A check on Trump
While victories in a few key states enabled President Trump’s election two years ago despite a popular-vote defeat, his fellow Republicans couldn’t be saved by the formidable advantages of incumbency, gerrymandering and geographic distribution. It’s a testament to the scope of the Democratic sweep that Republicans could have given up as many as 22 seats — and lost the overall vote by more than twice as much as Trump did — and still held on to the House.
That they didn’t is a powerful rebuke indeed.
The GOP’s even more substantial advantages in the Senate, where the seats up for election were disproportionately held by Democrats in Trump country, allowed the party to retain a narrow majority in the upper chamber — though Republicans didn’t even mount an organized challenge to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was handily re-elected over a fellow Democrat, former state Senate leader Kevin de León.
Midterm elections comprise hundreds of state and regional races, but they have increasingly served as a referendum on the presidency, a trend that Trump has only accelerated. The constitutionally coequal legislative branch has been diminished to de facto subservience to the executive over the past two years. Seventy percent of likely voters had Trump foremost in mind, according to a recent CNN poll, and most of them went against Republicans. Though the president can be counted on to dismiss and distance himself from the unfavorable result, he repeatedly told his endless rallies that he was effectively on the ballot.
He went further, in fact, making the ugly nativism at the core of his politics the particular focus of the last weeks of the campaign — while downplaying the booming economy, conservative judicial appointments and other issues that many of his fellow Republicans, not least House Speaker Paul Ryan, would have preferred to emphasize. He did so despite a rash of attempted bombings targeting his critics and a synagogue massacre linked to far-right conspiracies about the migrant caravans he relentlessly hyped. The president’s lastditch paranoid pitch was exemplified by a false, xenophobic campaign ad so outlandish that it was ultimately pulled by Trump-friendly Fox News.
The nation’s verdict on this grim politics was clear, and it couldn’t have been rendered without California. Democrats found Republican strongholds in the Central Valley and Southern California suddenly within reach. And a pair of veteran California representatives, Bakersfield Republican Kevin McCarthy and San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi, vied to be first in line for the next speakership.
Pelosi and her fellow Democrats effectively countered Trump’s all-consuming cult of personality with a disciplined focus on policy. They benefited from the belated popularity of the Affordable Care Act, passed by a majority that Pelosi corralled nearly a decade ago and then promptly lost in the infamous 2010 “shellacking.” The opposition party won’t manage anything nearly that ambitious while Republicans hold the White House and Senate; the Tea Party-fueled House ushered in eight years ago illustrated the pitfalls of trying to run the country with half of Congress.
But the House can effectively obstruct Trump’s legislative agenda, from weakening the ACA to fortifying the border. Its investigative and oversight powers, meanwhile, will be turned toward the administration and away from its opponents. Instead of helping Trump impede Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, the new majority will consider whether it justifies impeachment. The president, as a result, may have seen the peak of his power.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi is poised to return to the speakership, a plus for San Francisco and a plus for the concept of checks and balances in Washington.