My friend Carla, who I’ve known since high school choir, suggested:
I have an idea for your blog… or maybe just a title…. something like “keep it up Mr. President and the tsunami in November is going to be very, very blue”
What she means is that there could be be far more Democrats in Congress after the November 2018 election than after the 2016 vote.
My immediate reaction is that I’m not so sure that it’s true. Sure the Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has allowed drilling along all the coastline of the United States. And then excluded Florida because 1) Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, is probably running for the US Senate and Floridians HATE looking at off-shore rigs, like the rest of us do, and 2) Mar-a-lago, where Agent Orange likes to spend time, is in Florida.
And sure The Tweeter-in-Chief says stupid stuff on a wide swath of issues, from marijuana to immigration – I need to write on these more extensively – and I feel he makes the US a laughing stock all over the world.
He lies so much that I don’t think he’s even fully aware of it. When his trip to the UK was canceled, he blamed it on the Obama administration’s design of the new embassy even though it was arraigned by George W. Bush.
In short, he is an embarrassment.
Yet, if the stock market is up, and the tax bill cuts people’s taxes in the short term, and unemployment, which fell sharply under Obama, continues to do so, and stores such as Walmart raise wages (from $9 to $11 per hour, even as they slash jobs at Sam’s Club outlets), then some people will be satisfied with the status quo.
It is true that in the generic electoral ballots, Democrats are doing quite well. But one does not vote for a generic candidate, but for specific individuals. I’m pleased that over 30 Republicans have deigned not to run for reelection. An “open” seat is much easier to win rather than running against an incumbent.
Nevertheless, unless people go out and work these elections, getting people registered and then get out to vote, Democrats will not automatically win. It can happen, as it did in Alabama in December 2017, when Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for the US Senate seat that had not been blue in a quarter century.
Just counting on disdain for the guy occasionally at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to translate into Congressional victory is a terrible plan. But the blue tsunami IS possible.
Oh, I love this picture above. Read the story about its creation.
Problems I see: people not making sure that the Blue Wave sweeps into state legislatures, town and county governments, and all the downballot races. A big part of why we’re in this pickle NOW is that blue voters abdicated their electoral responsibilities in 2010, with calamitous effects across multiple election cycles, once Republicans were able to gerrymander themselves in. I still don’t think that Democrats have really internalized the degree to which Republicans will bend rules in their favor, or outright change them (Alabama is about to end special elections for vacant seats after Roy Moore lost.)
Another problem is that if Democrats win big this fall and end up running one or both houses of Congress, we’ll have another gridlock situation that Americans seem to always complain about after they create it. That might not bode well for 2020.
I also worry about the inevitable recession. There’s one coming, sooner or later.