Takeaways From Last Night Part 2

First, I had a reader ask what the number of seats lost to individual presidents in their first midterms was. I found this, I hope it answers the question:

The Usual Suspects were saying that this was going to be a referendum on Trump. Given the historical data on these things, it would appear Trump isn’t doing so badly.

Editor’s note; this was written before some of the west came in. The ultimate total as of this rewriting is 35 which place is it towards the low end of the center of the above list. Still not all that worrisome.

…

The election last night was supposed to be a slap in the face to Trump and the Republicans and a referendum on Donald Trump who of course everyone hates if you listen to the media and the Democrats, (but I repeat myself).

It turns out that the only place that the Democrats were getting by with the only thing that they had to run on… namely “we hate Trump”, was in areas where they had a vastly superior enrollment, usually better than 50%.

The pollsters were as usual inflating the Democrats chances, in this case the saying that we should have seen a 50 seat swing in the house. The Democrats got a total of 27 instead.

The Socialist Stacey Abrams lost in Georgia, Gilliam lost in Florida..

The fake Mexican with the Irish background spent 80 million dollars on that Senate race and still lost. I think we’ve got a reasonable argument that he shouldn’t be anywhere near appropriating tax money. It must be an absolute bear spending 80 million dollars, having a complicit and biased press helping you, and still losing to somebody that you clearly consider to be inferior to you. So hard are the Democrats scrambling to cover their losses on this one, that they’re coming up with garbage like this ^[1];

For a longshot candidate in solidly Republican Texas, Democratic US representative Beto O’Rourke got astonishingly close to snatching a US senate seat for his party.

O’Rourke lost narrowly to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz after running an unconventional campaign that attracted an unprecedented number of voters, even in solidly Republican areas. Those gains could put Democrats much closer to their longstanding goal of turning Texas blue—a feat that would give their party a significant leg up in presidential elections.

But Beto, a former punk rocker from the political boondocks of El Paso, is himself an unconventional candidate. Texans will have to wait until the next election to see if others can reproduce the enthusiasm he generated both within the state and nationwide.

The long-awaited blue wave

Democrats have been predicting that demographic change in the Lone Star state will make them the dominant party—eventually. But so far, Texas’s brisk urban expansion and the swelling of its Latino community have failed to translate into enough votes to make Democrats competitive in the state. Democrats haven’t won a statewide office since 1994.

Even Donald Trump, who railed against Hispanic immigrants, won the state by a 9% margin. But the most recent Senate race was much closer. With about 60% of votes in, Cruz was beating O’Rourke by less than three percentage points.

Results were surprisingly tight in reliably red areas, such as Tarrant County, where Fort Worth sits. As the rest of Texas’s urban counties turned blue, Tarrant had remained stubbornly red. In 2016, it went for Trump by nearly the same margin as the rest of the state, 8.6 percentage points. Senator John Cornyn won by a much wider margin ^[2] in the 2014 midterms: 61% vs. his Democratic opponent’s 38%. Preliminary results show Cruz and O’Rourke virtually neck-and-neck in the county.

Surprisingly tight by whose standard?

The Democrats literally poured money in, in spite of their professed belief that America is disgusted with Donald Trump and a ground change had occurred. A Blue Wave. A blue wave that simply didn’t happen. every one of the high-profile races, Folks, every single one where the Democrats were in there pulling out all the stops and pouring every dime they could into, they lost.

And while we’re here, let’s make note of the fact that’s Battle Ground State Democrats who opposed Brett Kavanaugh all lost their reelection ^[3] bids. Every one of them.

Every candidate that Barack Obama stumped for, lost. Every candidate that Donald Trump stumped for, won.

Every single one. Just think about that for a minute. Let it sink in.

Sorry, that doesn’t strike me as being a pervasive mandate for the Democrats… at the very least impeachment doesn’t seem likely with so small a majority.

But let’s consider the wins that the Democrats had.. admittedly, there were a few… among them, a man known to prey on underage prostitutes, along with the series of corruptions that would take longer than I have to type them. An anti-semitic America hater who married her brother and another anti-semitic racist who beats on women, and an avowed socialist with the approximate IQ of a door stop. and up in the Looney State of California, they managed to put in the governor’s mansion the only person in California who was actually worse than Jerry Brown.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi and The Usual Suspects will be running things in the house for the next two years. But as I have said in these spaces before, the biggest prevention of the re- election of Democrats, is Democrats in power. In two years after watching Nancy Pelosi and her insane and corrupt band of guano salesmen in action, at the very least Donald Trump is a lock for reelection. And I suspect a great deal more.