How Many 2018 House Seats Will Accrue To The Democrats Based On Trump's Toxicity?

Virginia election officials were still tabulating votes, though it was obvious Trump's candidate, Ed Gillespie was losing badly, when Trump reacted with the tweet above, hoping people wouldn'tt see his unblemished record as a kiss-of-death endorser in GOP primaries and in general elections. By Wednesday morning, political and communications operatives back in the White House were working overtime to deflect blame away from Señor Trumpanzee for the massive losses Tuesdayin every part of the country. And it wasn't just Democratic gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. The outsized losses Republicans suffered in the Virginia House of Delegates came as a complete shock and a bodyblow to the GOP. Democrats won control of the state Senate in Washington, won 3 deep red legislative seats Georgia, defeated a small city Ohio mayor who switched parties from Democrat to Republican so he could support Trump and defeated a close friend of Trump's in Westchester who had been financed to the tune of a million dollars by Bannon and Mercer... and so on.

The White House is panic-stricken that a narrative is taking hold that Tuesday was the beginning for an anti-Trump wave... which it clearly was. They're trying to blame everyone but Trump, even poor pathetic Chris Christie, for the losses. What you've been hearing coming from every White House propagandist since Wednesday morning is "This is not about Señor Trumpanzee." But they're the only ones saying it.

Vulnerable Republican Scott Taylor from Virginia Beach, where the Democrats did very well Tuesday, said exactly what the White House wants to squelch: "There has to be some self-reflection at the top and how that’s spilling over in the down ballot. I know they would tout the four congressional special elections we won, that’s a little bit different. That’s a localized thing. We under-performed in places that we should have crushed as Republicans. ... When you look at tonight in Virginia and the results that continue to come in ... [our] leaders need to have some self-reflection." He called it a "referendum" on the Trumpist Regime.

Bannon's and Mercer's Breitbart News was anti-Gillespie world headquarters on Wednesday, with article after article berating him.

Conservatives tore into failed Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie in the wake of his defeat Tuesday night-- blasting the Bush ally for playing “footsie” with economic nationalism and for rejecting Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon’s help.

“Ed Gillespie had no coherent message, was inauthentic, spoke from both sides of his mouth and at the end of the day, even the deplorables couldn’t save him,” Andy Surabian, a former Trump White House staffer and political adviser to Bannon, told ABC News.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham accused Gillespie of “playing footsie with conservative populism.”

...According to the Daily Beast, Bannon had extended “multiple offers” to Gillespie to campaign and hold rallies together, but Gillespie refused. Gillespie also declined to do interviews with Breitbart News or appear on the Breitbart News Daily radio show.

According to ABC News, Bannon made it known that he was concerned about Gillespie’s “lack of energy” and his close ties to Bush.

Gillespie’s woes are reminiscent of Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) who, in the Alabama Senate race, attempted to embrace Trump’s agenda while keeping his feet firmly in the ground of the establishment. Strange was soundly defeated by outsider Judge Roy Moore.

President Trump also recognized the conservative criticism of Gillespie, tweeting that while Gillespie worked hard, he “did not embrace me or what I stand for.”

“Tonight proves you can’t put lipstick on an establishment pig,” Surabian told The Hill.

And Bannon himself went on a fascist radio show with wing nuts Alex Marlow and Raheem Kassam to bash Gillespie.

Bannon said the lesson from Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s defeat on Tuesday night is that “if you’re going to win, you’ve got to embrace the entire Trump agenda, and you’ve got to do it early, and you’ve got to be dedicated to it.”

“You can’t phone it in,” he said. “You’ve got to do rallies. You’ve got to get the president out with you. You’ve got to go all-in on this. I just think campaigning with people like President Bush and Marco Rubio during these type of economic times sends the wrong signal. I think Gillespie’s campaign had ample opportunity to get Corey Stewart, get other people involved.”

“Things were done on the margin,” he said. “People worked very hard, I know the Lt. Governor, I thought Jill Vogel did a great job, but it didn’t get pulled off. I think the lessons are if people want to continue to drive this agenda, and continue to win, we’ve got to get very focused on executing the Trump agenda and then making sure we can sell it.”

“We did lose Virginia by five points during the campaign,” he recalled. “I actually thought Virginia was going to be too tough a reach. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time there, even though that’s my native state. But I was actually surprised by the five-point loss. I thought we would lose Virginia by two or three.”

“We lost it by more because of the heavy, heavy turnout in the northern Virginia suburbs, which really are a part of Washington, DC,” he explained. “When you look at Virginia today, really northern Virginia is a suburb of Washington. It has virtually all federal employees, or consultants, or media types, or companies tied to the federal government.”

Bannon said Virginia is “not a purple state, it’s a blue state.”

“Seven of the nine richest counties in the United States ring Washington, DC,” he pointed out. “I think three of those counties, or four of those counties, are in northern Virginia, three of them are in Maryland. It’s become just like the District of Columbia. It’s heavily blue. It’s made up of basically federal bureaucrats and companies, consultants, lobbyists, etc. tied to the federal budget. It’s been increasingly tough for Republicans to really get a foothold there. What you really hope to do is not to have a big turnout.”

“This is a wake-up call. People have to understand that the Democrats did a very good job of getting the vote out. You’ve got to give the devil their due, and when we think about ‘18, you’ve got to get very focused,” he advised.

...Bannon postulated that candidate authenticity is especially important in the digital age when every statement is monitored and remembered.

“You need authenticity of candidate. You need big, actionable ideas. And you need a really empowered, turned-out, aggressive grassroots movement, coupled with state-of-the-art digital technology so you can target,” he said.

Bannon said Gillespie is a “nice enough guy,” but “he is a Bush guy.”

“He decided to have President Bush come and campaign with him in Virginia,” he noted. “There’s just not enough of those Establishment types left to make a significant difference. You’ve got to bring out the Trump voters, and you’ve got to bring them out in a way that they’re enthusiastic in getting other Trump voters out. I think it’s incumbent upon people. You know, we won in a coalition. That’s one of the big lessons of Eight, is that we won in a coalition. That coalition has to stick together. But the key thing is we won in a coalition but we were selling the Trump program. I think that’s a lesson that hopefully candidates throughout the country learn.”

Bannon made some good points. Authenticity is important, although the kind of authenticity that Randy Bryce represents is positive and inspiring. Americans aren't ready for authentic Nazis.

Vox looked at voters in the most rural, conservative Virginia counties and found they were not sticking with Bannon-Trumpanzee neo-fascist politics. They claim that "Democrats saw their biggest gains in the most rural counties. Northam outperformed Clinton by an average of 14 points in places that were less than 50 percent urban. In the more suburban and urban locations, however, that falls off, with Northam actually underperforming Clinton slightly in the most urban areas... Democrats did a better job turning out their voters than Republicans did, and particularly so in the more rural localities. There was little difference between the candidates in the most urban cities and counties. Interestingly, it is in the whitest counties where Democrats did the best job holding on to their voters while Republicans did the worst."

The NY Times' Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin had a more conventional interpretation of the polling data. "The American suburbs," they wrote, "appear to be in revolt against President Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities on Tuesday dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office."

From the tax-obsessed suburbs of New York City to high-tech neighborhoods outside Seattle to the sprawling, polyglot developments of Fairfax and Prince William County, Va., voters shunned Republicans up and down the ballot in off-year elections. Leaders in both parties said the elections were an unmistakable alarm bell for Republicans ahead of the 2018 campaign, when the party’s grip on the House of Representatives may hinge on the socially moderate, multiethnic communities surrounding major cities.

“Voters are taking their anger out at the president, and the only way they can do that is by going after Republicans on the ballot,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania. “If this isn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what is.”

The Democrats’ gains signaled deep alienation from the Republican Party among the sort of upscale moderates who were once a pillar of their coalition.

Democrats not only swept Virginia’s statewide races but neared a majority in the House of Delegates, a legislative chamber that was gerrymandered to make the Republican majority virtually unassailable. They seized county executive offices in Westchester and Nassau County, N.Y., and carried bellwether mayoral elections in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Manchester, N.H., all races that appeared to favor Republicans only months ago.

...“Republicans are being obliterated in the suburbs,” said Chris Vance, a former chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, who placed the blame squarely on Mr. Trump: “Among college-educated suburbanites, he is a pariah.”

...[F]or Republicans, the bad news was not likely to end with Tuesday’s results. Congressional Republicans on Wednesday were bracing for a new wave of retirements just one day after another pair of House members, veteran Representative Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey and Representative Ted Poe of Texas, declared they would not seek re-election. Mr. Dent, channeling the exasperation of his colleagues, suggested an exodus might be imminent.

“Do they really want to go through another year of this?” said Mr. Dent, a leader of his caucus’s moderate wing, who has already announced he will not run again.

In the White House, electoral defeat gave way to a shifting series of explanations: Mr. Trump’s first reaction was to savage Ed Gillespie, the defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, on Twitter. By Wednesday morning, two presidential advisers acknowledged antipathy toward Mr. Trump would likely drive Democratic turnout next year.

...[S]ome of the most competitive House races of the 2018 midterms will take place in the two states. In New Jersey, Republicans will struggle to retain Mr. LoBiondo’s seat and must protect such imperiled incumbents as Leonard Lance, Tom MacArthur and Rodney Frelinghuysen. In Virginia, the district of Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican, went 56 percent to 43 percent for Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, the Democrats’ triumphant gubernatorial candidate. Mr. Northam also captured 51 percent of the votes in the district of Representative Scott Taylor, a freshman Republican from Virginia Beach.

...To many Democrats and some Republicans, Tuesday’s results recalled the last time a radioactive Republican was in the White House and voters vented their frustrations on a Republican-held Congress. In 2005, Democrats rolled to victory in Virginia and New Jersey, presaging an electoral wave in 2006, and inspiring throngs of Democrats to run for office in difficult districts.

Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he had spent Tuesday evening calling potential House candidates and urging them to watch the returns, telling them: “I just want to encourage you to turn on the television, if it’s not already on.”

“Democrats down there were very aggressive about expanding their map and recruiting strong candidates, even where they were told they couldn’t win,” Mr. Luján said of Virginia. “We’re going to make our Republican colleagues fight for every inch.”

In the Senate, too, Democrats are seeking to expand the map. Facing a narrow path to a majority, they are strenuously wooing Phil Bredesen, a former Tennessee governor, to run for the seat that Senator Bob Corker is vacating. Mr. Bredesen has been courted personally by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, as well as several former governors who now serve in the Senate, including Mark Warner of Virginia, according to Democrats briefed on the overtures. And the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee commissioned a poll aimed at coaxing Mr. Bredesen to run.

Mr. Bredesen is in Washington this week for meetings and is said to be nearing a decision.

Democrats won on Tuesday with a historically diverse slate of candidates: Having long struggled to bring diversity to the leadership tier of their party, they elected the first transgender legislator in the country, the first Vietnamese-American legislator in Virginia, the first African-American female mayor of Charlotte, N.C., and the first black statewide officer in Virginia in more than a quarter-century, among other groundbreaking candidates.

Kathy Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant who was elected to the House of Delegates in a Fairfax-based seat that Republicans previously held, said voters there had mobilized to rebuke Mr. Trump and his brand of politics. She urged national Democrats to follow Virginia’s example by recruiting candidates from a range of backgrounds for the midterms.

“This was a clear rejection of racism and bigotry and hateful violence,” Ms. Tran said of the elections, adding: “People are hungry for a government that reflects the diversity of our communities.”

County-level results captured the dizzying scale of the lurch away from Republicans: In Virginia, Mr. Northam captured outer Washington suburbs, including Prince William and Loudoun County, by 20 percentage points or more, where other Democrats prevailed by single digits in the recent past. He won Virginia Beach, an area Mr. Trump carried last year, by 5 percentage points.

In New Jersey, Mr. Murphy carried the densely populated New York and Philadelphia suburbs by staggering margins, including counties that broke for Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, eight years ago.

And in Delaware County, Pa., long home to a fearsome Republican machine, Democrats won seats on the county council for the first time since the 1970s thanks to a local campaign that featured yard signs that got straight to the point: “Vote Nov. 7th Against Trump.”

Former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, the last Republican to win a major office in Virginia, said the enthusiasm of liberal voters simply overwhelmed his party.

“The enthusiastic left showed up tonight in big numbers,” he said, “and really determined the outcome of the election.”

Prediction: Paul Ryan will not run for reelection.