Who’s to blame for the Blue Wave not materializing?
Even though they’re poised to take back the White House and made gains in the Senate, national Democrats are trying to figure out what went wrong in what was expected to be a second straight Blue Wave* election. That’s especially true in the House of Representatives, where their 2018 gains have evaporated. POLITICO (“‘Dumpster fire’: House Democrats trade blame after Tuesday’s damage“): Even with tens of thousands of ballots still to be counted, shell-shocked Democratic lawmakers, strategists and aides privately began trying to pin the blame: The unreliable polls. The GOP’s law-and-order message amid a summer of unrest. The “hidden Trump voters.” The impeachment hangover. The lack of a coronavirus stimulus deal. Some corners of the party were also beginning to question the message and tactics at the top, with several Democrats predicting — and some even demanding — a significant overhaul within the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, including possibly even ousting chairwoman Cheri Bustos, whose Illinois race has yet to be called. So, I don’t know Bustos from Eve. But what is it that she did wrong? By all accounts going in to Election Day, expectations were a massive Democratic wave. It didn’t materialize in the Presidential, Senate, or House races. How is that her fault? Apparently, it’s the expectations themselves that were the problem. Just 24 hours earlier, Democrats including Bustos and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were boasting about the opportunity to expand their majority, with some even predicting they could win as many as a dozen seats in the House by clawing back GOP territory in the suburbs of Texas, Ohio and Illinois. But by Wednesday morning, party officials and the rank and file were in panic mode as they awaited the results of nearly 20 members of the Democrats’ historic freshman class that handed the party control of the House just two years ago. And already they were saying goodbye to at least a half-dozen of their centrist Democratic colleagues, who were stunned by GOP challengers on Tuesday, including Abby Finkenauer in Iowa and Donna Shalala in Florida. Okay. But, if it’s not a wave election, what happened is precisely what you’d expect to have happened. In 2018, Democrats picked up an absurd 41 House seats. Almost by definition, most of them came in Republican-leaning districts and all of them in highly competitive ones. The full extent of fallout was just beginning to become clear on Wednesday morning, with lawmakers and aides expecting a far tougher internal leadership process, with Pelosi herself facing trickier math as she attempts to seal another term as speaker.
