A week ago today, the 2018 Midterm elections took place. As we remember from that night. Republicans kept the majority in the Senate and won several key Governor elections, but lost the house. The results for the Senate and house was that Republicans had a 53 seat majority in the senate and Democrats had a 30 seat majority in the house. Well, as the week went by and more votes were counted, Republicans lost more seats in the house, meaning Democrats now have about a 40 seat majority. Republicans also lost the Arizona Senate seat giving us 52 total seats. Now, I am aware of the crap going on down in Florida and all of that. This is just the latest information I have. So, from looks of it, Republicans were not fully clobbered to death, but it does look closer to a blue wave than it did before. The biggest reason for this shift was that the suburbs heavily voted blue, and this is mostly due to the rhetoric of President Trump. What this election revealed is that the suburbs do not like President Trump due to his toxic rhetoric, and they take that out on Republicans. The main reason for this is that Trump and even Republicans often times don’t appeal to people in the suburbs which obviously make a big difference. If Republicans want a good shot in 2020, there are 2 strategies they can pursue, and the two can go together.

1. Republicans can count the Democrats becoming more insane.

One of the key strategies that Republicans can use that was also used in 2016 and this past election is to count on Democrats going so insane that nobody would want them in power. This is not a bad strategy, in fact it helped them the past two elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton and Democrats ran on this notion that conservatives were these evil racist bitter clingers that will bring slavery back. Democrats have used this message for years and conservatives got sick of it and picked a candidate that would fight back. While this was used in this past election, it was not the big reason why Republicans were able to at least keep the Senate. The big reason why that happened was due to the whole Brett Kavanaugh debacle. Months leading up to this controversy, Democrats had a better chance than Republicans to take the Senate as well as the House. However, when the first allegation came out, with no corroborating evidence, Democrats decided to use this to try and clobber Kavanaugh out of the nomination. During those few weeks, Democrats displayed the worst political smear I have ever witnessed in my lifetime, it was really egregious. During that time as well, I saw the greatest unity among conservatives I have ever seen. If the elections were held then, Republicans would have swept no question. Bottom line is that Democrats have a tendency to screw up when they have the advantage, meaning that they nominate some of the more crazy candidates instead of moderates which will hurt them in the long run, but of course I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

2. Republicans need to change their pitch.

While Republicans can rely on Democrats to go completely insane, another thing they can do is to change their pitch when it comes to campaigning. The fact is that Republicans did a terrible job at pitching their message to people during the 2018 election. Which is a shame because Republicans generally have great policy ideas. One of the reasons why the Republican’s pitching didn’t turn out well is somewhat due to President Trump. As I said before, there is a large number of people in the suburbs who don’t like Trump, and then extend that to Republicans. I’m not saying that they should completely abandon President Trump, they shouldn’t, but their main focus should be on the policies they want to pursue to help their district and/or state, and try not to make it a referendum on President Trump. Another thing that could help is that President Trump should shut up for just 2 seconds. If Republicans and Trump can do this while Democrats go insane, 2020 will likely be a breeze for Republicans.

In the end, I think this election will be a wake up call to Republicans, whether that completely helps or not is a different story. Reality is that while Republicans can may stay in power in 2020, Democrats will eventually regain control. Whenever that happens, conservatives need to come together and not fight each other all of the time. If we can do that, then we should ultimately be fine regardless of whether or not Republicans are in power.