Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Change Behavior ?

“He’ll have trouble reassembling his 2016 coalition unless his behavior changes.”

So says an editorial writer from the Wall Street Journal two days after the 2018 midterm elections. I realize that those that write editorials in major newspapers are supposed to be smarter and more well informed than us peons that merely read these editorials, but I must humbly disagree with these sorts of prognostications that apparently can emphasize only one side of our President . . . the side that they do not like, namely his sometimes “quirky” behavior.

As for myself, I am not having a problem with most anything that he does because what I see are the results of his actions, and what occurred in these midterms was an example of President Trump getting results. What happened in these midterm elections was something that has happened only three times in the last hundred years, namely that the sitting president’s party gained seats in the Senate while losing seats in the House. To put the results of this recent midterm in a historical perspective, since WWII the sitting presidents party has lost an average of 37 seats. (The Republicans have lost a total of 36 seats when combining both the House [-39] and the Senate [+3] results.) More recently, at the midterm of Barack Obama’s first term, the Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate (-69 total!). Likewise at the midterm of Bill Clinton’s initial term as president the Democrats lost a total of 63 seats, -54 in the House and -9 in the Senate.

So what I am seeing is really pretty good for a sitting president as far as initial midterms go. More importantly how did the Republicans pull off this +3 in the Senate? Certainly the disgusting behavior of the Democrats during the Kavanaugh conformation hearings had a lot to do with the defeat of the anti-Kavanaugh senators at the midterm ballot box. (Note that the only Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh was re-elected. A coincidence? Not likely.) Without question it was President Trump and his campaigning in various states that was primarily responsible for the Senate gains. In the six days prior to the 11/6/18 midterms the President held over-flowing campaign rallies in eight different states, including Florida, Missouri, Indiana, and Tennessee – note that the Republican Senate candidates won in all four of these aforementioned states. He also held rallies in Ohio and Georgia in the last few days of the campaign, and in these two states the Republican candidate beat out the Democratic opponent for governor in two very close races. And just in . . . the Republicans held on to their Senate seat in Mississippi, thanks in part to two big Trump rallies (one in Tupelo and another in Biloxi) the day before that election.
Conservative America should be saying, “Thank you for your extra effort, Mr. President!”
So after digesting the results of the midterms, I think that I would re-phrase the comment from the Wall Street Journal to instead read, “He’ll have no trouble reassembling his 2016 coalition unless his behavior changes.”

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