Foragers for good news gathered a heaped basketful with the 5 November election results. Democrats swept both houses of the Virginia legislature and apparently, if narrowly, defeated the Trumpian Republican governor of Kentucky. In a suburban Philadelphia county that had gone Republican since time immemorial, Democrats swept local elections. In governors’ seats, Democrats now trail Republicans only 24 to 26, compared with sixteen to 34 when Trump took office. Republican House incumbents who have declared they’re not running for re-election next year now number twenty, as against eight Democrats.
Between the 2018 midterm elections and the sprinkling of 2019 results, prospects for driving the monster out of the White House without a second term – via the 2020 election or, less likely, Senate conviction after a House impeachment – would seem bright. In the fullness of backlash, Trump’s hatefulness rouses Democrats both left and centre. Americans of all stripes favour impeachment for Trump’s abuses of power – not only 83% of Democrats but 44% of independents – even before televised hearings begin. Yes, it was true that the Republicans won all the other statewide Kentucky offices; the incumbent governor, embraced by Trump, was distinctly despised. Still, last week’s election returns brightened the mood of Democrats.
The collective fever chart is of course jagged: the data teem with blips and uncertainties, endlessly disputed. The Virginia-Kentucky-Pennsylvania news interrupted a collective writhing in response to findings from early statewide polls in battleground states, as analysed with much fanfare by The New York Times’s Nate Cohn in three articles. In one, Cohn showed that some 15% of the electorate remain “persuadable”. Breath will have to be held for months, for such demographically disparate swing voters tend to wait till the last two weeks before making up their minds. Cohn also reported that people who have not previously voted, especially in swing states, don’t think very differently from those who do vote. Moreover, the swing state polls showed that:
