It’s going to take a little time to digest the results of yesterday’s election, through which Democrats took control of the U.S. Congress and flipped the governorship of Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Ohio and Nevada.
One undeniable takeaway is that the election demonstrated the limits of President Donald Trump’s brand as he chose to make the campaign about his accomplishments and personality, rather than fight 35 individual elections for the Senate candidates and 36 gubernatorial seats.
And, in the perverse way that politics works on Capitol Hill, in the face of the GOP’s historic losses, one of the big winners was Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the Republican establishment, who are now rid of potential threats to their hold on office, limited though their power may be in the minority.
To be fair, while one may criticize the campaign’s overemphasis on Trump, the Republican Senate had literally nothing else to run on.
As one of our online friends (@BadHombre) put it so well:
Republicans were handed a trifecta and a mandate in 2024, yet Congress, specifically the Senate, did nothing but undermine President Trump and leave him to govern via temporary executive orders that ended up in protracted legal battles with activist judges that were never held to account.
John Thune allowed over 100 critical House-passed bills to die in the Senate because he refused to nuke the filibuster, something every Democrat has said they’ll do if they take back control.
Republican voters begged for 2 years to get any type of election integrity legislation passed, and John Thune refused.
Chuck Grassley refused to get rid of blue slips to get all of Trump’s judicial nominees confirmed, but had plenty of time to upload videos of himself at Dairy Queen.
Less than 20% of Trump’s EO’s were codified into law. This was the LEAST productive Congress in history, taking 364 days off.
Why would Republican voters feel inspired to go out and vote for people who literally do nothing with the power given to them?
We would add refusing to go into recess, thus preventing President Trump from making recess appointments, but why pile-on?
As of CHQ posting time, this is what the new breakdown looks like (caution it may change in some close races as Democrats will try to keep counting until they win).
What can Americans look forward to, now that Congress has flipped and Democrats are in control?
The short answer is two years of chaos, investigations, impeachments and lawfare against President Trump and his Cabinet, staff and associates.
However, it will not be all smooth sailing for the current Democratic Party leadership, they will have to overcome their own internal party divisions to advance a legislative agenda and tee-up a Democrat candidate for President in 2028.
And that may be easier said than done.
The new Far-Left Democrat “majority makers” in both the House and Senate have expressed skepticism of, if not outright hostility to, the current Democratic Party leadership.
During this election cycle dozens of Democratic congressional candidates said they would not commit to backing current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker.
According to an October poll of likely voters in two swing states and 11 other districts across the country, a plurality of grassroots Democrats said they don’t want Jeffries as Speaker should their party regain control of the House.
The Senate’s soon-to-be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was even less popular after backing establishment Democrat candidates in hotly contested primaries won by Far-Left insurgents.
But Democrats are all about power, not principle, so we predict that in the end Schumer and Jeffries will prevail and there is unlikely to be a replay on the Democrat side of the public ousting of past Republican Speakers John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy.
There will be plenty of time for recriminations and campaign “autopsies” by Republicans, most of whom will be eager to throw shade on President Trump, but we are more concerned about what happens to the MAGA agenda over the next two years.
From the perspective of passing Trump’s legislative agenda, given the record of the Thune Senate leadership, during the next two years Democrats can hardly be worse than the allegedly Republican-controlled Senate has been over the past two years.
Perhaps the most important unknown at the present is what happens to the trillions of dollars in promised industrial redevelopment if investors see the United States as now politically volatile and potentially hostile to business?
And what happens in the streets of America now that Democrats have won control of Congress and are in a position to act on the demands of the cabal of former intelligence and military officers who have been plotting the overthrow of the Trump government in what amounts to a domestic version of a “color revolution”?
Democrats defeated Republicans in yesterday’s election, but they have no agenda that can lower household costs, reduce inflation or produce on their many promises of “free stuff for all” without going on the record for the crippling tax increases necessary to pay for it, a certain formula for a Republican resurgence in 2028.
