Too Soon for the Democrats to Break Out the Champagne

All of the signs are now pointing to a Democratic wave election this coming November. Both the President Trump and the Republican Congress are in the doghouse in terms of poll numbers and 2018 is looking like a mirror image of the Republican sweep in 2010. For example in the 2009/10 period the Republicans took the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia and won a surprise victory in the special election for a Senate seat in Massachusetts. This year the Democrats won in Virginia and New Jersey and won a special election for a Senate seat in very red Alabama. Moreover the Democrats passed Obamacare with a straight party-line vote and this year the Republicans passed a massive tax cut on a straight party-line vote.

So what's wrong with this picture? Unlike 2010 when the economy was in the dumps the economy appears to be entering a boom phase. The unemployment rate in November 2018 will approximate a very low 3.5%. Moreover the expectations for the Trump tax cuts are so low that most voters will be pleasantly surprised when they see the tax cuts in their pay checks in February and the real pain on the limitation of state and local tax deductions won't show up until tax filing time in 2019. Thus the Republican poll numbers have nowhere to go but up.

Of course we shouldn't under-estimate the ability of the Republicans to screw up. For example Trump could blow up NAFTA triggering a stock market drop and increasing the likelihood of a recession in 2019. And over all of this looms the ongoing Mueller investigation of the 2016 election and likely a host of irregularities in the Trump Organization.

As a result the Democrats will make big gains in the House of Representatives, but whether it will be  enough to take control remains to be seen.