They just lost 40 seats in the House though.
Yes, and it took a literally once in a lifetime awful and controversial President For that to happen.
2006
If you’re going to tell me that Republican-lite policy ideas are the way to consistently win in the house, you can surely explain why the Democrats haven’t been able to win the house one time in the last 25 years that wasn’t on the back of an epic Republican screwup.
- 2006, extremely unpopular war being screwed up by a bad President
- 2008, Republican administration crashed economy
- 2018, somehow an even worse President than the one from 2006, who by the way, managed to beat the centrist candidate that chose to roast part of her base after she was nominated.
And that’s it. You have to go back to like 1994 before the Democrats had won the house prior to 2006.
Democrats are just really, really bad at elections while Republicans run on just pure red meat and get the turnout. “We only want to cut your social security a little bit”, unsurprisingly, is crappy messaging.
As is “Trump is an existential threat to the country, but not all that existential actually”.
Also doesn’t help that Obama gutted the DNC and left them with nothing but a couple of mailing lists during his midterms and through 2016 and beyond.