Max Boot (een conservatief)
In the first few hours after the midterm election, I saw the result as a rebuke rather than a repudiation of President Trump. But two weeks later it appears to be more of a repudiation than it had appeared at first blush. True, some high-profile Democrats were defeated, notably Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Democrats lost one or two seats in the Senate. But they won Republican-held Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada to go along with a special-election victory in Alabama, and they gained at least 37 House seats – their biggest pickup since the 1974 post-Watergate election. At the state level, Democrats won seven governor’s offices and roughly 250 state legislative seats, taking control of seven chambers in six states.
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Trump’s xenophobic closing argument, highlighted by hysteria over the migrant caravan in Mexico, shored up Republican candidates in rural areas but contributed to a GOP wipeout in suburban districts. Maricopa County, Ariz., centered on Phoenix, was the most populous county in the United States that Trump won in 2016. On Nov. 6, it supported Democrat Kyrsten Sinema for the Senate. Tarrant County, Tex., which includes Fort Worth, was the second-most-populous county to go for Trump in 2016. It supported Democrat O’Rourke for the Senate. Even more dramatic is the fact that Orange County, Calif., the birthplace of Richard M. Nixon and of the modern conservative movement, is for the first time since the 1930s represented entirely by Democrats in the House.
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Here’s an ominous statistic for Republicans concerned about their party’s future: The share of Democratic support among under-30 voters increased from 55 percent in the 2016 presidential race to 67 percent in this year’s congressional election. Here’s another: The Democratic margin among Latinos grew from 26 percentage points in the 2014 midterm election to 40 percentage points in 2018.
Republicans have become the party of grumpy old white people who live in rural areas and lack college degrees. Trump managed to squeeze a narrow electoral-college margin out of those voters in 2016. It is possible that, with his demagogic skills, he can do so again in 2020. But the writing is on the wall for the GOP, because every year there are more minorities, more college graduates and more residents of suburban or urban areas. The entire country will no longer be majority white by the 2040s. With Trump in the pilot’s seat, the national Republican Party is in a demographic death spiral.
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