GOP Happy Talkers Must Be High

IT’S been a month since the midterms, and the grand scale of the calamity that has befallen the Republican Party grows clearer by the day. And yet Republicans in Washington seem intent on denying it.

In his wild meeting Tuesday with Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, President Trump emphasized the fact that the GOP expanded its majority in the Senate by two seats.

Earlier in the day, Rep. Tom Emmer, the incoming head of the National Republican Campaign Committee, which recruits candidates and raises money for GOP house races, told National Journal that “there’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs. That’s not true. It isn’t there.”

It isn’t illegal to possess small amounts of marijuana in the District of Columbia, so perhaps the president and Emmer had taken advantage of that fact to raise their spirits. That’s the best explanation I have for these bizarre efforts at happy talk.

For any Republican, the most alarming detail to come out of the midterms isn’t that Democrats gained at least 40 seats in the House. Rather, it’s the sheer size of the anti-Trump vote in 2018, and what it portends for 2020.

Midterms usually feature a drastically smaller electorate than presidential elections. Eighty-three million people voted in the 2014 midterms, compared to the 136 million who voted in 2016.

But in 2018, 118 million Americans voted. Nationally, Democrats thumped Republicans by 9 points, the most lopsided margin in a midterm in modern history. Approximately 62 million people voted Democratic last month. Hillary Clinton garnered 65.8 million ballots in 2016.

In other words, Democrats achieved midterm turnout numbers only a few percentage points lower than the presidential number in 2016 — in an election widely viewed as a referendum on Trump.

And Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2018! He will be in 2020, and everybody who voted against him by proxy in 2018 will be there again to vote against him without the middleman. And a lot more will be joining them besides.

Even more worrisome should be the fact that Democrats romped in the very states whose surprise Trump turnout won him the election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Those three states add up to 46 electoral votes. Trump won 306 electoral votes. It takes 270 to win. If Trump loses those 46 electoral votes, he’s toast.

There’s worse. Trump won Iowa, but Dems won two important House seats in Iowa, and those victories indicate the state will be very much in play next time. The Dem Senate victory in Arizona suggests the same may be true of that state as well. Democrats can make aggressive pushes for all these states, and Trump’s only chance right now of turning a blue state red is little New Hampshire, with its grand total of four electoral votes.

Now, Trump is right that Republicans picked up two Senate seats. But with the best map for Senate races the party had in a century, it should have picked up several more. And a majority of four Senate seats rather than two is meaningless.

All it really will do is allow two or three Republicans to cast “no” votes on legislation or judicial or executive-branch nominations with which they are uncomfortable, secure in the knowledge that the legislation will pass and their votes won’t have been responsible for killing it. That’s nice for them, but it means bupkis to us.

As for Emmer’s claim that there was no realignment in November, he might have meant the 40 House seats Democrats took in America’s suburbs aren’t dead and gone for Republicans, which is certainly true. But that’s not what it sounds like. It sounds like he’s saying the GOP wasn’t wiped out in America’s suburbs last month, when for the most part, it was.

Perhaps all this denial is a good way to keep the old chin up as the GOP heads into a new political dynamic in 2019 with Democrats in charge of the House ready to dig as deeply as they can into Trump administration behavior.

Or perhaps more Republicans will be taking advantage of the decriminalization of weed in DC during the next two years to take the edge off the deeply unpleasant reality now facing them.