A Bullish Wind

The President’s party always loses seats in the midterms.

Trump is a polarizing figure who will drive Democrat turnout like nothing since Obama’s first election.

The GOP is doomed, and Triump will be a lame duck starting in January.

We’ve all heard it.  Truth be told, while I think the GOP has a great chance to pick up congressional seats in Minnesota this fall, I  – as naturally pessimistic as any other Scandinavian-American and urban Conservative – have been mentally buckling myself in for a brutal, 2006-like night on election night.

Much as I was about this time two years ago.

We know how that went.

And while I don’t get sanguine over much of anything, Conrad Black says there’s room for hope in the wake of the Democrats’ Kavenaugh show trial and Trump’s canny, intensive campaigning:

Just as he calculated that by speaking for all those who despised the entire incumbent political system he could win the Republican nomination, and that he could win by designing a campaign to exploit the possibilities of gaining a majority in the Electoral College rather than the popular vote (as five of his predecessors did, by design or otherwise), he is now exploiting the fact that there is no leader of the opposition in the American system, and between presidential elections he has no rival. The likely outcome is the most favorable midterm result since Franklin D. Roosevelt won nine additional congressional districts and gained nine senators in 1934. Even now, though the bunk about impeachment has subsided, Trump’s enemies have little idea of how profoundly hated the OBushinton era, 1989 to 2017, had become, as a time of sleaze and incompetence and stagnation. Now, in what is practically a full-employment economy, wages for the least well-paid are rising. Amazon and other retailers grumble about $15 an hour for unskilled work, but it is the first time people in that economic bracket have had real increases of purchasing power and the lack of fear of joblessness in more than 20 years.

Time will tell — and not much time, as luck would have it.