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« on: January 17, 2018, 12:55:00 AM » |
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________________________________________ The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-10-2018 From The Federalist Patriot Free Email Subscription ________________________________________
The Patriot Post® · The 'Trump Effect' and the 2018 Midterm Elections By Mark Alexander · Jan. 10, 2018 · https://patriotpost.us/alexander/53368
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry … has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who … have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” —Thomas Jefferson (1816)
In the 2016 presidential election, what put Donald Trump over the top was middle America’s disgust with the status quo in Washington, both Democrat and Republican. Grassroots Americans from all walks of life1, who have been used, abused and discarded by both political parties, sent Donald J. Trump2 to DC with a mission — to drop a bomb on the Beltway political, bureaucratic and media entrenchments.
He did, and there’s plenty of fallout — most good and some not so good.
While the results have been positive for working Americans — those who sent Trump to DC — positive results are big political negatives for the Democrat Party3, and Democrats are determined to dwell on the negatives from now until November.
Is it too early to contemplate the 2018 midterm elections?
A New York second after Trump’s election4, Democrats and their affectionate mass media outlets5 began calculating a path to victory in 2018 and 2020.
Part of that collusion reflects their virtually indistinguishable ideology, but the perpetual election cycle — propagated by the mainstream media’s 24/7/365 endless loop of talkinghead political hyperbole — is also their most significant revenue generator, flooding their coffers with advertising and donor dollars.
I mention this to say that 99% of the media’s political chatter, which converts even the most mundane political claptrap into a “Breaking News Alert,” is still just claptrap.
However, now that 2018 is here, let’s take a serious reading from the political balance sheets to get some sense of Republican congressional opportunities and obstacles under Trump — beginning with the negatives on the left side of the ledger.
Democrats, unhinged over Hillary Clinton’s6 electoral loss, immediately claimed that she actually won the election because she got almost 2.9 million more votes than Trump. Of course, that claim can be chalked up entirely to Clinton’s more than 4.2 million-vote margin in one state, California — to say nothing of her votes stolen from Bernie Sanders7.
Fortunately, as legal and judicial scholar Hans von Spakovsky argued before the 2016 election, the Electoral College8 ensures that California does not run the nation.
But the second part of the “Clinton won” argument has been the most perilous for the Trump administration and Republicans.
Days after her defeat, the Democrats claimed collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin, and they made that spurious claim the centerpiece of their effort to delegitimize Trump’s victory. So far, they’ve managed to get a lot of mileage out of that charade, compliments of their media outlets and a flood of fake news9. They also received a lot of help from Clinton’s billionaire socialist backers10.
But it was only after the May 2017 appointment of the once well-regarded former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special prosecutor11 to investigate Trump that the claims began to lose traction.
Three months after Mueller’s appointment, serious questions about who crafted the Russia collusion setup12 finally surfaced. And it wasn’t until November, a long year after the claims first surfaced, that it became apparent that it was Hillary Clinton and her Democrat operatives who actually funded the Russian Fusion Collusion Delusion13. Moreover, it was propagated with the assistance of Barack Obama’s14 deep state operatives within the Department of Justice and FBI15.
Of course, Mueller can take his investigation anywhere he wants, and he will. But a proper investigation would instead reset its focus onto Clinton and the FBI’s political efforts to undermine Trump16 while Mueller’s FBI protégé, James Comey17, was at the helm. Let’s just say we’re not holding our breath.
So, while that investigation continues, what’s the Democrats’ backup strategy to undermine Trump/Republican favorability ratings across the nation ahead of the midterm elections?
Recall, if you will, that female majorities have elected every Democrat president since 1960 and have been a major force in midterm elections.
Thus, inciting female voter outrage to overturn Republican majorities in 2018 is a powerful and likely possibility.
Democrats are counting on their perennial political calculus that a majority of female voters are emotionally incontinent dupes18 and do not have the discernment to avoid being co-opted by emotive appeals. Thus, they’re going to make the “epidemic of sexual assault19” the centerpiece of the 2018 and 2020 elections, and they’ll float candidates like Oprah Winfrey20 to make their case.
Call it the “Roy Moore Strategy21.”
All the sketchy Trump sexual harassment claims and his admittedly offensive remarks about women will be revisited ad nauseam in an effort to coerce Republicans in the House and Senate to distance their campaigns from the president — and his agenda. The Democrats’ strategy, as noted at the outset, is to turn Trump’s positives into negatives and, in effect, campaign against peace and prosperity22 — against Making America Great Again.
Along the way, they’ll endeavor to portray Trump as “mentally unfit23,” accusing him of being, well, crazy. (What does it say about the state of the Democrat Party when it loses the presidency to a man who’s “mentally unfit”?) Trump, however, is a New Yorker, and he’s always acted like an archetypical New Yorker — brash, boastful, uncensored and unpredictable. In this respect, he’s “crazy” by their hypersensitive, Chardonnay-sipping standards.
Trump entered office with almost no experience in political protocols, and he’s unorthodox by virtually every Beltway standard. And while he isn’t crazy, he is driving Democrats crazy. Indeed, Trump Derangement Syndrome is just the latest manifestation of the well-documented pathology of the Left24.
Democrat prospects are bolstered by the fact that 36 GOP House members are vacating their seats25, but despite the fact they are already counting their victory, they have a long, uphill battle26 to retake the House. Retaking the razor-thin Senate majority is more likely, but Democrats are defending 25 seats this cycle, while Republicans are defending just eight.
Democrats dare not again underestimate Trump’s tell-it-like-it-is bravado — the bomb dropper — which won him the support of many grassroots Americans and disaffected blue-collar voters. Republicans seeking office in 2018 had also better take note27.
Despite all the noise marking Trump’s first year in office, the results have been impressive. Consequently, the positives on the right side of the ledger are a clear indication of what Democrats are up against — and what Republicans can successfully run on.
To recap in more detail, some of the Trump Effect positives I highlighted in “Year One of Making America Great Again28, here’s what Democrat Party3 hopefuls are facing ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
GDP topped 3% for the last two quarters of 2017. (In the 32 quarters of Obama’s "recovery,” only twice did he register a GDP of 3% or better.)
American businesses have created more than 1.7 million new jobs, including almost 160,000 manufacturing jobs and another 58,000 in mining and logging. And the number of illegal immigrants vying for American jobs, and at the same time lowering American wages, has declined significantly. (Illegal border crossings are now at a 45-year low29.)
The headline unemployment rate of 4.1% is the lowest mark in 17 years, though I note this benchmark with caution as there are many Americans who had to take subsistence jobs or had given up on looking for work over the previous eight years. The real unemployment rate is closer to 8%, though that is down 2% in the last year. Unemployment declined for workers of all educational levels30.
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