Consider some of the obstacles the Democrats must overcome in order to convince voters to return them to the majority in the House.
Love him or loathe him, President Trump has done more for the workers and families of this country than any president in living memory. We're just a year and a half into his first term and have already experienced some of the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment numbers in history and one of the strongest economies the world has ever seen.
Our GDP growth is beyond the dreams of almost all economists prognosticating during the flaccid years of President Obama's tenure, and over-all unemployment is at near record levels for a peacetime economy.
Like the GDP and employment, the stock market is currently bouncing around in record territory. This might be shrugged off by those who think they have no money in the market, but in fact just about everyone who pays into a retirement system is invested in the stock market since that's where those retirement funds are resting. The better the market does the safer their retirement, including social security and medicare, is going to be.
Moreover, Trump's appointments to the federal bench and Supreme Court have consisted of jurists who boast a record of honoring the Constitution and protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the first and second amendments, a fact which makes him extremely popular with a large swath of the American electorate.
His national security team and U.N. ambassador are perhaps the best any president has ever surrounded himself with. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it,
His [Trump's] national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations. Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel. Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.Despite the cavils of critics his actions abroad have strengthened American influence and brought common sense to our foreign policy. He has gotten us out of two very bad Obama-era international agreements - the Paris Climate Accords and the Iranian Nuclear deal.
Reimposing economic sanctions on Iran appears to be bringing that state sponsor of terrorism to its knees, and Trump is putting more pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear missile program than has any president in the last two decades.
His recent trade deal with Mexico is a boon to American workers and is likely to be followed by similar deals with the Canadians, and possibly the Chinese and Europeans.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are handicapped by an almost complete lack of any agenda for the country beyond repealing the Trump tax cuts and reissuing the executive orders rescinded by Trump. The tax cuts which the Democrats have characterized as "crumbs" and the deregulation of businesses are what have produced our amazing economic growth and unemployment, but the Democrats insist on doing away with them anyway.
They also want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), open the borders to whomever wishes to come in, provide "free" health care to anyone who wants it, and impeach President Trump.
None of this (except impeachment) will be doable unless the Democrats can also take control of the Senate, which is unlikely, but their agenda will appeal to a pretty narrow sliver of the American electorate in any case. Yet, it's all the Democrats have put forward so far.
In fact, one of their biggest advantages is that President Trump will not be on the ballot in November, so Republican turnout might be perilously (for Republicans) low.
The Democrats have to flip only 24 seats in the House of Representatives out of a total of 435, 48 of which are deemed competitive and 25 of which are in districts Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, in order to take control of that chamber.
If they succeed they've promised to begin the work of undoing what Trump has wrought, but it would be astonishing if the Democrats, running on almost no agenda at all, can win those seats and begin the work of thwarting a president who in a year and a half has probably done more for the people of this country, including the poor, than has any other president, Democrat or Republican, since at least WWII.
