The Republicans are doomed in the New York Times, once again. In Tuesday's edition, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns gathered to giddily shovel the dirt over the GOP’s hopes in the 2018 congressional elections under the harshly titled: “House Control Is at Stake as G.O.P. Suburbs Recoil at President.” The text box: “A mounting backlash could turn some red-hued districts blue in 2018.”
They found an older voter who apparently didn’t know the significance of President Trump mocking Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.”
As she sat with a glass of sauvignon blanc waiting for a women-focused Democratic fund-raiser to begin, Nancy Sharp let loose in a Texas-seasoned drawl why she and so many other onetime supporters of the Bush family were abandoning the Republicans.
“Have you ever heard of a stupider and trashier man than the president of the United States?” asked Ms. Sharp, an interior designer who lives not far from the elegant condominium where about 75 women gathered this month to help the House candidate Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. “Calling a U.S. senator ‘Pocahontas’ in front of God and everyone!”
Trump was making a dig at Warren for her false claims of Native American heritage, which the Times reporters hopefully are aware of, even if they didn’t bother to explain.
If Democrats are to claim the House majority next year, their path back to power will go through places like the Huntingdon, a 34-floor high-rise in the River Oaks section of Houston that was once home to Enron’s Kenneth L. Lay, has no fewer than five valets on a busy night and sits in the district of Representative John Culberson, a veteran Republican who may be in for the race of his life.
The mounting backlash to President Trump that is threatening his party’s control of Congress is no longer confined just to swing districts on either coast. Officials in both parties believe that Republican control of the House is now in grave jeopardy because a group of districts that are historically Republican or had been trending that way before the 2016 election are slipping away.
....
From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump.
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Beyond the biggest blue states, perhaps two dozen red-hued districts with significant suburban populations could be winnable for Democrats in a banner year, including those held by Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dave Reichert of Washington State; Ted Budd and Robert Pittenger of North Carolina; and Kevin Yoder of Kansas.
The reporters over-interpreted the Democrat's flukish Democratic victory in Alabama, and continued to spin the same political party that celebrated Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy (after repeated sex scandals and worse) as occupying the moral and political high ground.
What alarms Republicans is that charges of sexual misconduct, which undermined Mr. Moore and linger over Mr. Trump, are engulfing lawmakers and are bound to lead to more resignations, more special elections and a further galvanizing of female voters.
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Democrats have dreamed for years of peeling away the rings around major cities, separating suburban voters who favor conservative tax and economic policies from a Republican Party that also champions harder-right positions on abortion, guns and gay rights. So far, that effort has gained Democrats few seats.
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That rebuke resonates with voters like Pat Robinson, a retired teacher inclined to vote for a Democrat in 2018 but waiting to see who will emerge as the nominee. Ms. Robinson, who said she voted for Mrs. Clinton last year as the “lesser of two evils,” said she would not reward a lawmaker allied with the White House.
The reporters went out on a limb and seemed to think the Democrat would win a Republican House seat in Houston, and tried to put the Republican John Culberson on the defensive:
In Mr. Culberson’s Houston district, which Mrs. Clinton narrowly carried, the ingredients seem right for an upset.
He has not hired a full-time campaign manager, and some supporters worry he does not fully realize the threat. Asked at a fund-raiser this year if he was besieged with angry calls, Mr. Culberson suggested he was not, a comment that left some attendees flabbergasted, according to a Republican present.
Martin and Burns concluded on an ominous note for Republicans.
Nearby, one of her volunteers, a Brown University graduate and lawyer by training, spoke with even more urgency.
“I cannot bear what is going on right now in government,” said Norri Leder, saying of Mr. Trump, “I find him completely offensive and unethical and slimy.”
And, Ms. Leder said, her Republican husband feels the same way.
But John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist warned against such media giddiness, given that the Democrats have their problems too.
...the main problem with the blue wave theory of 2018 is that it asks too much of the Democratic Party, which is riven by as much division and confusion as the GOP is, if not more....What’s worse, they have no economic message. (Remember the Democrats’ “Better Deal” rollout back in July? Sort of had to do with the economy? Me neither.)....If they want to win in deep-red states next year, Democrats will have to offer a positive vision for the country. There’s no sign so far they have one to offer.
Davidson had something to say about the paper's confidence about a Democratic upset in Houston:
But here’s what the Times piece doesn’t mention: the last Democrat to represent that district left office in 1967, when the seat went to the former chairman of the Republican Party for Harris County, one George H.W. Bush. Republicans have represented the district ever since. Culberson, who has held the seat since 2001, won reelection last year by 12 points -- despite Clinton carrying the district.
