What the commentators said
“Well, it wasn’t the huge Blue Wave we were promised,” said Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today. Compared to the crushing midterm losses suffered by Barack Obama in 2010 and Bill Clinton in 1994, these results were relatively painless for the Republicans. It certainly wasn’t “the overwhelming repudiation of Donald Trump” that many had longed for. It did feel like a bit of a let-down, said Jim Newell on Slate. This is partly because the candidates that Democrats had invested the greatest hopes in, such as Beto O’rourke in Texas’s Senate race, ended up losing, and partly because expectations just “got out of hand”. But make no mistake: this was still a great result for the Democrats. In early 2017, the conventional wisdom was that the party didn’t stand a chance of winning the House in these elections.
The Democrats would have done better still had it not been for the row over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, said Megan Mcardle in The Washington Post. The rush to declare him guilty of contentious sexual assault allegations enraged many conservative voters. Result: the vulnerable Democratic senators who voted against Kavanaugh’s confirmation “are now ex-senators”. As for the Republicans, they should be asking themselves how they managed to lose control of the House at a time when the US economy is booming and unemployment is at historically low levels. If only Trump had “just kept his mouth shut” and stayed out of the headlines, his party might have done better. “Every time he stops saying outrageous things for a few days, his poll numbers improve to [a level] that could have held the House for the GOP.”
Trump is likely to feel vindicated, rather than chastened, by the midterm results, said Rob Crilly in The Daily Telegraph. He directed all his energy into the Senate races, and Republicans did well in the states where he campaigned aggressively. The lesson he will doubtless draw from this is that “populism pays. And if you thought the first two years of his presidency marked a descent into the ugliest of partisan politics, then I fear we’ve only just got started.”
Six men have been arrested in connection with video footage showing a crowd of people laughing and joking as a cardboard model of Grenfell Tower, complete with figures at the windows, is set on fire. The men, aged 19 to 55, were arrested in south London after the film was circulated online, causing widespread outrage. They have been arrested on suspicion of violating section 4a of the Public Order Act, which makes it a crime intentionally to cause harassment, alarm or distress via the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or signs. If the case goes to court, legal experts have warned it may be difficult to show intent: much will depend on how and why the video ended up online.