What Democrats should learn from the midterms

IF the Democrats don’t start respecting voters and abandon their losing policy of hating Donald Trump, this could be their future, writes James Morrow.

A BIT like the sports carnival at a progressive primary school, the midterm elections in the United States saw just about everybody get a prize.

And, just like a feel-good athletics day, everyone watching the action knew who really won the day.

Sure, Democrats won back the House of Representatives, a victory that without also controlling the Senate winds up being somewhat symbolic — allowing them to pass legislation and launch investigations confident in the knowledge that neither will likely lead to much.

But it was the Republicans who won big, in ways they weren’t supposed to.

The voting saw their control over Congress’s upper house, the Senate, solidified, and a number of key state governorships (the equivalent to Australia’s premiers) secured.

This means future judicial appointments won’t be subject to the same threat of Democratic hijinks as Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, cabinet picks will sail through, and there is virtually no chance of a Democrat attempt at impeachment ever getting up.

It’s a result that was largely predicted by the polls, but is astounding nonetheless.

Ever since Donald Trump romped in to power two years ago, America’s left (if not the world’s) have harboured the hope that Democrats would sweep Republican lawmakers out of Washington at the midterms, leaving the president impotent, investigated and, ultimately, impeached.

That’s not going to happen now.

Since his 2016 election win many Americans harboured the hope that Democrats would sweep Republican lawmakers out of Washington at the midterms. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

The Democrats had history on their side, too: Americans like divided government, and just as Australians hedge their state and federal votes, in the US it is rare for one party to hold both the legislature and White House for long.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — both of whom started their administrations in a far friendlier media climate — suffered huge setbacks at their midterm contests in 1994 and 2010 respectively.

Obama lost 63 seats in the lower house to the Republicans in 2010, the biggest such swing since 1948, almost double the number the Republicans lost to the Democrats this time around.

So what happened?

Certainly Trump threw a lot into the campaign, holding mega-rallies for candidates around the country who, by and large, won.

But he also made missteps, overplaying the important issue of immigration and turning off suburban voters in a number of districts that went to the Republicans two years ago.

Instead, Trump showed that he and the Republicans are blessed by their enemies in the form of a Democratic party that, like a breakaway faction of postrevolutionary royalists, cannot stop re-litigating their loss in 2016 — and which has allowed itself to be captured by an angry, progressive, Socialist Left that sees America and Americans as fundamentally flawed and bigoted.

Democratic senate candidate Beto O'Rourke lost to Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday night. Picture: AP/Eric Gay

Most Americans of course have little interest in these far-left culture fights which have metastasised out of university campuses and into the mainstream of American life.

Thus where Trump campaigns on a slogan of “Make America Great Again”, this wing of the Democrats’ slogan may as well be “Vote for us or we’ll call you a racist”.

Likewise, the Democrats made a huge blunder in attempting to block Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Early voting by Republicans skyrocketed in the wake of the Democrats’ mounting a last-minute attack on the judge with allegations that had been sat on for months by leading senator Dianne Feinstein.

This is why, going in to 2020, it’s a bad idea to count out Trump winning a second term.

As with Labor under Howard, Democrats have not figured out how to counter an administration presiding over a booming economy — or identified even a plausible candidate to carry their banner.

Because of the power the Clinton machine exerted over the party for so long, with all its assumptions about the natural order of things, an entire generation of Democrat politicians has sat on its hands lest they incur the wrath of the old guard.

If the Democrats want to have a chance to win in 2020, they need to stop hating Trump and start showing the voters some love.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of The Daily Telegraph.