RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/history-tell-us-2018/

The lesson of 2018 is that the political class is addicted to drawing lessons. Every two years, after the ballots are counted and the winners declared, our reporters, pundits, officials, activists, and analysts turn immediately to the next election. What do these results portend? Will Trump be reelected? Will the suburbs stay Democratic? This emphasis on the future allows the political class to indulge in its favorite activity: mindless speculation. For once, it might be more useful to look backward rather than forward. History has much to tell us.

What it says is that the midterm was about average. The New York Times projects the Democrats will pick up some 35 seats, giving them at least a 12-seat majority in the 116th Congress. The fundamentals pointed to this result. Only 2 of the last 14 presidents (FDR and GWB) have gained House seats in their first midterm. Republican losses are in line with historical trends for a president with less than 50 percent support. The Democratic gain is a few seats higher than in 2006, while less than Republican gains in both 1994 (54 seats) and 2010 (63 seats).

President Trump’s approval rating in the exit poll was 45 percent. This is better than Reagan’s approval in 1982 (42 percent) and about the same as Clinton’s in 1994 (46 percent) and Obama’s in 2010 (45 percent). Trump’s approval is less than that recorded for Jimmy Carter in 1978 (49 percent) and George H.W. Bush in 1990 (58 percent). Carter and Bush lost seats in Congress too. Donald Trump may be an extraordinary man, but in political terms he is an ordinary president.

The difference between the House and Senate results is unusual. Not since 1970 has a president’s party lost seats in the House while gaining them in the Senate. Nor were Democratic gains in statehouses as large as expected. At this writing, they have won the keys to seven more governor’s mansions, but lost important contests in Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire. (Republican leads in Florida and Georgia have not been certified.) Democrats also won hundreds of state legislative seats, but nowhere near the amount needed to overcome the losses they experienced during the Obama presidency. The split decision makes a kind of sense: This year’s Senate map favored Republicans, even as a shift among suburban voters and independents helped Democrats.

The high number of House Republicans who did not seek reelection, combined with a liberal gusher of money, was a boon for the party of Pelosi. The Democrats out-raised and outspent Republicans in what the Center for Responsive Politics says is the most expensive midterm ever. This advantage was especially pronounced in the House, where Democrats raised $951 million to the Republicans’ $637 million. Money isn’t dispositive. But it helps.

“A society cannot be judged on the basis of its criminal, psychotic or evil members, but rather, on how it responds to them. The same goes for its anti-Semites. America—yes, Trump’s America—passes this test with flying colors. ”

In an interview with HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” ahead of Tuesday’s midterm congressional elections, New York Times op-ed staff editor Bari Weiss blamed U.S. President Donald Trump for the Oct. 27 massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Weiss was not singing an original aria in the anti-Trump opera.

Indeed, since his inauguration in January 2017, the president has been accused by his detractors of directly inciting racism among his supporters and of indirectly creating a xenophobic atmosphere conducive to violence. The mass shooting at the synagogue provided these detractors with the perfect opportunity to reiterate what they had been saying for a few days when makeshift mail bombs were sent to various well-known Democratic figures: that although Trump himself did not plant the bombs or shoot the Jews in shul, he was actually the culprit.

Weiss, then, was in good company among liberals, which is why her statements to Maher were received with wild applause from the studio audience and from anti-Trump columnists everywhere. But what gave her interview particular weight was the fact that the 11 Jews murdered while praying on Shabbat belonged to the synagogue where she had become a bat mitzvah. Two heartfelt columns she wrote about the tragedy and her personal connection to it served as the impetus for the interview in the first place.

Yet she did not squander her stage time merely on mourning the dead and bemoaning anti-Semitism. On the contrary, she used the platform to make a political plea to Jewish voters “to elect people to Congress and everywhere else that are going to protect” the “way we live in this country,” which is “an aberration in history … a miracle.” In other words, elect Democrats.