Daniel McCarthy

For all the good news 2018’s midterms have given Democrats — a House majority, a Senate seat from Arizona, seven more governorships, and an all-blue congressional delegation from Orange County — they have also shown that President Trump has a clear path to re-election in 2020. Midterms historically maximize the relative turnout for the opposition party. More voters overall will go to the polls in 2020 than did so this year, just as more people voted in 2016 than did so this November. But the ratio of Democrats to Republicans will be narrower, if the past anything to go by.

A Republican comes within a hair’s breadth of winning a Senate seat — only to lose when the Libertarian Party candidate draws more votes than difference between the majority-party candidates’ numbers. Elsewhere, a Democrat is narrowly defeated when a Green Party candidate takes a few percentage points in a tight race where the Republican has less than a single point’s lead. These scenarios have played out a several times in recent elections, including on Tuesday. Only in the past 24 hours has Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Arizona, pulled ahead of her Republican rival by half a percent, as votes continue to be counted. The Green Party candidate in that race won 2.3 percent.

Donald Trump has been on full offense in the run up to next week’s midterms. The latest front he’s opened with Democrats is over ‘birthright citizenship,’ the practice of awarding citizenship to almost anyone who happens to the born in US territory, regardless of the parents’ allegiance. Liberals insist that the 14th Amendment guarantees this method of making citizens; conservatives take a more restrictive view of the amendment’s language, which recognizes the citizenship of ‘All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…’ Are children born to illegal immigrants, for example, subject to US ‘jurisdiction’ in the every sense?

Independence of mind is nowadays in short supply among the commentariat. Certain big background concepts have been propagated thoroughly enough that everyone knows just what to write as soon as anything happens. If there’s any doubt — or worse, any resistance — wave upon wave of goodthink browbeating will put a quick end to it. And if that fails, a dissenter’s sheer sense of futility may do the trick. What’s the point of insisting that two and two is four when everyone else in the clever class insists it’s five? Edmund Burke never gave up.

The law of political gravity favours the Democrats in the midterm elections less than two weeks away. They will gain seats in the House of Representatives no matter what they do, barring an upset of a kind that has happened only twice in the last 80 years. Curiously, both exceptions to the rule that the president’s party loses ground in the midterms were either side of the 2000 election. The Democrats under Bill Clinton picked up five House seats in 1998; the Republicans under George W. Bush gained eight in 2002. There were unusual circumstances at play in both instances: Republicans in 1998 were getting ready to impeach Clinton, while in 2002 the Bush administration was preparing for the Iraq War while the memory of 9/11 was still fresh in voters’ minds.

What does it say about President Trump if Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives after the November 6 midterms? If your answer is that Trump is failure or Trump is a disaster for his party, then you have to say the same thing about President Clinton and President Obama, both of whom also lost the House in their first midterms. Here’s my prediction: the GOP will indeed lose control, but the swing to the Democrats will be smaller than the swing to Republicans was in 1994 (54 seats) or 2010 (63 seats). Trump will have outperformed Clinton and Obama, and on strictly empirical grounds — setting aside anti-Trump bias, including among NeverTrump media conservatives — any honest analyst will have to admit as much.

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court has a solidly conservative majority for the first time since the New Deal. Just how conservative this new majority is remains to be seen: Chief Justice John Roberts disappointed the Republican right when he voted to uphold the legality of Obamacare in 2012. But if Roberts is no Antonin Scalia (the paragon of what most conservatives look for in a justice), he is no Anthony Kennedy, either. And with two of the four liberal justices on the court in their 80s, the prospect of a 6-3 or even 7-2 conservative majority is not a remote possibility. A second Trump term would almost certainly make it a reality.

Watch out, Twitter — Donald Trump doesn’t need you anymore. He now has his own Presidential Alert system that can send messages right to every cell phone in the country. Twitter allowed Trump to bypass the traditional media when he wanted to; the service is a sterling example of ‘disintermediation’ and the direct connection that can now be established between celebrities and the public. But with his new text alerts, Trump can well and truly speak directly to people without any fear of censorship by a tech zillionaire. Or at least he could if the Presidential Alert system actually were such a thing, and not just a 21st-century analogue to the dowdy old Emergency Broadcast System that used to transmit a beep to TVs and radios once a month.

‘There’ll be another woman.’ A friend of mine who has been in political journalism much longer than I have told me this weekend to expect another accuser against Brett Kavanaugh to come forward — and sure enough, the New Yorker on Sunday revealed one. Deborah Ramirez alleges that when they were students at Yale, a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party and touched her with his penis. As yet, however, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer write, ‘The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.

Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination has suddenly turned into a political disaster that threatens to submerge the GOP’s hopes of long-term judicial realignment. The Washington Post this weekend published details about a previously anonymous allegation of sexual assault committed by Kavanaugh in his youth. The political implications are clear, even if everything else about the claim is hotly disputed: Kavanaugh’s nomination is punctured below the water line. A woman who knew Kavanaugh in his high school days, Christine Blasey Ford, has accused him of drunkenly assaulting her at a party, holding her down, tearing at her clothes, covering her mouth when she attempted to scream — in short, attempted rape.

Four years ago a seemingly invincible US senator came within a percentage point of losing his seat in an unexpectedly close election. Mark Warner was pretty moderate as far as Democrats go, a good fit for a state, Virginia, that had drifted out of the Republican column in the last two presidential elections and just elected a full slate of Democratic statewide officials a year before. But midterms are when presidents and their parties get rebuked, and Warner, a telecom millionaire who had once been tipped as presidential contender, took his support for granted. The Republican, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, was supposed to be hopeless, but he nearly claimed what was supposed to be a safe Democratic seat for the GOP.

There is a monumental hypocrisy at the heart of NeverTrump Republicanism. The president’s critics in his own party say that Trump is a danger to American institutions and the rule of law. Yet time and again, these opponents bend and break the rules of institutions stretching from the Republican Party to the federal government in an effort to sabotage the regular political process — a process whereby Republicans, and Americans in generals, have consistently repudiated the NeverTrumpers. They can’t win elections, so they can’t govern constitutionally. But they do everything in their power to seize the machinery of party and state nevertheless.

The most surprising political development of the day yesterday did not come in one of the three states that held primaries. Instead, while voting was still ongoing in Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma, news broke that Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, had endorsed former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in Johnson’s bid for a Senate seat of his own. Senator Paul has libertarian affinities, but Johnson is running as a big-L Libertarian. After two stints as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Johnson is now its Senate nominee in the state he once governed. Is Paul delivering a vote of no confidence in his own party, the GOP?

In every revolution there are revolutionaries who love the old regime even as they tear it down. John McCain was a symbol of that. He stood for masculinity, anger, honor, and pain to a generation of Americans — roughly speaking, the Baby Boomers — who have spent their lives treating such things as a pathology. John McCain was an unmedicated American. He was a totem of military strength to a post-Vietnam media and political elite that accepts war (of the humanitarian variety) but not warriors. ​McCain the man is impossible to separate from his place in politics, and that’s a shame. As a man, he was brave. He was self-directed and defiant, traits that stood out in a gray Washington during his thirty years in the Senate.