1. The Parties and the Pendulum
For the Democrats, the news is bad—and it’s about to get worse. Why? Because the ideological pendulum is swinging the Democrats to a far-left place, and a political party doesn’t win from the wings.
To be sure, no ideological swing is permanent, but for the next four years, it seems likely that the Democrats will push themselves leftward, to un-electability at the presidential level.
I’ll get to this pendulum-swinging in a moment, but first, let’s establish the current partisan baseline: In addition to Donald Trump winning the White House, the House Republicans will have 238 seats in the next Congress, and Senate Republicans will have 51. Meanwhile, out in the states, the GOP will control 33 governorships and 67 legislative chambers.
To further illustrate the hole that the Democrats find themselves in, here’s a chart from The Washington Post, which shows that in the last eight years, Democrats have lost 10.2 percent of their Senate seats, 19.3 percent of their House seats, 20.3 percent of their legislatures, and 35.7 percent of their governorships. We can add: These are the lowest Democratic numbers since 1928.
In the caustic words of Post reporter Philip Bump, “That whistling sound you hear is the party Thelma-and-Louise-ing.” Movie fans will recognize that as a reference to the ending scene in the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise, in which the title characters drive off a cliff, plunging to their death.
So what happened? It seemed like only yesterday that the MSM, and the chattering classes overall, were certain that Hillary Clinton was destined for a decisive victory, possibly even a landslide. Yet now, not so much.
So today, the Democrats have something they didn’t particularly wish for: the opportunity for an “agonizing reassessment.” The problem is that such reassessments don’t always end up improving the situation—sometimes they make things worse.
As former CNN pundit Bill Schneider liked to say, an election defeat gives the losing party a chance to “fix” whatever went wrong. The big question, of course, is, “What needs fixing?” And now the post-mortem “autopsy” reports as to the needed fix are coming, one might say, fast and furious.
To be sure, a few Hillary loyalists declare that their woman lost because of “sexism,” or some other retrograde “-ism.” Many more Clintonites blame FBI Director James Comey; shadowy Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has gone so far as to claim that the election was a “coup d’etat” staged by “a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani.” Okay, so that’s the thinking of a few Clintonite dead-enders.
Meanwhile, most Democrats, and their barely-undercover allies in the MSM, are coming around to the view that Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. Here, for example, is the analysis of Politico’s Glenn Thrush, writing that the failure of Clinton’s campaign was:
…proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation.
