I am sick and tired of the pundits prattle. Of the remarks that it was not the red wave that was predicted or that the Dems did better than expected. I am dismayed by the sort of sigh of relief of progressives that it was not the shellacking they feared. I am tired of the sort of business as usual "live to fight another day" attitude that assumes "well maybe better next time" - as if we just have two more years to suffer though the grid lock we have already had for two years. (While both Trump and Biden signal their intentions to run again in 2024 potentially setting us up to live in a perpetual rerunning nightmare where Trump never leaves the newswaves, where a landslide is referred to as a stolen election and where one of two elderly white men continue to run our country.)
This prattle incorrectly fails to identify that this was a blue wave - it was a blue wave under severe gerrymandering. If one looks at how close so many individual races were, it is clear that without the gerrymandering that took blue districts and divided them between two and sometimes even 7 neighboring districts to bury the votes of people of color, youth and suburban women, that the Republicans would not have even the house.
I am concerned that progressives seem to believe that we have a good chance two years from now to have a different outcome. There seems to be a failure to understand that between stacked courts, redistricting that happened after the 2020 census and a 40 year plan on the part of the Koch brothers and their think tanks...the game can in fact be too fixed to ever again be "won".
The Koch think tanks have been planning for decades. They planned to slowly take over statehouses, (check), to use wedge issues (check), to interfere with Democratic appointment of Judges (check), and to stack the Supreme Court so there would be no where to go for relief, (check). All of this was designed to make it so that after the 2020 Census, they would control enough statehouses to gerrymander enough states as to ensure a permanent Republican advantage. Their plan was not concerned about who would be the Republican President or who would get elected under this plan, as it was assumed that all members of the Republican party favor big business over the little guy. It seemed certain an oligarchy could be accomplished.
What they never could have imagined, and has been a great fly in their ointment, is Donald Trump. Who would have imagined in the 80's or 90's or 00's that a bad businessman, a reality tv star, and a person with narcissistic personality disorder could run for President and win? Remember they tried pretty hard in the beginning of the 2016 primary race to tip it for a Bush, Cruz or Rubio (really anyone familiar and typical). But when he won the nomination, I think the Republicans still thought he could be their puppet. (They did not know that Putin had already claimed puppetmaster.) They simply could not imagine the kinds of irrational and counterproductive decisions that a narcissist makes to serve their own ego. They could not have imagined that he would both eliminate all competition for 2020 and also lose the election because of his poor performance as president!
They briefly thought they would then be rid of him in the way it has worked throughout history that the losing figure recedes into obscurity. But again they did not count on the sort of desperate personality disordered behavior that would lead him to encourage seditionists to over throw the government. On Jan 7th 2021 they briefly stepped back from him thinking this time he had gone too far, and they would be rid of him. However, when the media did not immediately condemn him, they had already learned that to fail to back him could mean political ruin. Thus they stayed loyal to him, swallowing hard on the new party line that the election had been stolen. They privately worried about his pushing this rather than solid policy for the mid-terms and bit their tongues as he picked incompetent men for the mid terms simply for their willingness to kiss his ring. But only now as this has lost them the House are they beginning to step away from him.
So Trump has sort of screwed up the great Koch think tank plan. The Republican elected in 2020 was supposed to be easily re-elected. The Supreme court had already been delivered. The Gerrymandering was supposed to assure that in 2022 he would have everything he needed in the way of complete control of all three branches of government, and any other additional rules could be changed to assure that a Democrat would never win again. Except Trump is so hated that we had a blue wave in 2020 bringing in Biden and a thin majority for him. But the Republican control was great enough to mostly block Biden's agenda so he simply looks in effective and his ratings have dropped. Yes still the blue wave came out to stop Trumps minions from getting elected in the midterm.
The problem of course as the fan of any team that never wins can tell you - over time people stop coming out as they sense the impossibility of winning. So 2024 is not in my opinion simply the next election season. To have any effective strategy at all, the Democrats are going to need to start naming that the game has been fixed.
