Some Wave... Donald.

A Pathetic Night for Trump's Party

I haven't wasted my evening or lost sleep watching election results in at least a decade, I have been that disenchanted with both parties for that long.

Which kind of idiot will try to screw things up and how? is not the kind of question that gets me to stay up to see what happens next.

Image by Daniel Vogel, via Unsplash, license.

That said, my personal best-case scenario for this election would have been the Democrats losing the House by a small amount and Trump's hand-picked, anti-republican candidates losing across the board: We certainly don't need continued Democrat strangulation of the economy, nor do we need Donald Trump to have an excuse to claim to be the savior of his party -- which he would happily take credit for if the much-anticipated red wave had happened. (Of course, he still might do that...)

As of this morning? Control of Congress remains up in the air, and in what I regard as the worst immediate-term news of the night, even the House (!) hasn't conclusively moved to Republican control.

This, to use the word of the man I hold responsible, is YUGE: Midterm elections historically break against the President, especially after he trashes the economy, as Biden's insane energy policies have done.

This is, long-term, potentially very good news. The Republicans -- apparently forgetting that voters might want to know why they should support them -- offered no positive counteragenda of their own. (Whatever Donald Trump tells me to do doesn't count.)

Perhaps next time, they might argue for -- oh, I don't know -- more economic freedom in the form of reduced government spending and regulation. In one sense, this should be easy: Compare what Democrats are doing to the government's relative hands-off policies during the early industrial revolution and promise to be more like that.

Yes, it will take more than that, but the GOP didn't even do that much: Most of them just basically hovered around -- like mini-Trumps -- hoping we would vote for them no matter what as "the" alternative. (News flash: not every politician is as repulsive to as many voters as the woman Trump defeated, and we all now have the benefit of hindsight regarding how that turned out.) Whether the Republicans improve, though, is largely up to them.

As I argued recently, the Trumpist wing of the GOP, which is harming it so much, must be defeated. How did it do? Let's look at Trump's hand-picked senatorial candidates, telequack Mehmet Oz, anti-abortion philanderer Herschel Walker, election denier Blake Masters, and traitor to the Electoral College Ron Johnson.

Sadly, as of now, any or all of them could still win, which will be enough for Donald Trump to claim victory and will all but guarantee that he runs, probably sidelining better alternatives like Ron DeSantis, and ultimately returning Joe Biden to office, perhaps again with a Democrat Congress.

So Joe Biden did not get the horse-whipping he richly deserves and we may not even get the brief respite that a GOP-controlled House might get us, via the power of the purse, from his worst policies.

Whatever Donald Trump blathers, this election should have been a blowout win for the Republicans. It is anything but that, and it might still be overall a win for the Democrats in both houses of Congress. That is truly pathetic.

So: Muddled and potentially even worse than before is how I would characterize this overall. I still hold out hope for a GOP House and carnage for Tump's cronies, but the full extent of the good news so far would appear to be that I am well-rested.

-- CAV