Op-Ed: No matter what happens in the midterms, pundits will trot out familiar narratives that will be used to justify their calls for GOP control.
The latest is that the 2018 midterms will mark the beginning of a new era of liberalism and socialism.
As if on cue, liberal activists, liberal news media outlets, and liberal policy wonks are flooding the airwaves with predictions that Democrats will fail to gain a majority in the House, and that the GOP-controlled House will lose in 2018 to the Democrat-led Senate.
“To win, Democrats will need to nominate a new, more liberal generation of candidates. And if the Democratic Party is unwilling to do such a thing, Republicans could succeed in installing another conservative party in control of both the House and the Senate,” warned The Washington Post editorial board, in what may have been one of its most unhelpful and absurd editorials so far.
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This is what was supposed to be the “new” liberalism in the midterms — and if liberals would have been on the same page with their “new” agenda 20 years ago, they could have been more effective in the 2004 elections, when they took control of the House by focusing on opposing the Bush wars and the welfare state, and in the 2010 midterms when they took control of the House by focusing on the Affordable Care Act, on the bailouts, and on the debt.
The Washington Post even acknowledges that it was the left-wing of the party that was responsible for the 2010 midterm victories, but it’s not quite clear that Democrats were just “defending the Affordable Care Act.”
In fact, they were opposing Obamacare.
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And they did it in ways that were just as effective as many of the conservative policy proposals they had opposed in 2009.
Here are the results of the 2014 elections based on election night exit polls:
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