Trump in trouble — lessons from a Democratic wave
‘Enormous storm’ for control of Congress is on the way in 2018 midterm elections
WASHINGTON— Democrats won races for governor. Democrats won races for state legislature. Democrats won races for mayor. Democrats won a referendum on health insurance.
Trans Democrats won. Bland Democrats won. Black Democrats won. Latina Democrats won. Even an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialist won. In Virginia. President Donald Trump has dismissed, as “fake,” polls that suggest he is deeply unpopular. That will now be harder. One night before the one-year anniversary of Trump’s own victory, voters in state and local elections in several states delivered an unmistakable repudiation of the president with a series of sweeping Democratic triumphs that suggest Trump and his Republicans are in serious electoral danger.
The results could immediately affect federal politics. More Republican members of Congress may be convinced to join a growing number of their colleagues in retiring rather than running again. More Republicans could become emboldened to begin to detach from Trump on matters of policy.
Regardless, analysts across the political spectrum said Democrats should be favoured to retake the House of Representatives in the 2018 congressional mid-terms.
“An enormous storm is coming,” Jeffrey Blehar, an elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ and a conservative, said on Twitter. “Democrats are wildly motivated to register their hatred for Trump, moderates are disgusted, and his base is depressed by failure to deliver.”
Trump, of course, did not personally appear on any Tuesday ballot. But discontent with him was the obvious thread linking the Republican failures around the country.
“This is about Trump. There’s just no getting around it,” RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Sean Trende wrote on Twitter.
The most notable result was in Virginia, where the Republican candidate for governor, Ed Gillespie, ran on Trump-like promises to protect residents from dangerous illegal immigrants and protect Confederate statues from removal. Gillespie was trounced by Democrat Ralph Northam, and Democrats unexpectedly dominated state legislature races.
Maine voters approved Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid health insurance program, which had been resisted furiously by the Republican governor. Democrats won the governorship of New Jersey, easily beating the would-be successor to widely loathed Republican Chris Christie.
A diverse array of Democrats earned a series of demographic firsts, including first transgender and Latina representatives in Virginia, first Black mayors in Montana and St. Paul, Minn., and first Black female mayor of Charlotte, N.C.
Democrats lost a smattering of other races, and there is no guarantee that other states will behave the same way these states did. But the night was hard to read as anything other than a disturbing sign for Republicans and Trump, himself.
“The question isn’t whether a Democratic wave has started. It’s how big that wave can grow,” said the Democratic election group Flippable. Here are five things we learned: 1. “Nationalism” isn’t magic: Gillespie was a Washington insider who rebranded himself as a fire-breathing crusader against illegal immigration, flooding the airwaves with racebaiting advertisements about Latino gangs.
This was the successful Trump playbook advocated by former chief strategist Steve Bannon. Days before the election, Bannon boasted to the New York Times that a Gillespie victory would show that “Trumpism” can prevail without Trump.
Instead, Northam beat Gillespie by about nine points. 2. The House truly is in play: “You can’t really look at tonight’s results and conclude that Democrats are anything other than the current favourites to pick up the U.S. House in 2018,” Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman said on Twitter.
FiveThirtyEight analyst Nate Silver was slightly more cautious: “I’d say they’re favourites, but not particularly heavy ones,” he wrote.
Still, overly optimistic Republicans and overly pessimistic Democrats should adjust their expectations. Trump’s sub-40 per cent approval rating makes a 2018 landslide possible, although far from certain. 3. Trump-era Democrats can still succeed with diversity: Trump’s success with white-identity and male-identity politics, defeating the would-be first female president, in part, because of a white-male backlash to the first Black president, has prompted deep soul-searching among Democrats about how to reach the once-loyal white men who abandoned them.
But all varieties of Democrat did just fine.
The most dramatic victory was by Northam, a genial white southern doctor. Also victorious were such diverse candidates as Black Virginia Lt.-Gov.-elect Justin Fairfax; Helena, Mont., progressive Wilmot Collins, a former Liberian refugee who became the first Black mayor in the state, and Danica Roem, a transgender woman who beat an anti-trans incumbent who described himself as the state of Virginia’s “chief homophobe.” 4. Democrats are fired up: Democratic protests helped to save Obamacare.
Still, Democrats had not shown that their anti-Trump passion could propel them to actual election wins. Now they have.
Republican voters turned out for Gillespie; he received significantly more votes than any state Republican ever. But he was still swamped by a dramatic six-point turnout spike in heavily Democratic Northern Virginia. Activist groups who describe themselves as “The Resistance” helped fuel the remarkable downballot Virginia wave that put Democrats on the verge of seizing the state legislature. 5. Justice reformers are, at least sometimes, winning: Sure, Philadelphia is one of the country’s most Democratic cities, but still: it elected a chief prosecutor with no experience as a prosecutor, a resumé that includes 75 lawsuits against the Philadelphia police, and a proud record of advocacy for Black Lives Matter activists.
Defence lawyer Larry Krasner joked at a debate that he had “spent a career becoming completely unelectable.” He finished with 75 per cent of the vote.