Karl Rove: Trump should be lowering expectations ahead of midterms, not talking about 'red wave'

Republican strategist Karl Rove on Monday said President Trump should lower expectations ahead of November’s midterm elections, not predict a "red wave" of GOP victories.

Rove, appearing on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” pointed out that the party that holds the White House historically has lost seats in a midterm election.

“In all likelihood, Republicans are going to lose seats in the House, they’re going to lose governorships, they’re going to lose state legislative seats,” Rove said. “I think the president would be well-advised to say we face an uphill fight but he feels good about it, rather than set the expectation that somehow or another the Republicans are going to gain across the board with a red wave.”

Rove’s comments came a day after Trump predicted on Twitter that there “might be a Red Wave” in November.

Trump used the same phrase during a rally Saturday in Ohio, where he was campaigning for Republican Troy Balderson, who faces a special House election against Democrat Danny O’Connor on Tuesday.

“If the Democrats get in, they’re going to raise your taxes. You’re going to have crime all over the place. You’re going to have people all over the border,” Trump said. “So why would that be a blue wave? I think it could be a red wave.”

A RealClearPolitics average of major congressional polls shows that Democrats hold about a 7-point lead over Republicans.

Most political handicappers give Democrats a good chance of taking back the House, though Republicans are well-positioned to retain their Senate majority given a 2018 map that has Democrats defending 10 seats in states won by Trump.

Rove, former President George W. Bush's political strategist, saw his old boss pickup House seats in 2002 — a remarkable achievement that came just more than a year after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

I see at least forty-one reasons why the GOP is favored over the Democrats for the 2018 midterm elections:

1. President Trump and the GOP waved their magic wands (as Obama ironically put it during the 2016 election) and produced a booming economy in less than two years in power. This Trump/GOP economy is one of the best economies since WWII, and one that quickly materialized, even after decades of chronic under-performance and low-level recession during the lackluster Bush/Obama decades. Voters vote their pocketbooks more than any other issues by far, and a booming economy is always bad news for the party that’s out of power.

2. The Trump/GOP major tax reform has directly benefited we regular folks, as well as super-charging our economy. And best of all, most of the benefits of tax reform have yet to even arrive, e.g., hundreds of billions of repatriated profits still are arriving onto our shores from the rest of the world and have yet to be invested into new domestic manufacturing infrastructure.

3. Worker pay and benefits are climbing at the fastest pace than any time during the last ten years.

4. In less than two years, President Trump’s economic policies have added 3.7 million jobs to the U.S. economy, precipitated the longest job growth streak in U.S. history, and resulted in the lowest black unemployment rate in history, the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history, and the highest female unemployment in 65 years. Polls have shown significant increases of support for President Trump from those groups of voters (currently at 29% support from blacks), groups who are normally the bedrock of Democrat support, and this growth alone could spell doom for the Democrats.

5. In less than two years, President Trump’s and the Congressional GOP’s economic policies have produced the highest stock market in history, and oil/gas production are at the highest level in U.S. history.

6. President Trump and the GOP Congress eliminated the vile, costly and counterproductive Obamacare mandate, which required people to pay a fine for the privilege of not buying nearly useless, overpriced medical insurance. Also eliminated was the grossly unfair inheritance tax, a tax that has been responsible for destroying more successful small businesses than any other factor.

7. President Trump’s temporary punitive tariffs have panicked the EU into complete capitulation on the issue of tariff-free fair trade, with Canada and China soon to follow. Mexico is not far behind with U.S. threats of withdrawing from NAFTA all together if Mexico doesn’t cooperate on the issue of fair trade. At this point, our foreign trading partners now know for a fact that President Trump is serious about forcing fair trade and that he will not hesitate to take whatever actions are necessary to bring that about, even if some of those actions might temporarily be antithetical to some segments of the U.S. economy.

8. President Trump and the GOP Congress have implemented massive deregulation of industry.

9. Counterproductive CAFE auto fleet mileage standards that are extremely harmful to our auto industry are on the verge of being rolled back by President Trump’s EPA.

10. President Trump’s EPA has eliminated scientifically-baseless carbon regulations that have pointlessly stifled U.S. energy production and thereby raised the cost of living for everyone in the U.S.

11. President Trump has probably made AND kept more campaign promises than any other President in U.S. history. President Trump has kept his campaign promises on dozens of issues, including killing the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement nonsense, withdrawing from the odious and unconscionable Iranian “deal”, and halting payment of U.S. foreign aid to U.S. enemies like Palestinian terrorists. Implementing such a massive number of campaign promises, and without backtracking or equivocating, is essentially unprecedented in U.S. history. It’s extremely rare for any politician to keep their campaign promises (especially Republicans), and keeping campaign promises inspires confidence in the integrity of those who keep their promises, as well as eliminating one of the main impetuses for the majority party to lose Congressional majorities in midterm elections.

12. President Trump has put warriors back in charge of war and made warfare the principle aim of the military instead of promoting various social justice ideologies, thus reinvigorating the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower and diminishing the probabilities of war via a much stronger hand to achieve peace through strength.

13. President Trump instructed his military to QUICKLY destroy ISIS, but has otherwise kept us out of foreign wars, as well as eschewing fruitless and ridiculously expensive “nation building” exercises in corrupt, dictatorial third world countries that can barely keep the power on and the water running, much less give a tinker’s damn about democratic elections.

14. President Trump has forced NATO nations to pay billions more of their agreed-upon share of expenses, with more billions to come.

15. President Trump has been playing hardball at every juncture at the U.N., including a projected 24% reduction in U.S. payments to the U.N.

16. President Trump is a strong supporter of Israel, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

17. President Trump has strong relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

18. President Trump’s North Korean denuclearization efforts are headed in the right direction so far, e.g., North Korean rocket engine testing infrastructure is currently being dismantled, and Korean War KIA remains are being repatriated.

19. President Trump halted unvetted immigration from terrorists countries and implemented extreme vetting for all legal immigration, greatly reducing the influx of America-hating Muslims, as well as greatly reducing the pool of radicalized terrorists.

20. President Trump has cracked down on illegal immigration in general, stemming the flood from our southern border.

21. President Trump’s policies have resulted in deporting MS-13 and other drug-dealing gang-members and many other criminal illegal aliens as well.

22. President Trump and the GOP Senate have already appointed one strict Constitutionalist to the U.S. Supreme Court, with a second strict Constitutionalist soon to follow.

23. President Trump and the GOP Senate have appointed 44 Federal judges to date.

24. Polls repeatedly show that the GOP is more trusted on economic and national security issues than the Democrats.

25. Polls consistently show that voters don’t care very much about issues that the leftist fake stream enemedia and the Democrat Party are pushing. The great majority of voters pretty much care only about a robust economy and out-of-control illegal immigration according to a recent Gallup poll.

26. President Trump’s approval numbers are higher at this point than Obama’s were at this same time in his first term, despite the leftist fake stream enemedia’s universal adulation of Obama then and their universal hatred of Trump now.

27. President Trump has implacably fought back against the leftist fake stream enemedia, driving them to such extremes of rage that they have now essentially destroyed themselves for all time by losing credibility with we regular folks and losing their ability to convince people of the truthfulness of their fabricated “news”. The term “fake news” has now forever entered the lexicon of American politics. (Thank you, President Trump!)

28. President Trump has nearly destroyed the 1984ish Newspeak “politically correct” restrictions on free speech that the leftists have been perpetuating for decades as a means to limit people’s ability to speak the plain truth. (Thank you AGAIN, President Trump!)

29. President Trump has exposed the Bushite/GOPe/RINO/Globalist/anti-Trumper pretend-”conservatives” as being toadies of the globalist oligarchs and plutocrats and NOT the champions of the people that they’ve always pretended they were, thus destroying the non-Democrat half of the REAL party of the wildly wealthy, namely the GOPe/Democrat “Uniparty”.

30. President Trump’s election and the Clinton’s resultant loss of their singular iron grip on the Democrat Party has effectively broken the Democrat Party for the time being. The Democrat Party essentially has no platform other than “Trump is evil and must be destroyed at all costs”. Even worse, the Democrat Party has now lost all party discipline, splintering into internecine warfare and enabling its lunatic and radical socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-law-and-order, anti-border, anti-nationalist, and anti-American wings free rein to dominate the national media and national conversation, thus exposing the Democrat Party to the nation-at-large as a radical, anti-American party that’s totally antithetical to traditional American values still cherished by the great majority of our citizens.

31. Recent polls have shown that younger voting generations are now equally split in support of Republicans and Democrats, which is completely unprecedented from their past overwhelming support of Democrats; recent polls have also shown that younger voters are also unlikely to vote in great numbers in midterm elections. Youngsters have traditionally been supporters of Democrats, so both these sets of polls are bad news for the Democrats.

32. The Democrat Party is having extreme difficulty with fundraising at the national level, while the national GOP has record fundraising.

33. Since 2016, Congressional Democrats have continuously demonstrated that they are completely unwilling to assist in governing our nation and have demonstrated their contempt for the well-being of our people, instead adopting strident, scorched earth policies of obfuscation, propaganda, lies, and “resistance”, no matter how badly such behavior may hurt our citizens and our nation. A good case in point was when the “Right to Try” bill, designed to give dying patients one last chance via the use of experimental drugs, was opposed by 147 House Democrats.

34. The leftist fake stream media, Hollywood “celebrities”, and Democrat leaders like Maxine Waters have deliberately encouraged an environment of extreme public hostility, have abandoned all norms of civil behavior, have publicly hounded and attacked all who disagree with them, and have attempted to stifle freedom of speech at every turn, even provoking weak-minded individuals into extreme violence, such as the attempted assassinations of Congressional Republicans at the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in 2017. These acts simply do not inspire the average voter to want to put these kinds of people back into power.

35. The Democrat Party is wildly out of sync with the attitudes of the vast majority of we regular folks, overtly promoting open borders and encouraging floods of illegal immigrants who do not speak, understand, or write English and who depress wages and soak up tens of billions of dollars of free medical care and welfare paid by we taxpayers. Democrats also oppose the right of we regular folks to own firearms for self-protection, oppose Voter ID, proclaim the desire to repeal the wildly popular and wildly effective GOP tax reform, advocate impeaching President Trump solely because they refuse to accept that Trump won the election, and propose abolishing ICE, which is the agency that protects our borders and also vets imported goods to prevent the import of weapons of mass destruction and counterfeit and/or dangerous goods. Perhaps worst of all, Democrats support the insane promotion of so-called “sanctuary cities”, in which violent, drug-dealing illegal alien gang-members and all other violent predatory illegal alien felons are protected from deportation so that they can continue to prey on we regular folks.

36. Private-sector rank-and-file union members are no longer knee-jerk supporters of the Democrats, finally realizing that Democrat (and Bushite) economic policies have been designed to flood the U.S. market with cheap illegal alien labor while at the same time driving manufacturing offshore to 3rd world countries with cheap labor supplies of their own, whereas President Trump and the Congressional GOP have been implementing policies to reverse these destructive trends. Additionally, a recent Supreme Count decision has eliminated public sector unions from extorting money from non-union public sector workers via the forced garnishment of union dues from government paychecks, with the result that these unions will be deprived of tens of millions of ill-gained dollars that they’ve been funneling to Democrat candidates, as well as facing the loss of hundreds of thousands of members who joined only because they had to pay anyway whether or not they were members.

37. A recent poll shows 76% of U.S. voters will not vote for a socialist candidate, an unpleasant result for Democrats who are busily making socialism the newest de facto plank in the Democrat platform.

38. President Trump’s successes and Democrat’s excesses have triggered the “walkaway” movement with Democrats of every generation, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status leaving the Democrat party in highly public ways.

39. President Trump’s supporters are more enthusiastic about Trump than ever before, including prior to the 2016 election. Many voted for Trump reluctantly, some simply in reaction to the awful choice of Hillary Clinton as the alternative, but had low expectations that Trump would keep his promises and/or govern effectively. President Trump has kept his promises and proved that he can govern very effectively, and thus has moved many doubtful supporters into the enthusiastic-supporter column. Republican voter approval of President Trump is also at astonishingly high level, higher even than during the election.

40. Election polls are likely to continue to under-count President Trump voters like they did in 2016. Aside from the rigged nature of many of these polls in which tricks are used like oversampling Democrats, an even bigger problem is that many of President Trump’s supporters jealously guard their privacy and refuse to participate in polls, assuming that they can even be contacted by telephone in the first place. An additional factor to the reluctance of President Trump’s supporters to participate in such polls is the extreme hostility the fascist left and their leftist fake stream enemedia allies have engendered, making President Trump’s supporters even more reluctant to discuss their preferences with strangers than during the 2016 election.

41. President Trump has committed himself heart and soul into assuring that Congressional Republicans continue to hold majorities in both Houses come 2019 (including a likely increase of their Senate majority) by traveling and holding campaign rallies several times a week until the November 6th election. Trump’s rallies were a major part of Trump’s success in being elected President in 2016, and the enthusiasm for attendance at his rallies has only increased since then. President Trump’s 2018 rallies, though staged locally, are being broadcast live to the entire nation by Fox News Channel, thereby providing both state-wide and national exposure to Republican candidates who would never otherwise be able to obtain that amount of positive media exposure. President Trump is probably making the best use of the Presidential bully pulpit in U.S. history.

Thus, it looks to me like nearly all the political winds are pointing to a crushing defeat of the Democrats in 2018.

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