“…Democrats won the U.S. House last night. They also fell devastatingly short of their own expectations, and the resounding rebuke they hoped to deliver to President Trump has landed as a modest disagreement.
Their House victory will make Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the new speaker, and that will matter in how this country is governed over the next two years. But the base and most of the media had wanted so much more.
Instead, we got a normal midterm election in a year, and with a president, we were told was anything but normal.
Should Trump feel repudiated by his party’s loss of the House? The strongest argument for this points to Republicans’ poorer-than-usual performance among suburban women in key House races. This, CNN’s Mark Preston suggested, is supposed to illustrate a GOP coalition falling apart under the strain of Trump’s peculiar brand of Republicanism.
But does it really? Or does it exemplify the same problems Republicans have long had with “soccer moms” (as they were once called) at times when the political center and the mood of the country turned against them? The difference between 2006 and 2018 might just be that the losses of 2018 are far less severe, limited mostly to House races, and don’t result in Democrats having any real power over anything — not even the power to block Trump’s nominations…”