Leaning Blue
The midterms are coming! The midterms are coming!
That Paul Revere-like warning is beginning to reverberate among Republicans, and well it should.
The entire body of the House of Representatives is up for election this year, the president is still unpopular and the Democrats already are an easy third of the way toward gaining the 24 seats they need for a majority.
Since World War II, the party of the president in power has lost an average of 29 seats in the first mid-term after that president's election, and if the president had a low approval rating his party lost an average of 44 seats, according to Vital Statistics on Congress and Gallup.
There's more.
The Associated Press reported last week on a historic electoral breakthrough: "The number of women running for the U.S. House of Representatives set a record Thursday, most of them Democrats motivated by angst over President Donald Trump and policies of the Republican-controlled Congress."
There's still more.
The latest Cook Political Report analysis on the 2018 midterms states: "Our latest ratings feature 55 competitive seats (Toss Up or Lean Democratic/Republican), including 50 currently held by Republicans and five held by Democrats. We continue to view Democrats the slight favorites for House control."
"Continue" was perhaps a weak verb for that analysis. Cook's new report found changed ratings for 13 districts, and all 13 moved in the Democrats' favor.
Think about it. The House of Representatives that we'll have this time next year will be entirely the result of how we vote in November.
Is blue the new orange?
Did we mention the new MTSU Senate race poll?
Middle Tennessee State University last week said its newest poll found Democrat Phil Bredesen holds a 10 percentage point lead over Republican U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn in the Tennessee's U.S. Senate race.
The poll found that 45 percent of the 600 registered voters surveyed said they would vote for Bredesen, a former governor, if the election were held now, while 35 percent backed Blackburn. Another 17 percent were not sure and the rest declined to say. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
MTSU's poll for the governor's race wasn't quite so cheery, though still not shabby.
Among the four Republicans and two Democrats running, the poll's margin of error effectively put Republican Diane Black, Republican Randy Boyd, Democrat Karl Dean and Republican Beth Harwell all in a statistical dead heat.
Of course, the primary will change that when the GOP shifts it support to just one gubernatorial candidate.
Still, a Democratic Tennessee senator would be just fine.
Trump under pressure
One wonders whether Trump was feeling midterm pressures or Russia probe pressures or just what when his U.S. Treasury Department on Friday imposed new economic sanctions on senior Russian politicians, companies and business leaders.
Whatever the prompt, it's overdue, albeit welcome.
The sanctions, citing a list of complaints that include Moscow's efforts to undermine Western democracies and recurring cyber offensives, target 17 Russian government officials, a state-owned weapons trading company and seven oligarchs - some with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The sanctions freeze any assets those individuals or entities hold in the United States and prohibit U.S. citizens from conducting business with them.
Trump unfiltered and untethered
Meanwhile, our president prattles about deploying the National Guard to defend the border with Mexico while instructing the military to prepare for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. He escalates a trade war with China that sends the U.S. markets into another dive.
White House officials scurried to calm fears, saying the administration's proposed China tariffs were a "threat" that would ultimately help, not hurt, the United States economy. Those officials also jumped quickly to say that the United States was committed to continuing to fight the Islamic State in Syria, signaling Trump's retreat from the insistence that the 2,000 American forces there would soon return home.
As for the National Guard "wall?" Well, who knows. Trump got that bright idea when he saw a Fox News story about a caravan of Central Americans headed for the border. He first claimed they were seeking DACA status - never mind that they would have had to be in the U.S. before mid-2007 and been 15 or younger even then. Fake News.
But, after all, Fox is the original purveyor of scare tactics to rouse Trump's "American First" credo.
The trouble is, the impressionable Trump's actions are moving us (and his party) further and further from being "first" in anything.
Even the 'blue wave' expected to sweep Democrats to power in Congress in the midterm elections, may not be enough to fix the Fox-fanned national social disconnect that gave us Donald Trump in the first place.
Again, we ask: Where are the Republicans leaders with the backbone to stand up to Trump? And to Fox?