Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? Lots of surprised faces after Tuesday night’s elections results. I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to see the kind of ticket-splitting we saw all over the place between GOP senate candidates (which, by and large, did well in their respective states) vs. what down-ballot congressional candidates did in their districts. I heard from my GOP party contact earlier today, and the “party line”, so to speak, is that those candidates that aligned themselves with President Trump did much better than those who chose not to. There’s a lot of anger at FOX News calling the House for Democrats with voters standing in line and the polls being open in California. Not sure to what – if any – extent that might depressed turnout (I doubt it made much of a difference) but what FOX did was truly unconscionable.

I’ve sifted through some notes I had been taking throughout the year in anticipation of this post, and frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t consider more the issue of healthcare costs and how it might impact suburban districts (where so many of the GOP’s congressional victims got whacked). But hey, I’m no professional at this kind of thing, so who cares? 🙂 At any rate, with that in mind, here are a few thoughts and comments about the mid-terms in general:

1. There was no blue wave. Sure, the Dems are going to have the House, but what they ended up taking was hardly historic. And, they’ll find out just like the GOP did that’s it’s a lot harder to actually govern than play the role of the resistance. Without a doubt, the Trump rallies prevented an even bigger bloodbath from taking place. And the loss of those three Senate seats is going to hurt the Dems far more than any advantage they might temporarily gain with “San Fran Nan” holding the Speaker’s gavel.

2. There’s little doubt that the blame for the GOP’s loss of the House falls on the shoulders of two RINOs: John McCain and Speaker Paul Ryan, who was useless and nowhere to be found this election cycle. I think Richard Baris is exactly spot on: the inability of the GOP to: a) repeal Obamacare completely (McCain casting the deciding vote), and b) replace it with a suite of innovative, market-based solutions (Ryan’s greatest failure as Speaker) really hurt the GOP.

3. If there’s a silver lining in all this for the GOP, it is that so many worthless RINO congressmen got whacked that the House GOP will now be (like their Senate counterparts) more conservative and more Trumpian. This improves the chances that the Freedom Caucus’s Jim Jordan (and not Ryan’s RINO rooter Kevin McCarthy) will become Minority Leader. Hopefully the GOP understands that they’re going to need someone like Jordan to paint the clear distinctions between his side of the chamber and Pelosi’s.

4. The purge of RINO congressmen also gives the GOP a better opportunity to recruit good, solid conservatives to regain the seats lost last night in 2020. Hey, sometimes you need to take a bit of a licking in order to come back stronger for the next fight.

5. Do not discount the importance of the GOP majority in the Senate being much more conservative as a result of the departures of Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Arizona’s Jeff Flake. First of all, it reduces whatever leverage the Lisa Murkowskis and Susan Collinses of the world have previously had to force PDJT to pick acceptable candidates for the Supreme Court if any new retirements were to be announced. Secondly, it wouldn’t surprise me to see someone like Clarence Thomas use this golden opportunity to announce his retirement and enable the President to pick a younger, just as conservative, replacement.

6. Big winners of the night? Alternate media. I, like tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of others, eschewed the crappy, oh-so-rigid and predictable cable news networks for live broadcasts on YouTube and other venues. Me? I switched between the Internet broadcast hosted by Steve Bannon over at Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit site and Styxhexenhammer666’s YouTube channel. For millennial progressives there was Cenk Uygur’s The Young Turks YouTube channel. I can guarantee you when the 2020 election comes around, the audiences for these alternative forms of political broadcasts will be exponentially greater. The cable news networks don’t know it yet (or if they do, they’re not telling), but they’re the walking dead, the equivalent of Ford Falcons whose audiences and influence will be drastically curtailed in just two short years. Things are changing that rapidly.

7. Big losers of the night: media darlings Andrew Gillum, the Venezuelan socialist who lost his race for Florida governor, and dopey “Beto” O’Rourke, he of the $70 mil poured into his campaign to unseat Ted Cruz in Texas, money that could have been far-better spent elsewhere:

In the night’s early bellwether, Ted Cruz won Texas even though skateboarding-and-super-cool Beto spent $70 million trying to beat him. Thank you, thank you Beto. Take a bow, and take a knee. (Texans just love kneeling during the national anthem.) Seventy Million Democrat Dollars poured down the Rio Grande. Imagine the damage that money could have done if spent in other campaigns or secretly flown to Iran to ransom a rug. The Democrats now are the party of The Millionaires — George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer — and, except for the blessed Sheldon Adelson who seems determined, single-handedly if necessary, to counter-balance all of them, that’s where money now crowds politics. And Robert Francis Beto vacuumed in Seventy Million of those George Washingtons while Ted Cruz won.

Barack Obama and Oprah were also particularly stung:

And then, next-door, the Georgia governor race. We have been told that Oprah is God (now that Harvey Weinstein has been anthropomorphized). When Oprah endorses a book, everyone in the country immediately buys it, and four or five people even read it. So there was Oprah, the God who made Obama president. And Obama, her Prophet, campaigned properly alongside her, both for Stacey Abrams, another radical. If it was not the Trump campaign stop in Macon that sealed the deal for Brian Kemp, it was the Obama kiss of death. Out of office for two years, Barack still has not lost the touch, energizing Republicans with memories of the blight. It appears to everyone but Abrams that Kemp held Georgia for the GOP. The public awaits Oprah’s next book recommendation; perhaps Taylor Swift can sing it.

Heh. Indeed.

So what can we expect for the next two years? Well, it’s a virtual guarantee that Democrats will overplay their hand and attempt to ruin President Trump with investigations related to Russia, Judge Kavanaugh, and the President’s taxes and business associations. They’ll have to because that’s what their base of frothing, drooling Feminazis and Hollywood celebrities demands. But all that will end up doing is pissing off centrist Democrats (if there are any left) and independent voters. If the Democrats try to further motivate their base by passing legislation to restore Obamacare regulations and/or tax increases, the Republicans will motivate their base and independents by squashing those initiatives in the Senate. Most folks think there won’t be any major legislation passed in the next two years, but I’m not so sure. Me? I’m guessing Nancy Pelosi may be willing to trade something like DACA for some market-friendly healthcare initiatives and/or deficit reduction measures.

So, it could have been better, but it sure could have been worse. While lots of folks are already ruminating about the 2020 elections and what states Trump might or might not lose or win as a result, keep in mind two things: 1) 2020 is light years away politically, and it’s a virtual lock that the political landscape then will look completely different than it does now, and 2) the Democrats are going to have to pick a candidate. It’s easy to look at last night purely in terms of Donald Trump, but in 2020 there will be a second candidate and a competing political vision for voters to choose between. It’s hard not to the see the Democrats picking someone that represents the far left, because that’s where all the energy in the party is right now. But it’s just way too early to even speculate. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.