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Tuesday night, the wave was softer than hoped the Democrats. Wider waves occurred in the US elections, the largest being the 1894 tsunami, which took 127 Democratic representatives and increased the ranks of Republicans by 57%. The election of 1874 did almost as much damage to a Republican majority, drowning 100 people and costing them 49% of their workforce. The 1932 election, which brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency, also bade farewell to 46 percent of the Republicans in the House.
What happened on Tuesday night was definitely more modest. That implied a Democratic gain of about 35 seats in the House, a loss of about 15% for Republicans, and Democrats lost seats in the Senate.
For a real wave, the Democrats would have needed a national economic failure. Since there was none, the alternative was to hold referendum campaigns on President Trump. The Republicans also ran against Mr. Trump, mainly because the President did not give them a choice. Growing after gathering, it has imposed itself as the main problem while stoking the apprehension of another type of wave approaching the southern border.
On this basis, many Republicans have lost. Yet, while the Democrats have won seven governorates, 26 Republicans are defending. Ohio and Florida were not included, which the Democrats badly needed to be blue states for 2020. In 12 states, Republican governors crushed the two-digit opposition, while Democrats l have also done in 10 Member States, which meant that each party was digging a large part of its trenches. more deeply in the places where he was already rooted. There was only one real surprise of the Democratic governor in Kansas.
Senate elections were the biggest disappointment for Democrats, as Republicans not only won the most visible race in the Senate (Texas), but also beat Democrats in the states of Indiana, Missouri, Washington, North Dakota and possibly Florida, while occupying a free seat in Tennessee. one, in Arizona, is not decided yet). Senate Republicans will increase their majority between 52 and 54 years – and with the new recruits in this election who are closely married to Mr. Trump. This will facilitate the confirmation of conservative judges without appeasing the moderate Republican senators.
The majority in the Senate is not likely to change soon. By 2020, Republicans will defend 22 seats, but only two of them are in the states that Hillary Clinton has adopted: Susan Collins in Maine and Cory Gardner in Colorado. Democrats will also have serious vulnerabilities, starting with Doug Jones, who won the 2017 Alabama special election to replace Jeff Sessions because Roy Moore's campaign collapsed under a flood of #MeToo denunciations. In 2016, Alabama got 36 points for Trump and if the former Attorney General's sessions decided to run for his former seat, Mr. Jones's senatorial career would probably be short. In at least 14 states with Republican senators in place in 2020, the chances of success of the Democratic challenge are negligible.
Reaching the command of the House is important, and already existing minority Democratic leaders – Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn – are preparing to assume the roles of President, Majority Leader and majority whip lost in 2010.
Given the Democratic fury sparked by the 2016 presidential debacle, the first words spoken Tuesday night in many mouths of Democrats were "investigation", "subpoena" and "impeachment". The Presidents of the Republican House committees held hearings and investigations on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Steele Record and Uranium One. The tables will be replaced by the new chairs – Jerry Nadler from the Judiciary Committee, Adam Schiff from the Intelligence Committee and Elijah Cummings from the Oversight Committee – will search Trump's tax returns in his family's cases ( and in possible violations of the Constitution). Clause) and the ethical implications of the Trump administration figures. For at least some, the ultimate goal will be Watergate 2.0, which is to reverse the unwanted results of a presidential election by resignation or indictment.
But congressional Democrats have a long history of defeating the claws of victory. Ms. Pelosi may be the presiding president, but her nationwide voter favorability index is less than 30%, so any legislative initiative she proposes has an inherent backfire potential . She is also deeply suspected among party progressives, who view her as a stain-stain of money in Washington. This suspicion is not unjustified.
Although Ms. Pelosi accused the Trump administration of "rampant corruption, cronyism and incompetence," the sooner the Democratic victory in the House was imminent, the more discreetly she spoke of retaliation – and rabid have become at the prospect of some triangulation with Mr. Trump. If the desire to overthrow Mr. Trump is blocked by a geriatric Democratic leadership, the bloodshed in the party caucus could be more violent than the fury of the Bernie-ites at the 2016 Democratic convention and even more self-destructive in 2020.
Yet the fate of the Trump administration as a result of the democratic victory could be a paralysis. In an atmosphere of hyperinvestigation, the number of Republicans willing to expose themselves to a torrent of subpoenas and the threat of indictment will diminish, and Mr. Trump will find himself assisted by less competent hands. Similarly, Beltway's "swamp" permanent bureaucracy will feel freer to take revenge for leaks and slow down work on Trump initiatives, knowing that friendly Democrat investigators will look elsewhere.
The absence of economic crisis may explain the low magnitude of the Democratic wave. This does not explain, however, why this has happened, and historians here 50 years old may be wondering how a president who has experienced excellent economic results and managed to arm his foreign allies and his adversaries in the co-operation should have seen his party punished at the polls.
Republican defeat had three causes. First, the uniqueness of the electoral landscape of 2018. Republicans had to challenge 41 open room seats, including eight in districts that Mrs. Clinton had won in 2016. Seven of them were awarded to Democrats. Ten other districts were located in suburbs where Mr Trump had won only 2016, and eight of them had become Democrats. In at least three districts, Republican titans who had refused to identify with Mr. Trump – and Mike Coffman of Colorado, Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Carlos Curbelo of Florida – were left to fend for themselves and were defeated .
An election organized in the form of a referendum on Mr Trump thus had the effect of reinforcing the ranks of Trump's loyalists. The most embarrassing defeats were suffered by non-deceivers; Apparent victories of the most sensational Republicans on Tuesday night were awarded to Trump-huggers – Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis and Senator-elect Scott in Florida, Governor-Elect Brian Kemp in Georgia and Senator-Elect Kevin Cramer in North Dakota . .
The white women of the suburbs graduated from the university, who became democrats by 20 points, also played a decisive role in the victories won at the Democratic House. It was these voters who cost Republican Virginia David Brat what seemed two days before the elections, a 4-point victory over Abigail Spanberger in the Richmond suburb of the seventh district of Virginia, and which initiated Republican Republican Republican Republican Randy Hultgren from his headquarters in the Chicago suburb of 14th district of Illinois.
Mr. Trump's good economic news did not impress the suburbs of Women in the Whole Foods because they had never experienced the shock of the Great Recession: their mortgages had never been under the Water and their men were not killing themselves with opioids. Mr. Trump and the Republicans saw only misogyny and indifference to health care.
The third factor was money. Democrats surpassed Republican spending on home runs from $ 292 million to $ 247 million between September and November. Lauren Underwood's campaign surpassed Hultgren by 2-1. In the 48th district of California, Dana Rohrabacher, who holds 15 Republican mandates, disappeared under a Democratic silver blizzard: 11.3 million to 4.14 millions of dollars.
This demonstrated an admirable investment investment by Democratic leaders – but it also showed how much the Democrats had sunk into a kind of political schizophrenia, becoming both the party of big dollars and democratic socialism. , by Tom Steyer and the elected representative. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The key to Trump's policy lies in a book that almost no politician has bothered to read, "The Art of Dealing". What he is likely to do is to treat. If he manages to bring the leadership of the House of Democrats into a Bill Clinton triangulation, he will probably achieve at least modest successes and can claim enough credit to ensure his reelection. If the Democrats refuse an agreement and play to demolish Mr. Trump, they will likely fail, as the Republicans did in 1998-99 with Mr. Clinton and in 2011-12 with Mr. Obama. Meanwhile, Trump and the Senate will continue to provide the federal judiciary with a generation of Conservative judges who, more than any other Trump initiative, will carry the mark of this man for decades.
For her part, Ms. Pelosi could not speak to Mr. Trump, but to Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. McConnell have been on Capitol Hill for much longer than the President. If they and their staff can formulate bills on health care, taxes, budget and infrastructure independently of the White House, they can present the results as a fait accompli, rejecting any responsibility for the opposition. from Mr. Trump. In this way, Ms. Pelosi could perhaps isolate the president and encourage the emergence of new Republican rivals. Let the games begin.
Mr. Guelzo is a professor of history at Gettysburg College.
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