ELECTION NIGHT POST-MORTEM: SOMETIMES THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS RIGHT…AND A LOT OF PEOPLE REALLY HATE DONALD TRUMP

11/6/18

A little election night quarterbacking…in no particular order…

•   I was flabbergasted by the shellacking the GOP took in the House.   As readers know, I thought they’d retain the House comfortably.  (TUESDAY’SMID-TERMS—GOP HOLDS THE HOUSE SOMEWHAT COMFORTABLY AND PICKS UP 4 IN THE SENATE, 11/4/18) It was looking bad enough for the Republicans pretty much from the get-go, but when the GOP lost in my district (Illinois 6), a district gerrymandered by Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan to be a GOP district, things got really dark really fast for the GOP.  The Republicans look to lose at least two and probably three House seats in Illinois; while there might not have been a blue wave nationwide, there was, to use a cutesy-pie term making its way around political junkiedom of late, a bluenami in Illinois.  That the Republicans got blown out in state races in Illinois didn’t surprise me and that made me slightly uncomfortable in counting on the GOP’s holding all of its national House seats in the Land of Lincoln in making my House prediction.   Rather than making me uncomfortable, it should have made me more logical; how could the Republicans lose every constitutional office in Illinois but hold onto all its House seats?   That’s nearly impossible and yours truly should have seen it.

·         I told my students this morning that if either Peter Roskam lost his House seat in Illinois or Ted Cruz lost his senate seat in Texas, the GOP would be in deep trouble.   Roskam lost, Cruz barely held on.   The GOP was in trouble, though probably not deep trouble; it did pick up a few Senate seats, as I, and just about everyone else, predicted.   So the Roskam/Cruz indicator seemed to work out.

·         There are people who love President Trump and people who hate Donald Trump.   More people hate Donald Trump and almost all of them REALLY hate Donald Trump.   Fewer love Donald Trump, and even fewer of those REALLY love Donald Trump.   But President Trump doesn’t seem to realize this.

·         More important than the last bullet point, there are fewer people voting for Mr. Trump or his perceived surrogates but not admitting it in polite, or any, company.   This was the vote that won the election in 2016 for Mr. Trump.

·         A friend asked me last week why the Republicans didn’t run solely on the economy.   I agreed that that would be the best strategy.    The Republicans didn’t, though, and the consequences were predictable.  The GOP’s failing to run on the economy was partially due to a very good Democratic campaign that forced the Republicans to talk about things like health care.  (See below.) But mostly it was due to Mr. Trump’s insistence on running on ancillary items.   Bill Clinton was, and probably remains, smart enough to know that “It’s the economy, stupid.”   Donald Trump isn’t.

·         Those “ancillary items” referred to in the last bullet point fired up the base but only added to the GOP travails among the swing voters in the suburbs and especially among women in the suburbs.   Not to beat on a dead horse, but if a guy as inoffensive as Peter Roskam can lose in a district designed for a Republican to win because his opponent successfully tied Mr. Roskam to Donald Trump, things look bad for the GOP as long as it is led by President Trump.

·         Lest I get too carried away with the last bullet point, the results in the House are not out of line with historic results in the mid-term after a new president takes office.   Still, Republicans should feel worse about tonight than the raw numbers would indicate.   And Illinois Republicans should feel awful, especially about the future of our state.

·         One item that is neither ancillary nor exclusively on the economy is health care and it is probably an even bigger issue than most people think.   Until the GOP explains, convincingly, how whatever replacement it comes up with for the ACA will protect people with pre-existing conditions, this will continue to be a huge positive issue for the Democrats.

·         The biggest winner for the Democrats tonight was one of their losers…Beto O’Rourke of Texas.  His campaign for president starts as you read this.

·         In the Illinois 3^rd Congressional District, Arthur Jones, an avowed neo-Nazi who through subterfuge and the apathy of the GOP establishment ran unopposed for the Republican nomination, managed to get about one quarter of the vote in the general against Dan Lipinski.   That an avowed neo-Nazi could get over 55,000 votes in a district split between neighborhoods on Chicago's southwest side and the city's near southwest suburbs is a travesty.   No, it doesn’t mean that there are 55,000 neo-Nazis or fellow travelers in the district, but it does mean that there are 55,000 people who are so obtuse and so insouciant about their franchise that they didn’t take the time or make the effort to learn that they were voting for an open and proud white supremacist, anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.   This is the most frightening thing to come out of tonight’s results.

·         Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right.   Tonight was one of those nights; as most people predicted, the GOP lost the House and retained the Senate.  Hence this was not a great night for those who enjoy thumbing their noses at the conventional wisdom…like yours truly.

Onward and upward, ladies and gentlemen…I hope.

TUESDAY’S MID-TERMS—GOP HOLDS THE HOUSE SOMEWHAT COMFORTABLY AND PICKS UP 4 IN THE SENATE

11/4/18

Regular readers of yours truly are familiar with a particular pundit who assumed a permanent place in the Pantheon of Perspicacious Pundits with perhaps the most piquant and portentous (the latter in the sense of eliciting amazement or wonder, not in the sense of being pompous, though some might argue that point) prediction of the modern political era just days before the 2016 presidential election:

TRUMP WILL WIN, AND WIN BIG, ON TUESDAY, 11/4/16

And, no, I will never cease reminding people of that one, but I digress.

Given the sheer outrageousness, and correctness, of that perspicacious piece of punditry, many of my friends and readers have asked for my thoughts on Tuesday’s mid-terms.   I have, until now, declined such predictions.   Making prognostications involving political races, as the aforementioned bold and right on the money 2016 prediction shows, involve more than guesses; in order to predict, say, the balance of the House resulting from Tuesday’s mid-terms, one has to look at every race, or at least at every race in which the outcome is in any kind of doubt.   Given that there are 435 House seats, this is a herculean task, especially for one who, like yours truly, doesn’t do this kind of thing for a living.   Even when one winnows it down to the 75-80 races that could conceivably go either way, this isn’t easy.   The good news is that the Senate, with its relative handful of contested races, is easy, or at least easier.

While I would have loved to make an outrageous prediction, such as the GOP’s picking up seats in the House, I was unable to do so.   Most would consider my vision of what Tuesday’s outcome quite ho-hum.   Others, on the other hand, may think that I am once again, off my rocker.   But here goes…

I approached this predictive task with a methodology similar to that which I used in my stunning 2016 prediction, in which I went over the presidential election state by state.  I looked at all the contested races in the House and the Senate and incorporated the following assumptions to provide a margin of error, so to speak, in the polling numbers.   After all, not everything is science, fake or otherwise, and intuition plays a part in political punditry.

·         The momentum in these final days of the race is with the GOP.   The Democrats thought that the caravans heading to our country’s southern borders and the Kavanaugh hearings would work in their favor.   While these two ephemeral issues may ignite the already intensely pro-Democratic passions of the small crowd with which the paid political punditry hangs, both issues work in the favor of the GOP, to the extent they work at all, because people who don’t live in Washington, New York, or San Francisco still get to vote in this country.  Why these issues work for the Republicans is perhaps grist for another mill.   For now, however, as usual, the biggest thing the GOP has going for it is the Democratic Party and its ever-growing isolation from the American voter who lives outside the aforementioned trendy psychological redoubts on either coast.

·         The economy always has been, and remains, the key issue and the economy is very good; it may even be running too hot at this juncture.   You and I can debate all we want about how much of this is attributable to the sitting administration, but the typical voter generally votes for the people in power when things are going well.

·         The tax cut (i.e., the actual tax cut passed last year, not the imaginary middle-class tax cut Mr. Trump tossed out a few weeks ago as a naked election ploy) is a much larger positive than the experts think it is.   Much to the amazement of Democratic politicians and strategists, people actually like having their taxes cut and would rather take advantage of their larger pay checks than harbor grudges against those whose tax cuts were larger than their tax cuts.   Regardless of how one feels about the macroeconomic soundness of the tax cuts, they will play well on Tuesday.  I’m just surprised the GOP hasn’t emphasized the tax cuts more in this campaign.  Perhaps the best thing the Democratic Party has going for it is the GOP.

·         Rather than being the opportunity to lash out against Trump that the Democrats and their largely sympathetic national media think, this election provides quite a different opportunity.  It provides voters the chance to endorse Trump policies without having to actually vote for the often-reprehensible Mr. Trump.   The majority of people who vote endorse, for the most part, Mr. Trump’s policies but they, understandably, don’t like Mr. Trump.    Tuesday’s mid-terms provide a chance to affirm the former without affirming the latter.

·         The “reverse Bradley effect” (TRUMP, THE“REVERSE BRADLEY EFFECT,” AND THE MAN’S UPCOMING LOSS IN IOWA, 12/23/15) remains in effect, though to a smaller degree than it did in 2016.   A lot of people voted for Trump in 2016 but didn’t tell anybody they did.  Likewise, many, but fewer, people will vote to affirm Trump policies, and keep the guy safe from impeachment, even though they won’t share that in polite company.

 Given my methodology and my intuition, what do I predict for Tuesday?  Sadly, nothing that far outside the conventional wisdom, to wit…

The GOP holds onto the House, losing a net 9-12 seats.   This will perhaps be surprising to those predicting a “blue wave” and perhaps to those who think the night will result in the GOP’s holding a razor thin margin.   But my numbers seem to indicate that the Democrats will come nowhere near picking up the 25 seats they need to pick up the House.   Come to think of it, given the history of the results for the incumbent party in mid-term elections, an outcome such as the one I predict would be a considerable victory for the GOP and hence may come as a bigger surprise, at least to those ostensibly in the know, than yours truly thinks.

The GOP does even better in the Senate, picking up Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota and losing none of the seats it currently holds, resulting in a 55-45 Senate.   If I really wanted to go out on a limb and go with intuition more than the numbers, I might even say the GOP picks up Montana and/or West Virginia.   But the numbers say Tester and Manchin keep their seats, so I’ll go with that.

The net result?   Not much changes.   Impeachment looks like a very long shot and conviction looks just about impossible, barring something even more outrageous, and, remember, impeachable, out of Mr. Trump.  GOPers, of course, remain in control of all committees.  Court nominations will be easier.    And Mr. Trump will have no excuses for failure to perform as advertised, which is always a good thing.

LAST MINUTE UPDATE:

As I finish writing this, I am hearing on the local news that some “expert” group is saying that the Democrats have a 6 out of 7 chance of picking up the House.   Maybe yours truly is indeed once again making an outrageously bold prediction.