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I have accurately predicted the Trump POTUS victory right from the start of the recent POTUS campaign. I have been predicting lately that the Democrat Party will suffer the loss of between 8-10 Senate seats & 12-20 House seats in the upcoming "Mid-Term" elections in 2018. I now feel the Democrat Party (with Media help) losses will increase, as I feel the Democrats have lost the entire group of "Southern" states, totally, and possibly the entire country, or close to it. In the state of Virginia, the Democrats will massively lose both the Governorship and the Senate seat held by...

Forget the Better Deal. What the Democrats need is a better candidate. Besides, the new slogan of the ailing Democrat Party -- A Better Deal -- is about as old and tired as FDR's New Deal or Harry Truman's Fair Deal. Even A New Spiel would have been better. However, it is what you get when you hire political consultants to do your thinking for you

The political map doesn't look very good for Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to a new analysis published by FiveThirtyEight. The analysis, written by Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, says that if Democrats were to win every single House and Senate race next year in places that Hillary Clinton won or that President Trump by less than 3 percentage points last November, they could still lose the House and lose five Senate seats.

... There are lots of reasons the partisan division has become so lopsided in favor of the GOP. The Democrats and their friends in the government departments of elite universities and on the editorial desk at the New York Times will say it's because the legislative district maps are drawn unfairly, because the votes of non-whites are suppressed in the South and in rural areas, and just about any other excuse they can think of to suggest the Republicans are cheating. In truth, the voters just aren't buying any more what the Democrats have to sell. The Democrats, from FDR...

When Democrats think about their party’s problems on the political map, they tend to think of President Trump’s ability to win the White House despite losing the popular vote and Republicans’ potent efforts to gerrymander congressional districts. But their problems extend beyond the Electoral College and the House: The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913. Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty...

Democrats have “no reason” to try to make bipartisan legislative deals with President Trump and should instead wait until next year when outspoken Democrat Maxine Waters leads the House and Chuck Schumer leads the Senate, Democratic activist Robert Patillo said Saturday. “Democrats looking at a president hovering around a 30 percent approval rating have no reason to run into a burning building and try to put it out, when they should instead just wait for 2018 when they have Speaker of the House Maxine Waters and Senate leader Chuck Schumer,” Patillo, an attorney, civil rights activist and Atlanta radio host,...

DEMS FEAR RUSSIA PROBE BLOWBACK

Forget about Nancy Pelosi. The true leader of House Democrats is . . . Maxine Waters. On today’s Morning Joe, Commentary editor John Podhoretz flatly predicted that if in 2018 the Democrats win a 10-seat majority in the House, they “will impeach” President Trump. Moreover, Podhoretz said that “the table is being set pretty nicely” for Dems to retake the House majority. View the video here.

**SNIP** Democratic leaders shared few details to preserve suspense around the plan, which is scheduled to be unveiled Monday at an event in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where the party hopes to defeat incumbent Rep. Barbara Comstock (R). But some lawmakers, aides and outside advocates consulted on the new agenda said that it is expected to focus on new proposals to fund job-training programs, renegotiate trade deals and address soaring prescription-drug costs, as well as other issues. It is also expected to endorse long-held Democratic principles, including “a living wage” of $15 per hour and already unveiled spending plans for...

By now, Donald Trump was supposed to be selling herbal Viagra and 1,000-count packages of Trump Ice to reactionary survivalists over Facebook Live; Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to be resigning from the leadership of the (moribund) Labour Party to spend more time with his sewer grates; and Bernie Sanders was supposed to be ruing the fact that, in America, “democratic socialist” is a synonym for “politically irrelevant.” Alas, the pundits supposed wrong. The Republican Party nominated a xenophobic insult-comic — who had campaigned in support of political violence, religious discrimination, and mass-murdering Muslim prisoners of war with bullets dripped in...

There is a grave danger for Republicans in all of this. If there’s one thing the 2016 presidential election should have taught the GOP establishment, it’s that Americans are disgusted with politics as usual – the showboating, the sloganeering, the canned talking points and the pervasive, poisonous insincerity of it all. That’s why Republican primary voters rejected, one by one, a field of presidential candidates full of experienced politicians. GOP voters were told their 2016 candidates were diverse and accomplished – and indeed they were. But they all had one thing in common: they were politicians, and Americans were fed...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said it is “unimportant” for Democrats to win the midterm elections in 2018. During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked Pelosi to estimate the chances that Democrats win back the lower chamber back in 2018 and whether she would run again for speaker if they did. “That’s so unimportant. What is important is that we have the lively debate on a better deal,” Pelosi said.

GOP Senate candidates across the country are battling to emerge as the pro-Trump candidate in contested primaries. President Trump’s approval rating might be stagnant nationally, but he still enjoys strong support with many of the GOP primary voters who will decide crucial Senate primaries ahead of the 2018 midterm election. So GOP candidates in states that Trump carried in November are beginning to hammer their opponents as unfaithful supporters of the president to gain an edge in their primaries.

A new report by a prominent Democratic think tank argues that the party needs to look beyond the suburbs to win back power. The centrist Democratic think tank Third Way reliably supports socially liberal, fiscally sensible policies that are catnip to the cosmopolitan wing of the party—and as a result, the group often aggravates the party’s base of populist progressives. But a new study of last year’s election results, provided exclusively to National Journal, underscores the idea that Democrats need to win back working-class Donald Trump voters before they chase moderate Republicans who defected to Hillary Clinton. The analysis comes...

RUSH: Lower Lake, California. This is Brian. Glad you called, sir. How are you? CALLER: Hello. Good morning, Rush. I wanted to ask you a question. As of now, the Republican Congress has failed to pass Trump’s legislation in the repeal and redo of Obamacare, and later in the year they’re gonna try taxes, which will probably also fail. How do you see the possibility of them losing the House and then Trump being impeached based on anything that Mueller may find, regardless how small it is? RUSH: I am going to surprise you. I’m glad you asked me this...

Last week, the Democrats released a new bumper sticker for their 2018 Congressional campaign: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?” It’s not a bad political notion so far as it goes — opposition in politics is an effective tool, as Democrats learned from Republicans, who campaigned against Obamacare and Democratic spending policies to the tune of 1,000 state legislature seats, 12 governorships (including in states such as Michigan and Massachusetts), 10 Senate seats and 63 House seats. Now Democrats hope to reverse the math. But there’s something else going on here, too. Democrats hope that campaigning as #TheResistance...

**SNIP** Reviews of Thursday’s op-ed weren’t much better, with Slate calling it “asinine,” for example. A noted a HuffPost headline read, “It’s 2017. Democrats Should Really Just Stop Taking Mark Penn’s Advice.” Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Obama aide, told me, “There can and should be a robust debate in the party about where we go in the post-Obama era. I don’t pretend to know the right path forward, but I know it isn’t a poll-driven, corporatist path.” Twitter users weren’t much kinder:

Almost no one in the United States commits voter fraud. This is backed up by numerous studies, and also makes logical sense: Defrauding the voting system entails a lot of risk and no reward, so there's little incentive to risk a felony conviction to cast an extra vote that is virtually certain not to change the outcome of an election. This is especially true for undocumented immigrants who would risk deportation to vote. And, in general, Americans are hardly so committed to voting that they're breaking the law to cast extra ballots – the turnout rate among the voting-age population...

President Trump tweeted he hopes that Democrats keep House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in charge to help Republicans. "I certainly hope the Democrats do not force Nancy P out. That would be very bad for the Republican Party - and please let Cryin' Chuck stay!" he tweeted. Trump bragged about Republicans' record in special elections to replace lawmakers he appointed to his Cabinet, all of which have been GOP victories. The most recent race, in which Karen Handel beat Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, was the most expensive House race in history. Many...

If Donald Trump were impeached, as some Democrats would like, Mike Pence “would be worse” for domestic policy than the current president, U.S. Sen. Al Franken told International Business Times. But the vice president would be less dangerous on foreign policy, said Franken. Franken made the comments in an interview with IBT during a stop on his book tour in Denver. During the wide-ranging discussion, the Minnesota Democrat said his party could use the so-called “nuclear” option to try to block the Trump administration’s health care bill. On a contentious environmental issue, Franken parted ways with many progessive Democrats in...