That of neither has been
answered fully." So it is with this offyear election in which candidates
and voters re-litigated the astounding but now familiar presidential election
of 2016.
If Donald Trump hasn't shown he can improve on his 46 percent
of the popular vote, the kind of candidates Democratic primary voters prefer
haven't shown they can improve on Hillary Clinton's 232 electoral votes. On to
2020!
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