It’s just the normal cycle. The mushy middle don’t like the president’s allies. The charts were pretty much the same coming out of Clinton and people were talking about a permanent/ 20 year GOP majority... And of course if you flip the colors the charts for 2000 through 2008 looked about the same and people talking about a permanent/ 20 year Dem majority... The simple fact is there’s a cyclical nature to politics, countries run in one direction for a while, then they stop and say “hey, that didn’t solve all our problems, these guys suck” and run the other way. It happens to all countries that allow the people to have a voice, with our 2 4 year term structure it’s very clockwork here, other places the durations are a little more random, but the nature of the cycle remains the same.
My take away from this is that the recent election results shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone as it’s pretty consistent with their recent performance trend. More than that, I think it pretty clearly illustrates that they didn’t lose in 2016 because of Russia. Vladimir Putin didn’t have anything to do with 2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016. They need to look in the mirror I think.
I think that’s true to an extent, but the runs haven’t always been as short as they seem to be getting now. I think it will be hard for the Democrats to recover this time because they’ve bought into a view of the world that considers the views of most Americans to be morally repugnant. Normally, you can negotiate and compromise your way to a majority coalition, but you can’t do that with people who are “racist, sexist, xenophobe, etc.” We’ll see how long it takes them to realize that . . .