“Landslide. Yes, landslide—stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals,” proclaimed TIME’s post-election cover story. “After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide.”
No Republican in memory, until Trump, was so loved by his base as Ronald Reagan. No Republican in memory, until Trump, was SO vilified by his detractors as Ronald Reagan.
Although the pollsters have conceded the Senate to the Republicans, they are still 88% confident (though not 188% confident) that the Democrats will take the house. A pox on the pollsters! May this election be as big a surprise to them as 1980 and 2016 put together.
Reagan lost seats in his first mid term, but that was because he had to put us into a sharp (but short) recession to stop the galloping inflation of the Carter years. Mr. Trump has had it much easier on the economic front, and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit it. This economy had been smothered for eight years. All he had to do was light a match to it.