easyt65
Diamond Member
- Aug 4, 2015
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Sabato: Say, 2018 looks like a looming disaster for Senate Democrats
"Democrats blew a golden opportunity to win back control of the Senate in 2016. Republicans defended 23 seats against the Democrats’ 13, and were widely expected to suffer significant losses — more than the four seats necessary to reduce the Senate to a tie. Instead, the GOP held on in Florida, Pennsylvania, and handily won a Wisconsin race that almost everyone expected Russ Feingold to win by a large margin. If the GOP wins the run-off race in Louisiana as expected, they’ll have a 52-48 majority for the next two years — and maybe wider, if Heidi Heitkamp gets a position in the Donald Trump administration.
By 2019, that might become a filibuster-proof majority, warns Larry Sabato. Rather than the 10-seat advantage they had in 2016, Democrats will have a seventeen-seat disadvantage. Furthermore, many of those races will be in states won by Republicans in November.
It’s entirely possible that Republicans could end up with a 62-63 seat majority, which would give them carte blanche on policy for the final two years of Trump’s first term. It’s also possible that some of this potential might dissipate as a reaction to Trump’s governance, as frequently happens in midterm elections. That would require Democrats to have learned the lessons of why they lost so badly in 2016 — and so far, as Salena Zito explains, they’re still in deep denial.
They have less than two years to figure that out. So far, though, all they’ve done is kept their party’s leadership in the same hands that lost four straight election cycles and turned Democrats into that “coastal elitist club.” That portends yet another major electoral disaster for Democrats. And if Republicans and Trump actually deliver on their promises in 2017-18, it could be even worse than it looks for those coastal elites."
Sabato: Say, 2018 looks like a looming disaster for Senate Democrats - Hot Air
"Democrats blew a golden opportunity to win back control of the Senate in 2016. Republicans defended 23 seats against the Democrats’ 13, and were widely expected to suffer significant losses — more than the four seats necessary to reduce the Senate to a tie. Instead, the GOP held on in Florida, Pennsylvania, and handily won a Wisconsin race that almost everyone expected Russ Feingold to win by a large margin. If the GOP wins the run-off race in Louisiana as expected, they’ll have a 52-48 majority for the next two years — and maybe wider, if Heidi Heitkamp gets a position in the Donald Trump administration.
By 2019, that might become a filibuster-proof majority, warns Larry Sabato. Rather than the 10-seat advantage they had in 2016, Democrats will have a seventeen-seat disadvantage. Furthermore, many of those races will be in states won by Republicans in November.
It’s entirely possible that Republicans could end up with a 62-63 seat majority, which would give them carte blanche on policy for the final two years of Trump’s first term. It’s also possible that some of this potential might dissipate as a reaction to Trump’s governance, as frequently happens in midterm elections. That would require Democrats to have learned the lessons of why they lost so badly in 2016 — and so far, as Salena Zito explains, they’re still in deep denial.
They have less than two years to figure that out. So far, though, all they’ve done is kept their party’s leadership in the same hands that lost four straight election cycles and turned Democrats into that “coastal elitist club.” That portends yet another major electoral disaster for Democrats. And if Republicans and Trump actually deliver on their promises in 2017-18, it could be even worse than it looks for those coastal elites."
Sabato: Say, 2018 looks like a looming disaster for Senate Democrats - Hot Air
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