Sam Stroud
Staff Writer
Although the Democratic Party retook the House in last week’s midterms, they failed to achieve the much-desired rout of the Republicans that had been talked about in the months leading up to the election.
The truth of the matter is, if they couldn’t achieve a blue wave this year, they never will.
If there was ever going to be an election for a mass Republican wipeout, this was the year for it. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have seldom crossed the 50-point threshold; Democrats held a seven-point lead on the generic ballot, and polls showed their enthusiasm was higher than Republicans, even after the Kavanaugh hearings, which Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called an “Adrenaline Shot.”
It didn’t happen, though. Democrats did take the House, but the results are nowhere near historic. Democrats are poised to pick up around 35 to 40 seats. This pales in comparison to the 2010 midterms. The Republicans picked up 63 seats that year.
Why is it, in a year marked by left-wing “resistance” to President Trump, that Democrats couldn’t make bigger gains in the Senate and lost seats in the Senate?
The answer is almost absurdly simple. Democrats have trended too far left. So far left that the face of the Democratic Party has become a broke bartender who can’t pay her D.C. apartment rent.
This isn’t a new problem — in 2015 Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then DNC chairman, was unable to point out the difference between a Democrat and a socialist in an interview with Chris Matthews.
The Democrat candidates who performed the best in elections were the moderate candidates who ran in the Midwest. As The Washington Post reported, far-left candidates who were backed by “Our Revolution,” a group of Bernie Sanders supporters, flipped zero Republican seats.
The writing is on the wall for 2020. The Democrats need to go back to the center if they want to win. If the Democratic Party ever wants to enjoy the success the Republicans had in 2010, it will have to abandon socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If Democrats continue to pick candidates like Bernie Sanders to run in general elections, they will struggle in areas that are not deeply blue. We have seen socialist-supported candidates struggle in battleground states such as Andrew Gillum in Florida.
Nominating far-left candidates will not help Democrats win general elections. Even on their best cycles, they will not be able to amass a blue wave because the candidates they are running are too left for the American people.
