Take it from this conservative: Republicans disappointed in the midterm elections

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Tuesday’s elections were a much worse result for President Trump and Republicans than most pundits are portraying.

To understand why, one must ignore the irrelevant short-term expectations game and political spin from campaign professionals. Instead, what matters — please excuse the apparent cliches — is the long-term big picture and the fundamentals of what ordinarily would happen on this particular election’s political map.

Imagine a generic year — no Trump, no caravan, no Kavanaugh — which featured Democrats defending 26 of 35 Senate seats on the ballot. Obviously, the Democrats have nearly three times as many chances to lose net seats as to gain them. Then, posit that 10 of those Democrat-held seats are in states won by the current Republican president, while only one is in a state lost by that Republican. Further posit that several of those 10 Democrats won the prior time only because of major gaffes by their Republican opponents, at the same time a Democratic president was helping Democrats by coasting to re-election.

In short, the Democrats’ 2018 hand was remarkably weak.

Every half-intelligent analyst in the country looked at that map four years ago and said Republicans would likely pick up seats in North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, and probably Montana, and would be favored in West Virginia if the Democrats did not have an unusually popular incumbent. If those analysts knew unemployment would be at a record-low level, with inflation still low by ordinary standards and no major international crisis, they would say Republicans would have an even-money chance to gain at least two additional seats from among Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota (two elections), Wisconsin, New Mexico, Virginia, Maine, and Ohio, while having a good chance of holding their seat in swing-state Nevada.

In sum, the actual “break-even” pickup number for Republicans on this map, in this economy, would be at least five seats, with six or seven more likely than three or four.

Thus, the actual GOP net gain in the Senate of either two or three seats — after already blowing the seat in GOP-heavy Alabama — is nothing to crow about. At very best, it’s barely par for the course.

As for the House, there’s no good reason for its majority not to have stayed Republican. Forget the “incumbent parties always lose mid-terms badly” shibboleth, which is correlation without causation. Bill Clinton’s Democrats picked up seats in the 1998 mid-terms; George W. Bush’s GOP did the same in 2002. In 1990, George H.W. Bush’s Republicans lost only nine House seats; in 1962, John F. Kennedy’s Democrats lost only four.

What matters, in terms of national trends for House elections, isn’t which party holds the White House, but what the economy and the electoral map look like at the time. In what by most measurements is an unusually strong economy (although I think it’s precarious); without any large, unambiguous scandal working against the incumbent majority; without a foreign crisis — and on a map on which Republicans had gerrymandered themselves a large advantage — all the fundamentals should have favored Republican retention of the majority.

Sure, losing a few seats here and there might happen. On the other hand, in these circumstances, it took political malpractice of the worst sort to lose not just the 23 seats necessary for Democrats to take the majority, but actually what looks more like 33-35 seats. Aside from the “Watergate election” of 1974, this is the most seats (on net) Democrats have ever gained in a midterm cycle in the modern political era beginning in 1960.

The truth is that despite economic winds at GOP backs and gerrymandered terrain under their feet, Republicans lost badly. In particular, they were slaughtered in suburbia, especially among women. By all available indices, the reason they were slaughtered in suburbia — which ordinarily leans slightly rightward — is because of revulsion against Trump’s general nastiness, his divisiveness, and what many consider his thinly veiled bigotry.

Given a chance to save at-risk suburban seats by focusing on the (apparently) strong economic numbers, Trump and the GOP instead chose to double down on their scare tactics with a flagrantly demagogic and factually misleading ad about an illegal-immigrant cop killer. For the House GOP majority, at least, it backfired spectacularly: Until that ad, Republican poll numbers were rising, but they began falling again almost as soon as the ad appeared.

Further down the ballot, the Republican carnage was even worse, with another 333 state legislative seats lost, along with seven governorships. This continues a trend already rampant in special elections in the past two years. Obviously, this is certainly not “so much winning.”

As I noted in my final pre-election column, the ramifications of losing the House will be severe. Whatever legislative agenda Republicans had is now dead for two years, and divisive investigations of Trump will dominate the news. Yes, the GOP Senate gains will make it even easier to advance the crucial task of appointing conservative judges — but as noted above, those gains were to be expected anyway.

By all reasonable logic, a political team that started with majorities in two chambers and loses one has not achieved a split decision — it has suffered an important defeat. In these circumstances, as explained above, this defeat is even worse than it first appeared.

Trump and Republicans now face ominous trends among suburbanites, women, young people, and minorities. If they don’t change course, Tuesday’s losses will be models for future electoral disasters.

Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.

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