The Morning After... - Updated

Some optimism from Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo:

Let me try to put this whole erratic evening into some perspective. This was definitely not one of those nights when a triumphant party drives everyone before it. The Senate results were brutal. There was a half hour or so mid-evening when it looked as though the whole thing might be a replay of the brutal 2016 result. There were key gubernatorial wins but also some disappointing misses – particularly Florida and Ohio. But I come out of tonight feeling good about the result. Why? The country is in a position where we don’t have the luxury of getting everything we want or getting overly disappointed if we don’t. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that Gillum went down to defeat. But there was one absolutely critical thing that had to happen tonight: the Democrats had to reclaim a foothold of power in Washington to place a check on President Trump.

They did that. It wasn’t close. The victories had geographical breadth. That is critical.

Update: More from Josh Marshall. I like his smart and nuanced take on things, he says he'll be posting throughout the day, I'll cut-and-paste here as he does.

I’m going to start this morning with an email from TPM Reader JF. It’s a deeply pessimistic look at last night’s results. I thoroughly disagree with it. I’m publishing it partly because I like JF and like sharing a range of reader opinions but more because it’s a good statement of the view I disagree with. So it’s helpful to put out there as a clear, smart statement of the take I disagree with.

I’m going to be sharing my thoughts and argument in different posts over the course of the day. But principally, this was never going to be easy. We shouldn’t expect it to be easy. The disgrace of the Trump presidency is still in many ways a historical accident. But Trumpism is not. It grows out of beliefs and structures that are deeply rooted in our history and rife in our present. Democrats don’t just need to win elections. They need to build an electoral movement and political infrastructure that will change the shape of the electorate over time and rewrite the rules of the political structure itself.

Millions more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton to be President two years ago than Donald Trump. The total vote for the House will likely be an aggregate total as large or larger than any wave election in the last 30 years. And yet they’ll end up with a relatively modest majority. These facts are deeply embedded in geography and constitutional structure. They will very hard to change. But a critical task of Democrats going forward will be to delegitimize an electoral system that consistently produces such results. In a 21st century democracy, the majority should not be routinely denied the greater share of political power. This is not merely something to grouse about for the few weeks after election day. It is a sustained argument, one that must leverage the deepest strains of American democratic ideology. That will lay the predicate for new rule making. That is not unprecedented in American history. It is a recurrent, historic pattern of reform.

We’re still waiting for a lot of results. But Democrats made significant inroads on all the down ticket fronts that are most critical. That’s a big deal. But it’s just the first step.

When I look at last night’s results, tough Senate losses aren’t the big concern for me. It’s embedding what happened in this midterm into structures and institutions, party organizations, civic groups, political entities that can perpetuate these beginnings over time. Our entire experience politically over the last quarter century is that politics is not about ‘one and dones’. It’s what is getting built between cycles and over the course of multiple years. (Click here to read the reader's message.) 

Update #2: Political Scientist Jonathan Bernstein's thoughts about the election:

The polls and projections were basically correct: The Democrats had a very good election night. They’ll gain a House majority for the first time since 2010, and for only the third Congress since 1994, and by a solid margin. They’ll lose some in the Senate, but that’s not because they did badly Tuesday; it’s because Republicans had a large lead, 42 to 23, among the seats that weren’t up this year. That was too much for Democrats to overcome even on a fairly good night.

1 And Democrats will pick up a few governors, a slew of state legislative seats and some state legislative chambers, and some other down-ballot positions.

Yes, Republicans have some bragging rights. They won quite a few gubernatorial races that were considered tossups, including in Florida, Ohio and (probably) Georgia. And as of early Wednesday they were leading in most of the up-for-grabs Senate contests. The latter is a big deal, because not only will they continue to hold the chamber, but they made their job in 2020 a lot easier. They were worried they would do a lot worse, but they clearly didn’t do as well as they expected two years ago. 

So why did the Republicans have a bad night? The basic story is pretty simple: This is what happens to a party when it controls the White House and the president is unpopular. In fact, most of what was resolved on Tuesday was probably a consequence not of the fall campaign, but of Trump's record-shattering bad year in 2017, at least in terms of approval ratings. A large group of Republicans decided to retire last year; that’s when Democrats recruited many of their top potential candidates to run; and that’s when Republicans failed to find good candidates in several states where they might have been competitive.

Trump’s standing recovered a bit in 2018, but as of Tuesday he was the least popular president through 656 days in the polling era. The slight uptick in his approval ratings wasn’t going to be enough to help the party recover from 2017, and it’s possible he cost Republicans a little more. 

And unlike George W. Bush in 2006 or Barack Obama in 2010, when poor policy outcomes (Iraq in Bush’s case, a slow recovery for the economy for Obama) turned people against them, Trump’s failure to date has mainly been strikingly personal. Granted, the two big Republican policy initiatives in Congress, the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the tax cut, didn’t help. But Trump failed to contribute any popular policy ideas -- and certainly wasn’t effective at pushing for any ideas that might have been popular, such as an infrastructure bill. 

The bottom line is that despite a solid economy and without any high-casualty war, Trump spent 2017 at around 38 percent approval, and 2018 at around 42 percent. And he has spent his entire presidency, after a brief honeymoon, solidly over 50 percent disapproval, with a large portion of that strongly disapproving. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump rarely even pretended to be the president of all the people, which was especially foolish for someone who narrowly won in the Electoral College and lost solidly in the popular vote. 

This disdain for those who didn’t vote for him has turned out to be a disastrous strategy. Beyond that, mismanagement of the White House and a parade of scandals, with indictments and guilty pleas and resignations and criminal referrals, meant that there was a steady stream of bad news coming from the administration. Enough, it appears, to overwhelm the good news about the economy. (Read the entire post here.)

Update #3: Barack Obama issued a "morning after" statement:

I congratulate everybody who showed up and participated in our democracy yesterday. Obviously, the Democrats’ success in flipping the House of Representatives, several governorships, and state legislatures will get the most attention. But even more important than what we won is how we won: by competing in places we haven’t been competitive in a long time, and by electing record numbers of women and young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, a surge of minority candidates, and a host of outstanding young leaders. The more Americans who vote, the more our elected leaders look like America.

On a personal note, Michelle and I couldn’t be prouder of the alumni of my administration who took the baton and won their races last night. Even the young candidates across the country who fell short have infused new energy and new blood into our democratic process, and America will be better off for it for a long time to come.

I also want to congratulate voters across the country for turning out in record numbers, and for voting for several ballot initiatives that will improve the lives of the American people – like raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, and strengthening voting rights.

Our work goes on. The change we need won’t come from one election alone – but it is a start. Last night, voters across the country started it. And I’m hopeful that going forward, we’ll begin a return to the values we expect in our public life – honesty, decency, compromise, and standing up for one another as Americans, not separated by our differences, but bound together by one common creed.

Days until the 2020 election: 727