The Patriot Post® · Not a Blue Wave Nor Even a Trickle

What are the odds that a political party could lose a presidential election by 3.5% and five million votes, and yet not lose a single one of the nearly 200 congressional seats it was defending all across the nation?

We ask because that’s how things are shaping up for the GOP. On Election Day, 198 Republican representatives were defending their House seats against a Democrat Party that “experts” were predicting would add between five and 15 seats to its majority. Granted, many of these 198 GOP seats were in districts considered safely Republican, but according to the Cook Political Report, 18 of them were toss-ups.

If a toss-up is a coin toss, what we saw on November 3 was either a crappy bit of prognostication by the Cook Political Report and countless other “experts,” or a flipped coin that landed “heads” 18 straight times. What are the odds?

House Republicans did more than defend, though. They went on the attack. At this point, they’ve flipped at least nine seats that were held by Democrats, and they’ll pick up at least a handful more when the dust has finally settled. And the new Republican House caucus will boast more women and more minorities than ever before.

So much for the double-digit gain that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was predicting this summer. Instead, she (or whichever fed-up Democrat finally wrests the speaker’s gavel from her) will preside over an extremely slim House majority — and she’ll have anything but a vote of confidence from the American people.

National Review’s Rich Lowry called the election a “Blue Trickle” instead of a “Blue Wave,” but we don’t even see the trickle. “There has been Democratic backbiting where there was supposed to be celebration,” he writes. “Virginia moderate Representative Abigail Spanberger, who barely won her reelection bid, loosed a profanity-laced tirade against the party’s Left during a House Democratic conference call, outraged that it had handed Republicans so much ammunition.”

And that’s just the House. A couple of weeks ago, all the talk was about the inevitability of a Democrat-controlled Senate; meanwhile, court packing, statehood for deep-blue DC and Puerto Rico, and the filibuster’s funeral were all but assured.

But a funny thing happened on the way to single-party rule.

As West Virginia (Trump by 39 points) Senator Joe Manchin put it, “Under no circumstances would I support packing the court or ending the filibuster if there is a 50-50 tie. … Defund the police? Defund, my butt. I’m a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans’ jobs and healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”

We’d take strong issue with Manchin’s claim that the Democrats are “the party of working men and women,” but the rest of his rant is well taken.

Somehow, Joe Biden, the guy who couldn’t draw flies to a campaign rally, racked up a lot more population-adjusted votes than a young, dynamic Barack Obama got in his once-in-a-lifetime 2008 campaign. Somehow.

But everywhere else? The Democrats and their stank-nasty statism got kicked to the curb. And that’s just as it should be in a healthy Republic.