First, history tells us that Democrats will have a tough time holding onto their already narrow House majority next year. Only once in more than 80 years has the party in the White House NOT lost seats in a first-term midterm election. This is true even when a president is relatively popular. Pres. George HW Bush went into the 1990 midterms with a 58 percent approval rating. His party still lost nine seats. We are also in a redistricting year where Republicans will have the upper hand in drawing district lines in key battleground states.
A midterm election is not a contest between two different visions for America; it is a referendum on the sitting president and his party. The party out of power is unified not necessarily in what they are for but what they are against, namely the other side’s policies. Pre-Trump, Republicans were unified by their shared dislike of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. The 2016 election may have divided the Democratic Party, but two years of President Trump brought them back together in time for the 2018 midterms.
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