Remember a few months ago when the mainstream media was pushing the narrative that Democrats will enjoy a cakewalk in the 2018 midterm elections?
Yeah, now, not so much.
The story has changed dramatically in these last few months. President Trump’s approval rating — even as measured by the MSM, which skews the results to make Democrats look better — is on the rise. The economy is booming, so much so that The New York Times wrote a piece on Friday headlined: “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.” The New York Times!
“The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately,” read the lead of the story.
The Times seems to be covering itself in case the same thing that happened in 2016 happens this November. Remember back then, when all the polls said Hillary Clinton would win, and the Times put her odds at 99%? With that in mind, reporter Jonathan Martin penned a piece that offered some bad news for Democrats and a ray of light for the GOP.
“Senate Republicans Are Newly Hopeful About the Midterms. For Good Reason,” Martin wrote.
After a turbulent first year confronting friendly fire from President Trump, Senate Republicans are entering the summer before the midterm elections feeling more hopeful about retaining their narrow majority than at any time since the president’s election. And for good reason.
Mr. Trump is enjoying a modest increase in his approval ratings this year and, as important, is attacking Democrats rather than inciting the internecine feuds that could depress Republican turnout. The economy continues to grow, as demonstrated by Friday’s unexpectedly strong jobs report, while unemployment has fallen to levels unseen since 2000.
Republicans, already on the offensive thanks to a Senate map that includes 10 Democratic-held seats in states Mr. Trump won, have seen nearly every electoral variable turn in their direction in recent months: They have averted disaster in the West Virginia primary, successfully recruited their preferred candidates in North Dakota and Florida, and watched a renegade Republican challenger wane in one of Mississippi’s two Senate races.
The bet-hedging follows a story just last month in which election savant and stats master Nate Silver had some disheartening news for Democrats, saying “a bad 2018 could condemn Democrats to the Senate minority indefinitely.”
“That’s a glaring Achilles heel for Democrats. One bad election cycle for this class could virtually eliminate red-state Democrats from the Senate in one fell swoop. That would give Republicans something like a 20-seat majority in the upper chamber — probably too wide for Democrats to overcome in any single future election cycle,” Silver wrote on FiveThirtyEight.com.
Our current sense that the Senate could switch hands in any given election year would be no more, potentially emboldening the Republican majority to pass more conservative policies. In order to regain control, Democrats would not only need to rebuild their standing in red states from the ground up but also sustain that success over multiple election cycles. Given how presidential/midterm dynamics have caused recent elections to yo-yo between Democratic and Republican waves, that kind of sustained success looks harder than ever to achieve. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that a bad 2018 could condemn Democrats to the Senate minority indefinitely — at least until something big changes about American political parties.
Martin’s piece also notes that “six of the most competitive Senate races are in states [Trump] carried by double digits: Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia. (Democrats hold all of those seats except Tennessee’s.)”
So, the narrative is changing. Or, rather, the MSM is now getting wary of declaring an across-the-board Democratic sweep, just in case, you know, the exact opposite happens.