Opinion: Usual midterm result soured by blue wave predictions

The Democrats spent record amounts of money and trotted out every celebrity surrogate they could find during the 2018 midterms, and it still wasn’t enough to defeat President Trump.

Supported by the wealthy elite, the Democrats raised billions of dollars for election campaigns across the country, even setting a fundraising record in their failed bid to unseat Texas Senator Ted Cruz. 

Democratic candidates alone spent more than $1 billion on their campaigns in pursuit of the promised “blue wave,”, and all it bought them was a thoroughly average result in the House of Representative and a historic loss of seats in the U.S. Senate.

Money wasn’t the only thing the Democrats wasted during the midterms, though.

The Democrats also deployed their top political and cultural superstars to propel their imaginary blue wave forward.

In a desperate attempt to increase Democratic turnout, former President Obama made stops in several battleground states, but many of the candidates he stumped for failed to defeat their Republican opponents.

Liberal celebrities like Oprah to Taylor Swift also lined up to endorse Democrats, hoping to drive supporters to the polls by demonizing President Trump.

And that’s on top of the liberal media bias and skewed polls that Democrats have always been able to rely on to tip the scales in their favor.

With all of these advantages in their arsenal, the Democrats were convinced that they were heading for a historic “blue wave” on Election Day. Historic it was, just not in the way they were expecting.

In an underwhelming performance, the Democrats picked up about 30 seats in the House of Representatives, roughly matching the average midterm outcome against a sitting president’s party. Significantly, they failed to capitalize on a number of key races where they could have expanded their new majority but didn’t.

While the Democrats’ performance in the House was unremarkable at best, their rout in the Senate was truly shocking. Republicans added at least three seats to their Senate majority by successfully ousting Democrat incumbents in Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri.

Historically, opposition parties perform far better in midterm elections -- they generally pick up six Senate seats. This is just the fourth time since 1934 that a sitting president’s party has gained any Senate seats at all in a midterm election. 

“Fifty-five is the largest number of Republican Senators in the last 100 years,” President Trump said following the election. “And in the last 80 years, a sitting president’s party has only gained a cumulative total of eight Senate seats, averaging one per decade.”

In 2010, Obama lost an astonishing 63 seats in the House, and six seats in the Senate. In 2006, George W. Bush also lost six seats in the Senate. The 1994 midterm elections were equally as bad for incumbent President Bill Clinton, with the “Republican Revolution” capturing eight seats in the Senate and 54 seats in the House.

The media will try to spin the Democrats’ mundane performance in this year’s House elections as a historic victory, but history doesn’t agree. Even with all the Democrats’ mega-donors and celebrity endorsers, President Trump and the Republicans are the ones who really made history.

Brad Parscale is the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.