Leading up to the general election on November 3, we were treated to endless predictions from leading Democrats that a blue wave was about to carry the Democrats to a massive victory in the election.  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Tom Perez all promised big Democratic gains up and down the ballot.  Speaker Pelosi said house Democrats would enjoy “double-digit” seat gains.  These predictions were supported by polls showing Democrats about to achieve big wins.  But loyal Bad Dogs and Bakeries subscribers knew from as far back as December 2019 that turnout would be all that mattered in these elections, and that the polls would be wrong and should be ignored.

The polls and predictions were all wrong.  It was the Republicans who won big on November 3 — particularly those establishment Republicans who wanted to get rid of Donald Trump.

—  In the days immediately before the election, the Republicans achieved their most consequential win when Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as the newest — and most conservative — member of the U.S. Supreme Court.  The addition of Justice Barrett gives the Republicans a 6 to 3 majority on the court — a majority that will last for years and echo for decades.

—  At the outset of the campaign, there were 27 candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.  It was the most Republican of the 27 — Joe Biden — who won the nomination, and then the presidency.  All during the primary campaign, there was a constant drumbeat from Republicans in the press, on line, on the radio, and on television telling Democrats that they had to nominate Joe Biden as their presidential candidate if they wanted to have any chance of winning the general election on November 3.  Joe Biden was the Republicans’ candidate.  You heard this from Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark and on MSNBC, from David Frum in The Atlantic, from Rich Lowry in National Review and on NBC, from Bret Stephens and David Brooks repeatedly in their columns in The New York Times, and from numerous other Republicans.  They knew that Trump would be the Republican candidate and feared that he would lose to whomever the Democrats nominated.  They were right in their fear.  So they worked hard for months to ensure that the Democrats nominated their most Republican-friendly candidate.  That was, by far, Joe Biden.  So while Donald Trump lost the White House, the Republicans got the next best thing in Joe Biden, while the Democrats got their worst possible candidate in the White House.

—  Regular readers of these pages know that I have written that the Republicans enjoy, and will continue to enjoy, a permanent majority in the U.S. Senate.  But the Democrats did have one last chance to take temporary control of the senate with wins in the November general election.  And before the election, they were brimming with confidence, and making predictions that they would seize the senate majority by ousting Republican senators like Joni Ernst in Iowa, Susan Collins in Maine, and Tom Tillis in North Carolina.  But on election night, they lost one seat and gained only two.  Their blue wave in the senate never materialized.  Two months later, in a special election in Georgia, the Democrats managed to flip two Republican senate seats by the narrowest of margins thanks to Donald Trump’s sabotage of the Republican campaigns in Georgia.  These wins, by tiny margins, nominally gave the Democrats control of 50 senate seats and therefore the body.  But the reality is that the senate now has 50 Republicans, 47 Democrats, 2 independents, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a very red state.  While Manchin caucuses with the Democrats, he votes on the most important issues with the Republicans.  The only way that Joe Biden and the Democrats will be able to  move their agenda through a senate with 50 Republicans will be to abolish the filibuster.  Joe Manchin has stated repeatedly that he will never vote to end the filibuster.  Nor will he vote to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, or add justices to the supreme court, or any other crucial reform need to make the federal government functional.  So the Democrats did not win control of the senate in November.  Mitch McConnell in his role as minority leader, and not majority leader, will nonetheless continue to dictate what legislation makes it through the senate and becomes law.  And in 2022, Republicans will regain a clear majority in the senate.  A majority they will hold forever.

—  In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Democrats badly needed to expand their majority so as to create enough of a buffer to withstand the loss of seats they are certain to suffer in the 2022 midterm election.  And prior to the election, house leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, were predicting “double-digit” gains for the Democrats.  Instead, they suffered significant losses to the Republicans that left them with a bare majority.  The Cook Political Report is the most respected prognosticator of house elections.  Here’s how they fared on election night:

Seats rated “lean Democratic”:               Republicans won a third of them

Seats rated “toss up”:                                Republicans won them all

Seats rated “lean Republican”:                Republicans won them all

Democrats did not win a single competitive or “toss up” house seat.

Republicans will easily regain control of the house in 2022.

—  The Republicans successfully defended their turf at the state level as the Democrats failed to flip a single Republican state legislature.  Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on down-ballot elections, the Democrats suffered a blood bath in state legislative races all over the country.  The Democrats had targeted a dozen state legislatures where Republicans held a majority, including those in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, and Texas.  They failed in every state — even those won by Joe Biden.  In Texas, they only needed to flip nine seats.  They flipped none.  And the New Hampshire legislature flipped from Democratic to Republican.  The Democrats had hoped to check the rightward drift of state legislatures on issues such as abortion, gun safety, and voting rights, yet failed in state after state.  But the crucial point is that following the 2020 census, state legislatures will redraw congressional and state legislative district lines for the next ten years.  In 2010, Republicans fine tuned the art of gerrymandering, and will be just as effective this time allowing them to continue to control state houses and U.S. house delegations.  States like North Carolina, with more Democrats than Republicans, will still have state legislatures and congressional delegations controlled by Republicans.

In an environment that should have created numerous opportunities for the Democrats to make gains across the board, they suffered defeats at all levels, and have to be wondering what future they have in electoral politics.

Democratic Party donors contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the party’s campaigns, and got little for their money.  They should be asking the party for their money back.