a reply to:
carewemust
At least in recent times, it's common for the party of first term presidents to lose seats in the midterm elections, particularly in the House. What's
less common is to lose enough seats for an overall shift in power but it happens. The Dems lost both the House and Senate during Clinton's first
mid-term. During Bush 43's first term, the GOP gained a few in the midterms but in the 2006 midterms, the Dems took control of both houses of Congress
and a majority of governorships. And I think the Republicans got a bump in the first midterms because of 9/11.
Then the Dems gained some more seats in 2008 but during the 2010 midterms, they got trounced and lost the House and their filibuster-proof majority in
the Senate.
I'd say a big factor is that when a party has the presidency and Congress, they're generally on the hook for everything that goes wrong and there's
always things for people to be upset about so there's always blame to be had. On the other hand, the economy has been doing well for a few years now,
it's been doing even better since the election and tax cuts are always popular.
The Democrats should probably take all the pages out of the GOP playbook from the last half of Obama's 2nd term: talk about the deficit at every
opportunity, question the stats on unemployment, etc.
It's going to be interesting. The economy is good which usually bodes well for the incumbents but we're hyperpolarized and Trump has been consistently
unpopular. He has been up the last couple weeks — he shot up about 6 points in the first week of February which is probably mostly connected to the
economy. I'm predicting that he will lose most if not all of those gains this week. There's the Russian indictment which contradicts his repeated
"it's all a hoax created by Democrats" lie about election meddling.
Also, Rick Gates is going to take that deal this week. He's flipped on Manafort and it's anyone's guess what happens next. Hopefully it gets really
ugly and a bunch of crooked lobbyists and politicians get dragged down. The word on the street is Gates won't be offering anything up on Team Trump.
Other than the lobbying 2012-14, Manafort hasn't been active in domestic politics too much since he went to work for the Party of Regions afaik. If
he's got dirt on politicians from 2012 on, he might be able to roll over on them. He may or may not have anything US prosecutors can do anything with
regarding his Russian/Ukrainian work.
It'll be interesting to see what sort of superseding indictments come down. It's unlikely that he's got any chance of walking with Gates as a
cooperating witness so a lot will probably depend on how much time he ends up facing.
There's a lot of other things shaping up right now, not least of which is what's going to happen with DACA.The economy could also take a turn. There
could be a major terrorist attack which could be good or bad for Trump depending on how it's framed. There could be a domestic terrorist attack. More
mass shootings. The turnover for this administration is historic and they're a regular factory for minor scandals (and scandals that would have been
bigger under different circumstances). Things could heat up with NK again. There's natural disasters of course. Then there's man-made disasters like
oil spills.
Then of course there's the other aspects of the Russian investigation (like if they indict people related to the hacking, that's almost certainly
going to be bad for Trump), the IG report, whatever crap Nunes can come up with. I don't foresee any legal consequences, maybe a few more staffing
changes in the DOJ/FBI, but it's good fodder for rhetoric/propaganda.