This year, I kept predicting that Donald Trump would lose the election and drag down Republican candidates for lower offices. In my defense, I based this on polls whose results were fairly consistent, but which all turned out to be a wee bit off. In my further defense, they were only a wee bit off. Trump’s popular vote total ended up about two percentage points lower than Hillary Clinton’s, which is only slightly better than the polls predicted. It was his unexpectedly strong performance among blue-collar voters in swing states—a constituency that usually votes for Democrats—that tipped the results in the Electoral College.
Trump did, arguably, drag down a few other Republican candidates, contributing to Senate losses in three states he didn’t carry: New Hampshire, Illinois, and Nevada. But the losses were mostly on the other side and can fairly be described as a catastrophe for Democrats.
In my final defense, for years I have maintained a Democratic Party Death Watch chronicling the growing long-term weakness of their political position. This year was a culmination of that trend. Very early in the primary process, I described the Democratic primaries as “a grim kind of death march, with an aging roster of minor figures up against the ‘inevitable’ steamroller of a candidate who is infamously cynical and dishonest, flagrantly corrupt, and constantly mired in scandal, with an insufferably entitled daughter, in-laws who include a convicted felon, and a husband with a messy personal life.”
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