Five bright spots for Republicans after Texas

To hear the media tell, it, Texas's early primary shows that the great blue wave against President Trump is on us and Democrats will be ruling the U.S. once again.  Here's how an over-excited Associated Press reported it:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Women running for Congress surged to big wins and Democrats smashed recent turnout levels in Texas' first-in-the-nation 2018 primary elections, giving Republicans a potential glimpse of what's ahead in the first midterms under President Donald Trump.

Energized and angry Democrats in Texas, where the GOP has dominated for decades, came out in force to surpass 1 million voters Tuesday – the first time the party has eclipsed that benchmark in a midterm primary since 2002, just months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Smashed?  Oh they love that word, redolent of rock stars smashing their guitars in ecstasy, I guess.  They had higher turnout, OK?  In reality, there's plenty of good news for Republicans.  Here are five points in a flash analysis:

1. Democrats made gains in some areas, yes, but they didn't actually win.  And they certainly didn't win enough to take over.  They just had higher turnout, which is a sign of enthusiasm, which of course is having their candidate lose to President Trump.  The press is calling it a milestone, a blue wave, and all that, but it also has been slavering for a Democratic victory, and such reportage shows the press willing to declare overwhelming victory any place it can find good news.  No need to believe the hype.

2. There does seem to be a natural pendulum swing going on here, and that's a sign of a healthy democracy.  Democrats now seem to be doing better in Texas, but it's from a very, very low base.  Here's the flip-side: if Democrats can turn a red state blue, it's also a fact that in areas that are not all that badly rigged and in maybe some that are, Republicans can turn a blue state red.  There have been significant gains in New England for the Republicans that the press has ignored, save for Salena Zito.  No, we don't want to swap them Texas for New England, but New England is a prize, and things can easily go the other way for Democrats, too.  The press isn't mentioning that.

3. Money.  The Democrats flooded the zone in Texas with money.  Mountains of money, and money they don't really have.  What's left has been billionaires carrying the whole thing, which is a risky picture for a supposed mass movement leftward and individual candidates attracting a lot of money.  Real wave elections, as Donald Trump demonstrated, don't need to be flooded with cash if the spirit of change is there.  If Democrats have to buttress this whole "blue wave" thing with just billionaire cash and individual-candidate cash, it's far from certain that the phenomenon will last, given that it thus far has produced nothing.  When the little people start giving in waves big enough to notice, it will be more of a sign of a mass movement and shift.  Right now, it seems too early for that, and we are fresh off the Trumpquake, which is likely to last, given the effort it took for people to become believers.

4. The quality of Democrats who are winning.  They aren't loud leftist firebrands, but rabbity sneak-under-the-wire low-key Democrats, anxious to make you forget their party's socialist and leftist orientation, given that such a record has such a bad smell with voters.  They could win on this strategy, to be fair, but the dynamic would be similar to how Bill Clinton (or, in the U.K., Tony Blair) retook office for his party in the wake of the Jimmy Carter (or, in the U.K., Sunny Jim Callahan) horror and the sun-king blaze of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that followed.  Carter-Reagan = Obama-Trump.  In other words, Democrat-lite.  They aren't going to act like Obama once they get into power.  That era is going to be over for a long, long time, given the disaster of that presidency.

5. The great Democratic Party bum fight.  Take a look at the New York Times charts and graphs on the primary election.  Notice the gray bars in the Democratic Party column under the House race and governor's race categories.  Those are significant.  They represent split votes among the Democratic electorate.  The AP and other press are reporting the supposed Democratic gains as if the Democrats were a monolith, but the reality is, they still remain badly split between the Bernie Sanders socialists among them and the Hillary Clinton leftists.  The bum fight among Democrats remains a live force, as I wrote about here, and once the Democrats come up with one candidate from the primary (and the May 22 runoff in some cases), a lot of the Democrats will be out of sorts and stay home.  Advantage: Republicans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/03/five_bright_spots_for_republicans_after_texas.html

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/03/07/there-was-a-red-wave-in-texas/