Politics

If you live in the world inhabited by Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, you’ve seen the man perform all sorts of difficult tasks: getting elected over all the odds, overcoming every media onslaught. You’ve seen him do it all — except lose. In any objective sense, Trump is a middling electoral performer who has only ever cleared exceedingly low bars. Yes, he overcame steep odds in the 2016 election, but that election should have been a cakewalk for Republicans against an historically unpopular Democratic nominee running to extend her party’s rule for a third term. While he oversaw deep losses in the 2018 midterms, but no less a political athlete than Barack Obama had also sustained an even worse defeat in 2010.

The dust is still settling around the congressional midterms, but it looks like Republicans will retake the House by a very slim margin and Democrats will have an ever-so-slight lead in the Senate. But with stubbornly moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Republicans can be fairly confident the upper chamber will not try to advance the most extreme parts of President Biden’s agenda, even if they do increase their majority by one seat in the December runoff in Georgia. And of course, because of the flip in the House, those uber-progressive proposals will never make it up to the Senate. The governor’s houses in Maryland and Massachusetts may have flipped blue, but Republicans knew they were lucky to be holding them in the first place.

If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms, there would be no conservative movement today. Of course, the 1964 election was an actual defeat, while this year’s elections were an advance for the new Republican right, which succeeded in its first task — gaining power in the GOP — and has strengthened its hand in Congress. The right has picked up a Senate seat with Ohio’s J.D. Vance, and Republicans look likely to control the House of Representatives come January. The GOP won the majority of votes cast in House races, nearly 52 percent overall. The official narrative of the election is meant to drive the right to suicide.

Bye-bye, Beto. Well, the self-serving political show-off known to Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal commentaries as Robert Francis O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas (“Roberto” in Español = “Beto”). Texans rejected his latest overtures and entreaties, re-electing Republican Governor Greg Abbott by an 11 percent margin on November 8. The margin ought to have been larger, given Beto’s lack of serviceable credentials, and it would have been, save for all the outside money and media fawning that came Beto's way. Still, 11 percent did the job. It finished, in Texas at least, Beto’s career of self-promotion, removing him from the reach of the credulous and naïve. At least I hope so!