What the midterm elections tell us about the 2020 presidential campaign mcclatchydc.com/opinion/articl…
Here’s what this month’s midterm elections can predict about the looming 2020 presidential election: nothing.
As fascinating and even vicious as some campaigns were this fall, much of the staggering $5.2B spent to sway voters was wasted. Campaigns produced more incitement than inspiration.
Democrats did retake the House after eight years of powerlessness. But there was no blue wave. In fact, the Democrats’ gains of 30-plus seats were less than the 40 expected when a president’s job approval is below 50 percent.
President Donald Trump mobilized nearly two out of three voters on both sides in what was hailed — pathetically — as a record midterm turnout of 113 million, barely 49 percent.
Elsewhere in the world, people are murdered for exercising that sacred right. Yet even given weeks of early voting, more than half of eligible Americans couldn’t be bothered.
The antipathy to Trump and his behavior, plus the departures of three dozen Republican incumbents, was sufficient to flip the House.
It wasn’t accidental that in their usually judicious way, voters enjoying a booming economy threw out barely half as many House members in the president’s party this time as they did in the first midterms of the last two Democratic presidents.
In the last 21 midterm elections, the president’s party has lost on average four Senate seats. Barack Obama lost six in 2010, Bill Clinton eight in 1994.
This time, voters opted to increase the GOP’s Senate majority, possibly by 4 or 5. They expelled Dem senators who supported that shameful burlesque opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. Only West Virginia’s Manchin, who voted to confirm, survived re-election.
This pattern returns Washington to the divided government historically preferred, with one party reining in and/or mercilessly harassing the other. Gridlock can be good if the country — or at least the half that voted — is about evenly split on where it should go.
