2018 Midterms: Realignment Election

This morning World Socialist Web Site argues that the European elite, based on press reaction to Tuesday's midterms in the United States, believe Trump is here to stay and the constituents of the "indispensable nation" have fully embraced fascism.

That's way off base. Trump showed the inherent weakness of the Bannon strategy of catering to a hard-shell Dixiecrat base. Yes, Trump triumphed in the senate, but that victory only highlighted the essentially undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate.

The piece to read this morning is Thomas Edsall's "The Polarizer-in-Chief Meets the Midterms." Edsall goes into the Trump lock on the senate. He also succinctly lays out the import of the 2018 midterms in his opening paragraphs. Basically, thanks to Trump, it was a realignment election, but not in the ways the Republican Party wants:

There is no clearer sign of the changing shape of the Democratic coalition than the fact that going into the 2018 midterm elections, six of the 20 richest congressional districts were represented by Republicans but that when the new Congress is sworn in, all 20 will be represented by Democrats.

The Democratic Party is continuing to extend its core support among minority constituencies — now 41 percent of the Democratic electorate— into upscale, often suburban, areas as college-educated white women abandon the Republican Party in droves and as education, more broadly, becomes a new partisan dividing line.

There are, to give another example, 13 well-to-do congressional districts that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. All 13 have Republican congressman. On Tuesday, Democrats won 10 of those districts.

What European observers don't understand about U.S. politics is it never strays far from the Civil War. That's bedrock. Needless to say, it's not terribly wise to base a strategy for national governance on the Lost Cause.