We have President Trump to thank for the noisy and exciting midterm elections. If John Kasich were president, the sound of the campaign would be zzzzzzzzz. Trump’s aides must have forgotten to tell him presidents aren’t on the midterm ballot. With luck, they’ll keep it a secret.
But even Trump hasn’t been enough to stamp out the most tedious aspect of electoral coverage, the narrative. That’s what we call it when the press—or if you prefer, the media—comes up with a word or two to make an otherwise zippy campaign boring. As of last week, the 2018 midterm is all about the “blue wave.” It’s a rerun.
We went through wave talk once before in this cycle. Then it ran out of gas as Trump’s approval rating went up and his value as a target for Democrats went down. And Trump turned his attention to Iran and North Korea and the G7.
Now we have it on the authority of the Washington Post that Democrats have gotten a “blue boost” from primary elections in California and six other states. The result is their chances improved of capturing the House in the midterm and impeaching President Trump.
That’s the new narrative for the 2018 campaign. What’s implied is that as long as Democrats stay out of trouble, they’ll surf to victory on that wave. There’s only one minor impediment—Republicans.
There’s never been much talk of a “red wave” strong enough to keep the House in Republican hands, the Senate too. But that thought is in the air. And as luck would have it, there’s evidence for such a thing.
Midterm elections focus on the president, but Trump is no longer the punching bag he was last year. His approval rating has inched up to 44 percent, which isn’t great but not bad either. Better yet, expectations that his approval would soon blow up because of a gaffe haven’t panned out. Democrats should have known better. Trump doesn’t suffer from gaffes. He thrives on them. Anyway, there’s evidence a red wave is building.
Strategists treat the “generic ballot” as a magic number. It asks which party you intend to vote for. At one point, Republicans were minus-18. That’s landslide time. Now they’re minus-3 or tied with Democrats.
Republicans have underpolled on this question for decades. This leads to a twist. If they’re at minus-7 or better, they’ll probably lose fewer than 23 seats and relegate Democrats to the minority for two more years. That’s what GOP savants say, anyway.
Ah, but there’s more. Republican intensity—how hyped up they are about the election—has gotten stronger than the anger of all those agitated Democratic resisters. That’s a pretty amazing development. So is the emergence of the 89-90 percent of Republicans who say they’re fine with Trump, according to a GOP survey of likely voters.
Issues? The double whammy of a surging economy and huge tax cut are bound to boost Republicans. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi is sticking to her story that the tax bill merely sprinkled crumbs around the country, but no one else is.
Pelosi will get relief from her agony should Democrats do well in the seven Republican-held House districts that Hillary Clinton won in California in 2016. However, the seven Democratic candidates are rookies, having never run for office before. Nor have they been looked over by Republican investigators, but they soon will be.
A Republican veteran insists the party needs only one more thing to top off its midterm effort: a Supreme Court vacancy. Nothing would bring out Republican voters like the prospect of confirming another conservative. And no one is better at making it happen than Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Meanwhile, Democrats have created a special issue of their own, gerrymandering, the practice of drawing the lines of voting districts to maximize your party’s success. They pretend that Republicans do it all the time. Don’t Democrats do the same? Perish the thought. The media have taken up the issue, too, as they do when Democrats give them a nod.
Not that there’s anything wrong with denouncing gerrymandering. Democrats are just being hypocrites. They have a long record of gerrymandering whenever they have the opportunity.
Republicans do it better. The trick is hard work over the long haul. Republicans have poured money and effort into electing governors and state legislators—that is, the folks who actually draw the congressional district lines.
Rather than do the work, Democrats take the easy way. They turn to the courts to bail them out, notably in Pennsylvania. Once they got a Democratic majority on the state supreme court, they filed suit on the grounds the longstanding lines were unconstitutional. They won.
A bipartisan group of legislators created the old districts. A Democratic court killed them and drew new ones designed to favor Democratic candidates. “The supreme court wreaked havoc,” says Republican leader Charles Gerow. The result: Democrats are likely to gain two or three House seats in Pennsylvania.
How can Trump help? He can do what he does best. He can tweet and denounce. He can travel and speak out. He can appear on Fox. He can be a noisemaker. He can make Democrats pay a price for gerrymandering. Just don’t tell him he’s not on the ballot.
