Voters rebuke Trump, modestly

The 2018 election was more a modest rebuke of President Donald Trump than a massive repudiation.

Trump’s Republicans held on to the Senate and overperformed expectations in several Senate and governor races, giving the GOP something to crow about. “The vigorous campaigning [I did] stopped the blue wave they talked about,” Trump boasted at a Wednesday press conference.

But Democrats took control of the House of Representatives with a roughly 34-seat gain. Only three times in the last 130 years -- in 1930, 1958 and 1974 -has a Republican president lost more seats.

The switch to Democratic control will bring big — and much needed — change in Washington. By putting Democrats in charge of one chamber of Congress, voters expressed the importance of placing restraints on a reckless president with a 55 percent disapproval rating.

The importance of the vote will come into play sooner, rather than later, as on Wednesday Trump fired his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and moved to install a sympathetic partisan as Acting Attorney General in a blatent bid to undermine independent Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.

While the president seems intent on obstructing justice, the new majority can push back in many ways, including holdling hearings on his politicization of the Justice Department and issuing subpoenas of Trump’s tax returns and other documents that may yield some clues of his, and his campaign’s, Russia ties.

he biggest policy message of the House result was that voters want an end to efforts to shed millions of Americans of their health coverage by repealling or undermining the Affordable Care Act. Both exit polls and an Election Day survey by The Associated Press showed health care to be the most important issue on the mind of voters.

Trump appeared to have received that message in a press conference, held before the Sessions ouster, that was noted for his appeals to biprartisanship. He specifically cited health care --along with infrastructure -- as an area where Republicans and Democrats could agree.

The party in the White House typically loses House seats in midterm elections. What makes Tuesday’s House outcome even more significant, even in light of a strong GOP showing in Senate races, is that it occurred in a strong economy and on a map that has been rigged to the Republicans’ advantage through gross gerrymandering of congressional districts in multiple states.

That should give Trump pause -- and cause for a new approach to governing.