Politics

Republicans went into the midterms with a baby boomer mentality – and as a result came out bust. ​This is not the way the pundit class wants Americans to see the election: it’s supposed to be all about Trump, proof that Trump-style populism is a failure. ​But there are two Trumps. One is a radically new force in American politics, challenging every norm and convention. The other is an 80-year-old Republican politician. ​Trump’s second term so far has given free rein to both Trumps: hence the bold moves the President has made in tariff policy and enforcing immigration laws, but also the sudden reversion to the foreign policy of yesteryear’s Republicans.

President Trump has long sought to create a political realignment in America. He succeeded on Tuesday night. In declaring that the voters should behave as though he were on the midterms ballot, Trump singlehandedly resurrected the Democratic party which is poised to win both the House and Senate as well as numerous statewide races.   The midterms don’t represent a setback for Trump but a crushing rebuke. For all his huffing and puffing about a stolen election in the run-up to the midterms, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday evening that he accepts the results. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said. “We’ll probably work something out.

The exit polls in the midterm elections revealed that corruption in government was almost as much an issue as the cost of living for voters. A stunning 90 percent of voters said it was a crucial or major factor in their vote. Neither party was trusted to combat it – 36 percent said Democrats, while 31 percent said Republicans. But the GOP was the main target of voter anger. A majority of voters viewed corruption as a crucial issue in the campaign, they voted for Democrats by 62 percent to 36 percent. Republicans were the party in power and were saddled with a president who surrounded himself with shady characters and seemed to almost revel in padding his income by $2 billion last year.

In his big Commonwealth speech in Antigua today, King Charles III is now expected to speak with “unflinching honesty” and “sincere sorrow” about Britain’s role in the slave trade. He may stop short, however, of issuing a formal apology, which is bound to trigger another round of agonized media discussion. But Britain has nothing for which to apologize, and the never-ending “slavery apology” debate is facile and riddled with stupidity.  We can understand the concept of slavery better – and the arch ignorance that many people bring to the topic – by considering other important historical relics, less contentious than slavery now, but which equally elude our present-tense, present-day bias.

I’ll be weighing in again on the midterms early Wednesday. But since this is the season of prediction, prophecy, punditry and prognostication, I thought I would take my cards, which I have grasped here in my hand, and lay them on this virtual table. The only thing certain is uncertainty – except when we are talking about the experts I see that the latest New York Times/Siena poll has the following numbers for the Senate race: Alaska: D+2, Iowa: D+1, Michigan: D+11, Ohio: D+5, Maine: D+6, Texas: D+7. Amazing! The people who would respond to a pollster that uttered the name “New York Times” report their preferences in such a way that the Democrats are ahead in not one, not two, but all these tightly contested races. “Tightly contested?

In the fall of 2017, Virginia was going through its quadrennial tradition of giving the nation an electoral check-in on the president by holding an off-year gubernatorial election. The nation’s mood was, to say the least, heated. Four months earlier, at a baseball field in Alexandria, a radicalized and mentally imbalanced left-wing activist had nearly killed House whip Steve Scalise and three others in a shooting. So it was with some recklessness that Latino Victory Project, in an ad supporting Democrat Ralph Northam, ran with the message that his Republican opponent Ed Gillespie (a moderate) wanted to hunt and murder brown children.

Donald Trump has so dominated the news over the past decade that it is hard to imagine American politics without him. Yet now we are in the last 27 months of his presidency. And as this year ends and the next approaches, the national conversation turns toward the looming election cycle of 2028 and the vital question of who comes next. The Democratic nomination seems destined to be a complicated struggle between various factions and candidates. The outgoing Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is a figure of ridicule yet strangely unsquashable. He remains the betting favorite. Senator Jon Ossoff, this magazine’s last cover star, is a contender. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a telegenic and increasingly influential force – and Kamala Harris just won’t take no for an answer.

Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania party boss who served as Abraham Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, has long been credited with the rule that an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought. His War Department handed out contracts to friends so freely that the House of Representatives censured him for it. By then, Lincoln, fed up, had already named him an emissary to Russia. Cameron was a crook, and his friends at least got their contracts. America’s technology giants have helped pay for Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom and have gotten nothing from it. The Democrats, favored to take the House of Representatives in the midterms, have promised subpoenas.