If you're looking for a message from the midterm elections, good luck. If you're looking for a mandate, you won't find one.
An estimated $12 billion was spent to produce the most traditional midterm result there is – the party in power loses. The scope and scale of the loss matter less than anyone wants to admit, as Democrats rush to cash in on their victories and Republicans scramble to raise money to rebuild, both with an eye on 2028. Yes, the next campaign is already underway. Don't blame them; blame time. It just marches on, relentlessly.
As a conservative, I would have preferred to hold the House and Senate. But honestly, Republicans probably would have wasted them anyway. Over the past two years, they did little with their majorities; the current
Congress is among the least productive in four decades. There was no reason to think the next two would have been any different.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was about it. Banking on it to win votes was always stupid. Elections are about what you're going to do, not a reward for what you've done, and campaigning on what you've done is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror.
In the past year, what have Republicans done with their majority? That's an honest question, because I have no idea. The Senate did pass a college sports bill, the Protect College Sports Act, which literally no one outside college sports cares about. Did you see a single ad touting this legislative "victory"?
Of course you didn't, because who cares?
Democrats are unpopular. So are Republicans
That's the spirit in which this campaign was fought. Democrats won because they weren't Republicans; Republicans campaigned on not being Democrats. Democrats are unpopular, but so are Republicans, and with the GOP running the government, it owns the blame for whatever voters are unhappy about. It doesn't matter whether that's justified or "fair." Life isn't fair. It just is.
Add to that an unpopular president who spent the campaign’s final days talking up a golf course most people will never play and a reflecting pool that won’t lower anyone’s grocery bill, and you begin to see why so many Republican voters, asked to “pretend” his name was on the ballot, simply threw up their hands and stayed home.
Everyone else did vote as if the president were on the ballot, and they punished him for a half-heartedly fought war and for tariffs that made things more expensive. If there had been an end in sight to either, the results might have been different. But you can’t fix a problem while you’re busy calling it a hoax.
I know plenty of people on the right who are upset by the results. “Texas is now blue,” read one text I got election night. Well, Democrats were winning statewide in Texas as recently as 1994. Look it up. California voted Republican for president in every election from 1968 through 1988.
States change. Stop picking bad candidates with sketchy personal and professional histories over popular incumbents, and you’ll probably get better results.
There are no time machines, so these lessons will have to be applied next time. Will they be? I don't know. Neither party seems capable of learning anything. Each one wins only because, in whatever year it happens to be out of power, it isn't the other party.
The case for getting nothing done in divided government
Personally, I like divided government because so little gets done. That makes it hard to screw things up worse than they already are. And God bless the veto.
As for the next two years: I expect Democrats to overplay their hand, spend most of their time hunting scalps in the Trump administration and come up empty. All the talk about affordability will be exposed for what it was, a means to an end and nothing more.
The president will govern by executive order. That's not ideal, because whatever one president does by executive order, the next can undo with the stroke of a pen. But it beats handing Democrats something horrible in the name of a grand bargain.
Otherwise, your life won't change. The best thing a government can do is go unnoticed, because that means it isn't screwing up your life. Aside from the noise – and there will be plenty of it – I suspect we can all look forward to a government that can't screw anything up.
Not for lack of trying, but because Democrats won't be able to work with President Donald Trump. How do you work with someone you've spent more than a decade calling history's greatest monster?
The best government is that which governs least, as cited by Henry David Thoreau. A Democratic majority will make a mess of things with its political witch hunts, but I don't think it'll be able to do much actual governing. And that's for the best.
Derek Hunter is the host of "The Derek Hunter Show" weekdays from 3-6 p.m. on WMAL in Washington, DC, host of "The Derek Hunter Podcast" and author of the book "Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Congratulations, Democrats. Now enjoy the gridlock | Opinion
