Election results

Law Professor Glen Reynolds says it best - from USA Today:

Election results 2018: Forget the blue wave and behold the purple puddle
Well, it wasn’t the huge Blue Wave we were promised, a change in Congress on a par with the Tea Party’s “shellacking” of President Barack Obama in 2010, or President Bill Clinton’s big midterm losses in 1994. It looks more like a Blue Slosh. Or maybe a Purple Puddle. The Democrats regained some ground, but it wasn’t the overwhelming repudiation of President Donald Trump and the Republicans they were hoping for.

As I write this, it looks as if Democrats will control the House of Representatives by a narrow margin, while the GOP keeps control of the Senate. What does that mean? Gridlock.

Is that good? It just might be.

The idea that gridlock is good is based on the notion that most of what Congress does is probably bad, and that when Congress can’t do much we’re better off. As Bill Kort wrote in 2017, “Gridlock is good because when Congress is tied up in knots they can’t do anything to hurt us. This idea has been verified by the market many times over the past 25 years.”

Gridlock in Congress can be a good thing
Kort notes that the economic boom of the 1990s took place after Clinton was forced to moderate his approach post-1994, and that times of government unity often lead to bad decisions. Under divided government, things have to appeal to both parties or they don’t pass. That will take a lot, given how divided the parties are.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that "divided government is the perfect time to do big things." Pointing to Social Security reform in 1983, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and the Clinton-era welfare reform program, McConnell said, “None of those things in my view would have occurred in unified government."

There are a lot of things that need to be done, ranging from infrastructure, to trade, to a health care fix that will get us past the Obamacare debacle. They won’t get addressed unless the two parties can come together. I think there’s room for them to work together — and former Democratic National Committee Chair Ed Rendell was saying the same thing on election night on Fox News. It’ll be interesting to see whether President Trump can bring some of his famed “Art of the Deal” skills into play.

More at the site. All the Democrats have to do is to stop being crazy. Is that too much to ask? 2020 should be very interesting.