Blue wave? Five reasons Republicans could still crush Democrats in the 2018 elections

Republican bigwigs should be quaking in their fancy foreign shoes.

Their president keeps poking allies and flattering dictators — including the autocrat behind the hacking of our 2016 elections and a dictator who was threatening to nuke us until a few months ago and still seems to be developing the capacity to do so. His Cabinet secretaries act as if they're competing for the most ridiculous scandal. And his lackeys appear more interested in enriching the Trump family than reuniting the thousands of kids separated from their parents by his policies. 

Just 17 weeks from the 2018 elections, the Dow is down more than 2,000 points as Donald Trump’s trade tantrums have dulled the gains of the low-unemployment economy he inherited. Rising gas prices and the spiking health premiums hikes juiced by Republican sabotage of the Affordable Care Act threaten to erase any slight gains promised to middle class families by last year’s tax cuts.

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to see a blue wave forming.

To take the House, Democrats just need to flip 24 seats, which looks more than feasible given Republicans are defending 25 districts where Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump in 2016. 

Why aren't Republicans worried?

Poll averages show Trump about 5 percentage points less popular than Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when their party lost 52 and 63 seats in 1994 and 2010, respectively. Democrats haven’t trailed in the Real Clear Politics generic ballot tracker since Trump became president, and more significantly, they’ve continually “overperformed” by double digits in special elections, which political scientists have found to have “predictive power.” 

But Republicans don’t seem too worried. And that should be terrifying.

The Republican National Committee is gleefully parroting Trump’s anti-immigration attacks on Democrats, though 58 percent of voters disapprove of his immigration policy in a new Quinnipiac poll. The amount of congressional oversight into Trump’s scandals is minuscule compared to oversight of investigations into Trump’s scandals. And the few elected Republicans who dare speak a peep against this administration fall apart quicker than Don Jr.'s story about the Trump Tower meeting.

What do Republicans know that you may not?

Maybe it’s that the Republican Party is gutting what’s left of American democracy. “In the United States, weakening constraints on the executive branch have resulted in a significant decline of liberal democracy,” argue political scientists Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson, based on data from the V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2018. 

Trump didn’t invent the right’s half-century effort to erase the gains of the civil rights movement and the norms that have maintained some semblance of our democratic republic. But his shamelessness has sure accelerated the effort.

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The Republican Party has insulated itself from failure, accountability and the vast majority of Americans, by trying every known method of keeping them from the polls. And in Donald Trump they have a master salesman uniquely skilled in selling terrible products, like racism.

Here are five reasons why Republicans, despite overwhelming rejection of their president and policies, have to be considered the favorites to keep the House and pick up seats in the Senate.

►The numbers. Due to gerrymandering, Democrats need to win the nation popular vote by up to 11 percentage points to secure a House majority, a Brennan Center report found. That’s more than five times Hillary Clinton’s 2.1-point popular vote advantage in 2016. Could Democrats win by a margin of 9.4 points and not take control of the House? That’s exactly what happened with Virginia’s House of Delegates last November. 

►The base. The Republican base has shown up in every off year election since 2010; Democrats have not. So much depends on voters who haven’t cast a vote in an off-year election in 12 years, or ever. And the Supreme Court continues to wither away voting rights, sharpening the powerful tool of voter purges in the right’s already potent voter suppression arsenal. 

Worrying is Democrats' only hobby

►The money. After years of making it easier for anonymous donors to spend unlimited amounts of cash electing candidates, the Supreme Court has quietly put public sector unions, the largest institutional supporter of the Democratic Party, on life support. And while the tax cuts don’t seem to be swaying many voters, big donors made big promises to get them passed. And you can expect to see at least a fraction of the billions the Republican Party sent their way raining down on endangered Republicans. 

►The hacking. Instead of admitting that Russia interfered to elect him in 2016, Trump continues to do everything he can to entice Vladimir Putin to interfere again.

►The delusion. Learn from Anthony Kennedy. Highly educated suburban Republican “swing votes” are not your savior. They will turn on you at the exact wrong moment, even if it means erasing a legacy of reproductive and LGBT rights and legitimizing a president’s attempt to sabotage an investigation into an attack on our democracy. The lure of swaying “disaffected” Republicans with cloudy “centrism” could end up turning off your base, which has proven to be fickle. 

This warning isn’t just for the left. Nobody need remind Democrats to worry. It’s pretty much our only hobby since January 20, 2017.

This is just a reminder that the House could easily join the presidency and the Senate as being controlled by the party that got far fewer votes. If this happens, the loser won’t just be Democrats, it will also be democracy.

And you probably don’t want to break your democracy. You may need it someday.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of The Sit and Spin Room podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP