Trump set to give Democrats another election shock
DEMOCRAT confidence they’re about to deliver Donald Trump a thumping is profoundly misplaced, writes James Morrow. Have they learned nothing from their 2016 shock?
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
STOP me if you’ve heard this one before: an army of left-leaning political experts predicts that when Americans go to the polls in a few days’ time, the Democrats come out winning big and Donald Trump winds up humbled and humiliated.
Then, the morning after the big night, those same experts find themselves having to explain why the Republicans did so well, falling back on familiar narratives of ignorant voters swayed by a populist demagogue who probably got some under-the-table help from the Ruskies.
That’s what happened two years ago when Donald Trump won the presidency.
And, as America goes to the polls again this week to vote in so-called midterm elections that determine control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, it’s a scenario that’s increasingly likely to happen again.
Democrats hope that they can take both houses of Congress, and in the process tie up Trump with inquiries and impeachment trials.
After all, mid-terms generally swing against the party in the White House, and as Democrats keep telling themselves, how can anyone lose to Trump?
But a closer reading suggests this will remain a fantasy as likely to come to fruition as a state dinner hosted by President Hillary Clinton in honour of Angela Merkel.
There are many factors at play here, but just on the numbers the Democrats have a problem.
A close look at the early voting, which can make up a third or more of ballots cast in some races, suggests that Republicans are voting in often substantially larger numbers than Democrats.
As of Friday morning Australia time, Republicans had cast 1,557,418 ballots to the Democrats’ 1,495,192 in Florida.
In states like Michigan and Ohio, the margins are even bigger: 330,540 to 215,176 and 348,451 to 274,231, respectively.
It’s the same story in many other states.
Assuming there aren’t massive numbers of conservatives protest-voting against their party, it means that in key House and Senate races in these seats Democrats will struggle to make up the numbers on the day.
The reasons for this aren’t hard to make out. But they all come down to a Democratic opposition that has allowed Donald Trump to take up so much space in their heads he may as well open a casino in the frontal lobe of their collective unconscious.
While in a number of individual races Democrats are looking good, the fact is that across America the economy is looking better.
Many households uncomfortable with some of Trump’s more outlandish rhetoric are finding themselves hard-pressed to vote against their wallets and a surging economy experiencing the lowest unemployment since the 1960s.
Yet the party that in the 1990s shed its radical-left baggage with the killer line “it’s the economy, stupid” is today spruiking star candidates whose socialist rhetoric wouldn’t sound out of place in Venezuela.
Thus what remains for the left are culture war fights (which they tend to lose outside the big cities where people think standing for the national anthem is a matter of simple respect and the violent antics of Antifa activists represents exactly the chaos they want to avoid) and cult of personality celebrity candidates like Texas Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke.
O’Rourke, real name Robert Francis, has been talked up as the next JFK or Obama by so many campaign journalists looking to clap in a Democrat win that the Beto puff piece has already become a thing of legend.
(The Congressman is “lanky, handsome and charismatic”, wrote Time Magazine recently; “He has a restless energy”, said the New York Times; “The early morning runs help O’Rourke … project youth and energy”, noted Politico.com in one profile.)
O’Rourke is also down by anywhere from three to 10 points in the polls, depending whose survey you read.
Which suggests that if anything, the disconnect between the media and pundit class in the US and the rest of the electorate is even greater than it was two years ago.
It also means a lot of lefties may wake up after Election Day with a thumping hangover. And not just because someone spiked the kombucha.
James Morrow is opinion editor of The Daily Telegraph.