Democratic Party on Course for Another Major Electoral Disaster in 2018

At the same time many (but not all) Democratic activists were damn certain Hillary Clinton was going to be elected President of the United States by a landslide, they were also shouting from the mountain tops that the Democrats would regain control of the U.S. Senate.

Most of these prognosticators swore that the Senate breakdown would be 52 Democrats (including two independents who caucus with them) to 48 Republicans, after the election. In fact, the breakdown is the exact opposite ... 52 Republicans to 48 Democrats.

But here is the major rub. 25 Democratic Senate seats are up for reelection in 2018 ... only 8 GOP seats are up in the next cycle. Of that number, 10 Democratic seats are in states Donald Trump won.

Thus far, the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the yapping class on social media, have demonstrated a complete unwillingness to engage in introspection about the most recent electoral disaster -- from the top of the ballot on down to state legislatures across the nation. The Blame Machine is on high -- blaming a myriad of things for the major losses of 2016, just like what occurred in 2014.

The net effect of this will be the Democratic Party will run the same type of campaign across the country in 2018 that was run in 2014 and 2016  ... and the Democratic Party will take a historic, mid-Presidential-term shellacking in the next election cycle.

Some folks will argue that there is plenty of time for the Democratic leadership and others to get their acts together. That's a nice sentiment, but ... there was a full two years after the disaster of 2014, and yet nothing was done.

The reality is most Democratic leaders will continue to believe they don't need to change a thing. They will jabber that the Obama Administration was a grand success, using Orwellian arguments along the way. They will pontificate that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the most splendiferous presidential candidate in history. And they will attack and insult those who disagree with them in a way that makes Donald Trump look positively saintly.

There is nearly no indication that any person in a position of party leadership is willing to wake up and accept the reality that the message and the strategies of the Democratic Party are failing. (The only possible exception is New York Senator Charles Schumer. But, in the end, if anything at all, he will be a voice in the wilderness.)

I called the conduct of the Democratic Party in 2014 political malpractice. The party lost U.S. Senators that should never have gone down to defeat, including my own U.S. Senator, Mark Udall.

Words alone cannot begin to describe what I think of the Democratic Party powers-that-be in the aftermath of the 2016 election cycle. I can say this ... I envision the entire executive committee of the DNC pulling up to party headquarters, crammed in a small auto. They all pop out of the vehicle, one after another, wearing rubber red noses and over-sized shoes.

And then, they spend the remainder of the day squeezing each others' rubber noses because it feels so good.

In the final analysis ...

The U.S. Senate headcount after 2018:

Democrats - 38

Republicans - 62