Election Day 2018 Is Long Since Over, but the Democrats Are Still Trying to Win Elections Any Way They Can

Sorry for the late posting. >e'll be back to normal tomorrow. • • 2018 MID-TERM ELECTIONS. Reminds me of "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game In New York" -- a song with lyrics by Frank Loesser sung by Frank Sinatra in the film version of the Broadway smash hit, "Guys and Dolls." Watch Sinatra sing the great song here < https://youtu.be/Ka_cJolZeuE >. • In every state where they Democrat Parry thought they could get away with it, they stole elections -- taking away the winners picked by the voters and replacing them with Fake winners who won by cheating the mail-in ballot and recount systems. • • • THE FLORIDA DEMOCRAT FIASCO. In Florida, the election certainly was treated as a crap game by the Democrats. Their permanent floating dice game went on for 11 days after the election results were posted on election night, November 6. • On Saturday, November 17, Democrat Andrew Gillum -- who had conceded to DeSantis on election night and then withdrew the concession -- FINALLY conceded to Republican Ron DeSantis in their contentious race in Florida for the governor’s mansion. Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, in a Facebook Live post made alongside his wife, said he wanted "to congratulate Mr. DeSantis on becoming the next governor of the great state of Florida." The Facebook concession came after a recount that DeSantis won DeSantis, maintaining a lead over Gillum of about 0.41% that is over the threshold required for a hand recount. Even the recount did not immediately lead to a Gilllum concession. Instead, he insisted that "tens of thousands of votes" remained to be counted : "As today’s unofficial reports and recent court proceedings make clear, there are tens of thousands of votes that have yet to be counted. We plan to do all we can to ensure that every voice is heard in this process." Gillum, still appearing as if he was in campaign mode, even visited churches across the state to meet with supporters and call on election officials to “count every vote” in the race. When Gillum conceded to DeSantis on election night, early returns showed him trailing the former congressman by a seemingly insurmountable margin of around 1%, but the Democrats managed to keep counting for 11 days, and as later vote counts trickled in from Democrat-heavy South Florida in the days after the election, DeSantis’ lead closed, forcing the race into an automatic machine recount and prompting Gillum to rescind his concession. BUT, unless Gillum recants yet again, the Governor's election is now over -- Republican Ron DeSantis is the next Governor of Florida, as he was on election night before the Gillum "Floating Crap Game" started. • AND, the Florida senatorial race is over, too. US District Judge Mark Walker on Friday evening upheld Florida law that “forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 pm Election Day.” This was the last best hope for Democrats after suffering several setbacks in recent days, including current Florida Governor Rick Scott gaining over 800 votes in the mandatory recount. Scott’s margin over Nelson makes it “mathematically impossible” for the incumbent to regain the seat, Scott campaign spokesperson Chris Hartline told The Daily Caller News Foundation Wednesday. Scott led by roughly 12,000 votes, according to the Wall Street Journal Thursday. Politico reported : "Senator Bill Nelson has run out of time, run out of favorable court rulings and is about to officially run out of votes. After losing to Governor Rick Scott on Election Day, losing after an automatic recount, and appearing to not make up the gap following a manual recount Friday, Nelson’s campaign was dealt a mortal blow later that evening by US District Judge Mark E. Walker, who crushed the Democrat’s last major hope by upholding a Florida law that forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 pm Election Day. 'It’s done. But it was done before today. This was a total Hail Mary,' said a top Democrat involved in Nelson’s campaign who didn’t want to speak publicly before the Democratic Party icon conceded defeat to one of the party’s most-hated rivals....While party officials refused to discuss the hopelessness of the situation on the record, the Florida Democratic Party on Friday continued to fundraise off the recount, suggesting to donors that Nelson had a shot when his own top backers knew he didn’t....' " On Sunday, Democrat Senator Bill Nelson conceded Sunday to Republican challenger Rick Scott, who will become the next US Senator to represent the Sunshine State. The victory will be Scott’s third close statewide win in less than a decade. The victory also marks the first time in more than a century that Florida has two Republican senators representing them in Washington. The state is scheduled to certify results in the race on November 20. • • • FLORIDA DEMOCRAT PARTY ALTERED MAIL-IN BALLOTS ILLEGALLY. In the most outrageous of the Democrat attempts to steal the Florida Senate and Governor elections, Democrat official’s attempted to use bogus altered ballots in Florida. BizPac Review stated on Saturday : "Voter fraud is rampant in Florida, based on bombshell emails uncovered by USA Today. A Democrat Party official 'directed aides to share altered election forms with voters in an effort to fix ballot signature problems a day AFTER polls closed.' Election experts say use of the altered forms was apparently an effort to boost the number of Democrat votes in the state’s hotly-contested gubernatorial and Senate races. The deadline in the mail-in ballot forms was retroactively altered to read November 8. Here’s what the altered forms look like < https://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/altered-ballot-form.jpg >. The real form directed voters to return the mail-in ballot by November 5. < https://www.bizpacreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/original-ballot.jpg >. Altering state forms is a criminal offense, so Department of Justice prosecutors are now investigating the bogus mail-in ballots as a potential RICO (organized crime) matter. The dirty ploy even disgusted Democrat campaign consultant Jake Sanders, who told USA Today that he had warned party officials about the illegality of using altered ballots, and was ignored. Sanders said : “Self-imposing a fake deadline and deceiving people is counter to [standing up for voters].” Election expert Charles Zelden said this ballot form tampering could be construed as a reckless “Hail Mary effort” on the part of the Democrat Party to rig the election : “If this is an attempt at fraud to sneak in votes that would have not been counted otherwise...it does play into the narrative of Republicans that this is a fraudulent effort,” said Zelden, a political science professor at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida has repeatedly said that Democrats are trying to “steal the election.” The Florida Department of State quietly asked for an investigation last week, Politico reported. The concerns are tied to the Florida Democratic Party, and involve date changes on forms -- known as “cure affidavits” -- used to fix vote-by-mail ballots sent with incorrect or missing information, according to Politico. Those documents were due no later than 5 pm November 5 -- the day before the election. Affidavits released by Florida’s Department of State show documents from four different counties said, incorrectly, the ballots could be returned by 5 pm on Thursday, Politico reported, stating that : "In one email released by the Florida state department, and addressed to Florida Elections Division Director Maria Matthews, Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux also indicated the altered affidavits had come from the state Democratic Party. 'Please pass the word to the FDP that they can't arbitrarily add their own deadline to your form or VBM cures!!' Lux wrote This is crazy!!' Last Friday, Bradley McVay, the state department’s interim general counsel, asked that the altered dates be investigated. A spokeswoman for the Florida Democratic Party, Caroline Rowland, brushed off the issue, calling it a distraction by Republicans. • • • ARIZONA MID-TERM SUFFERS FROM DEMOCRAT QUESTIONABLE TACTICS. Republican Martha McSally conceded the Arizona Senate race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema on Monday, November 12 -- a a week after the election. The Republican US Representative Martha McSally was trailing Democrat congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema last Monday by more than 38,000 votes. Sinema's victory means that Democrats have flipped the seat previously held by the retiring Jeff Flake. Democrats now have 47 Senate seats, while Republicans have 52, when the Florida race is included. The final makeup of the Senate will be determined by a November 27 runoff election in Mississippi. • But, like Florida, Sinema extended her lead in that week in key Maricopa County, according to Fox News's Dan Springer, who reported that : "Republicans and Democrats in Arizona came to an agreement in court Friday that gives all counties in the state until November 14 to address problems with ballots, as vote tallying for the state's tight Senate race continues. As of 7 pm ET Friday evening [November 9], Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema led Republican candidate Martha McSally by a margin of 21,185 votes statewide, according to the Arizona Secretary of State office. Sinema has received 990,177 votes and McSally has received 968,992, the office said. In Maricopa County specifically, Sinema has received 594,444, while McSally has 556,076, the office said. The settlement comes after Republicans filed a lawsuit Wednesday in an effort to prevent Maricopa and Pima counties -- the two biggest counties in the state -- from using procedures that permit mail-in ballot fixes to occur beyond Election Day, arguing that the practice was improper. The lawsuit was filed by four local Republican parties. If the signature on the voter registration doesn't match that on the sealed envelope, both Maricopa and Pima County allow voters to help them fix, or 'cure' it, up to five days after Election Day. Many other counties only allow voters to cure until polls close on Election Day." In addition, Springer states that : "Roughly 457,000 votes remained uncounted, the Arizona Secretary of State office reported earlier Friday. The ballots that still need to be counted were described by the office as those 'mailed in or received by post office on election day' and as 'late earlies' dropped off at the polls plus provisionals....The agreement would only affect a few thousand votes." • As vote counting continued in Arizona after Tuesday's mid-term election, GOP Senator Jon Kyl -- named as the replacement for Senator McCain until the November 6 election -- worried the Democrats legal strategy "sounds an awful lot like an effort to disenfranchise voters" from rural counties. "Every single lawful vote in Arizona should be counted," Kyl said in a statement on Friday. "And voting laws in our state should be applied uniformly across the map. Unfortunately, the Democrats legal strategy sounds an awful lot like an effort to disenfranchise voters from eleven counties from rural parts of our state and that's troubling." • CNBC reported that Republicans in Arizona filed a lawsuit that targets a rule in two counties, Maricopa and Pima, that allow voters to "fix issues with their ballots" up to five days after an election. The lawsuit asks that either this practice be ended or that it be implemented throughout the entire state. Republicans have challenged the process of counting mail-in ballots -- which is about three-fourths of Arizona's votes -- in the state's two largest counties. Maricopa and Pima Counties allow voters to fix issues with their ballots for up to five days after Election Day. The state has a tedious process of matching signatures on voters' registration forms to those on their ballots, and the counties let voters fix signature problems for days after the election. • THREE -- yes, 3 -- Republican statewide Arizona candidates have seen theri leads disappear in the post-election mail-in ballot counting. Daily Caller reported on Saturday that : "The Arizona Republican Party will conduct an independent audit of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office after three statewide Republican candidates who initially led on election night saw their races swing the other way as outstanding ballots were counted. Despite leading on election night and for some time afterward, GOP Rep. Martha McSally ultimately lost her Senate campaign to Democratic Representative Kyrsten Sinema. The tight race took almost a week to call. McSally, a former Air Force pilot, initially led her Democrat challenger by about 16,000 votes the day after Election Day. However, the slow count of mail-in ballots pushed Sinema into the lead and eventually handed her victory. • In another statewide race, Republican Frank Riggs initially led Democrat Kathy Hoffman in the race for Arizona superintendent of public instruction. He went on to lose about a week later. AND, Katie Hobbs, the Democrat candidate for Arizona Secretary of State, had been trailing Republican Steve Gaynor on Election Day, and the Associated Press went so far as to project Gaynor the winner that night. However, after several days of ballot counting, the Democrat candidate is expected to win that race. • The Arizona GOP wants to review the counting process in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. A press release by the Arizona Republican Party Committee said : “Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jonathan Lines today announces the formation of an independent audit to review the actions of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in the recent mid-term elections. It is the AZ GOP’s hope that this audit will produce a fair, factually-based report that will help us better understand what happened in this drawn-out election and address the many concerns of the voters.” • Among the issues to be studied are -- the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office’s decision to open an emergency voting center before Election Day; voting challenges and procedures on Election Day; how ballot counting and results reporting was handled; and allegations of election fraud. Phoenix attorney Stephen Richer will lead the audit, and Statecraft PLLC will be serving as advisory legal counsel. The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office hit back against the announcement, suggesting it was “political.” Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told KTAR News 92.3 FM : “I haven’t bothered to read the press release, I don’t have time for political games. We are focused on finishing this election.” • While the Arizona GOP is not explicitly claiming fraud in its announcement,it says it hopes to use its report to better the process in future elections. BUT, if irregularities led to false winners being announced, we can be sure that lawsuits will be filed to correct the election results. That may be a longshot, but right now, it is the only tool Arizona Republicans have to try to preserve voting integrity in their state. • • • GEORGIA DEMOCRAT FINALLY 'ALMOST' CONCEDES. Newsmax reported on Saturday that : "Democrat Stacey Abrams ended 10 days of post-election drama in Georgia's closely watched and even more closely contested race for governor Friday, acknowledging Republican Brian Kemp as the victor while defiantly refusing to concede to the man she blamed for 'gross mismanagement' of a bitterly fought election. The speech Abrams delivered at her campaign headquarters Friday evening marked the close of the 44-year-old attorney and former lawmaker's unsuccessful attempt to make history as America's first black woman governor. Since Election Day her campaign fought on, insisting efforts to suppress turnout had left thousands of ballots uncounted that otherwise could erode Kemp's lead and force a runoff election. Kemp, the 55-year-old businessman who oversaw the election as Georgia's secretary of state, will keep the governor's office in GOP hands as the state's third Republican governor since Reconstruction. He responded to Abrams ending her campaign by calling for unity and praising his opponent's 'passion, hard work, and commitment to public service.' The kind words came just days after Kemp's campaign spokesman derided Abrams' efforts to have contested ballots counted as a 'disgrace to democracy.' " • Abrams announced plans to file a federal lawsuit to challenge the way Georgia's elections are run. She accused Kemp of using the secretary of state's office to aggressively purge the rolls of inactive voters, enforce an "exact match" policy for checking voters' identities that left thousands of registrations in limbo and other measures to tile the outcome in his favor. Abrams said : "Let's be clear : This is not a speech of concession. Because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that." • Both Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey campaigned for Abrams in the final days and President Donald Trump held a rally for Kemp. Unofficial returns showed Kemp ahead by roughly 60,000 votes out of nearly 4 million cast on November 6. Kemp declared himself governor-elect the next day and stepped down as Georgia's secretary of state, though thousands of absentee and provisional ballots remained uncounted. Abrams sent volunteers across the state in search of voters whose ballots were rejected. She filed suit in federal court to force county elections boards to count absentee ballots with incorrect birthdates. Her campaign even planned for possible litigation to challenge the election's certified outcome -- Abrams finally decided not to take that route. She said she had concluded "the law currently allows no further viable remedy." Instead, she said she would fight to restore integrity to Georgia's election system in a new initiative called Fair Fight Georgia. Abrams told the media : "In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections from unconstitutional actions." Aides close to Abrams said that since the election she had been wrestling with competing priorities: She wanted to advance her assertions that Georgia's elections process makes it too hard for some citizens to vote. But she also recognized that a protracted legal fight would harm that cause and potentially her political future. • A $1 million contribution from billionaire mega-donor George Soros to the Georgia Democratic Party boosted its 2018 campaign chest, giving Democrats three times as much money in the bank as the state’s majority Republican Party, according to new campaign finance reports. But, the $1 million Soros donation on June 27 is the second to a Democrat campaign cause this year by an out-of-state contributor : San Francisco investor Susan Sandler gave $1 million in March to a political action committee backing Democrat gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams. In its June 30 state report, the Georgia Democrat Party reported having $1.58 million in the bank. The Republican Party -- which holds every major statewide office and controls both chambers of the General Assembly -- reported having $516,000 on hand and $523,000 in debt. Most of the debt results from to a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by a former staffer, in which the GOP had to pay out more than $500,000 to settle the suit. The two parties would have roughly the same amount in the bank without the $1 million Soros donation. Republican Party Chairman John Watson said : “There has obviously been a meeting of the extreme leftist, open-border billionaires, and they’ve obviously decided to go all in for Stacey Abrams.” But Watson predicted the money that flowed in through the end of June was just a start. “I think we should all expect there will be broken records for expenditures in this gubernatorial-election cycle this fall,” Watson said. Soros has put nearly $3 million into Georgia causes and candidates since the 2014 campaigns. The New York billionaire and his family have given $94,000 directly to Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign. • Abrams' new Fair Fight Georgia will surely have contributions flowing in from the usual billionaire Democrat donors -- we can bet that George Soros will be leading the pack. • • • AND NOW DEMOCRATS ARE STEALING CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS. This time the GOP theft victim is Republican Young Kim, who has now lost the lead in California House race, to Democrat opponent Gil Cisneros, whom she accused of harassing vote counters. Republican congressional candidate Young Kim just days ago was poised to be the first Korean-American woman in Congress as she led a closely contested California House race to replace retiring Representative Ed Royce in California’s 39th District, which includes part of the state's more Republican Orange County. Last week, she held a 3% lead over Democrat Gil Cisneros with about 150,000 votes counted. But since then, that lead vanished, with Cisneros taking a 941-vote as of late Thursday. The Kim campaign claimed that Los Angeles County Registrar rebuked the Cisneros campaign for “physical vote tampering.” But in a statement to Business Insider, the registrar said that it had not addressed anything related to ballot tampering. The Cisneros campaign called the allegations false : “The claims made by Young Kim mirror rhetoric from President Trump and are divorced from reality, and it’s because she knows that she will continue to lose ground as more ballots are counted. We support the Registrars and they should continue to have the opportunity to count every ballot.” • Saturday, it appeared to be all over for Kim as Democrat Gil Cisneros was declared the winner, thus shutting the GOP out of Orange County for the first time since the Great Depression. • Cisneros won a $266 million lottery jackpot in 2010, and used some of that bounty to vastly outspend his Republican challenger, essentially financing his own campaign. The race for the 39th was one of the most expensive House races in the country, with Cisneros spending about $9.7 million -- including $8 million of his own money -- and Kim spending nearly $1.9 million. Kim conceded the race Saturday, tweeting that she called Cisneros to congratulate him and offering him best wishes in Congress. The Democrat PArty seems totally unconcerned that another way Cisneros has used his lottery windfall was to get a credible sex harassment claim against him dismissed as a "misunderstanding." • TeaParty.org pointed out that the Kim loss is one more victory for a Democrat who trailed on election night. In another California congressional race, Democrat Katie Porter -- down by 6,200 votes on election night -- has now overtaken GOP Representative Mimi Walters, and will win yet another congressional seat for the Democrats. This race was also on Orange County, and the Orange County Register reported : "On Thursday, the Associated Press projected that Democrat Katie Porter has defeated two-term GOP Representative Mimi Walters in the race to represent the county’s inland 45th Congressional District." Officially, Porter is now winning the race by 6,203 votes after trailing by 6,233 when votes were originally counted. Porter reportedly won 58% of votes that have been counted since the night of the election. • According to the California GOP’s calculations, none of those seats were in jeopardy heading into the mid-term elections. Absentee ballots, which were still being counted in the district as of Thursday, put Porter over the edge. Big League Politics spoke with a US Senate Candidate from California this week who explained that the laws surrounding mail-in ballots in the state have been changed to make the counting process much less rigorous. James Bradley told Big League Politics that the state has passed a law allowing for mail-in and provisional ballots to be machine counted. Previously, the signatures on such ballots had to be individually verified in order for the ballots to be counted. Since the safeguard of signature verification was nullified, Democratic mail-ins and provisionals have vastly increased, according to Bradley. • There appears to be a pattern of mail-in ballot counting swinging districts from red to blue in several places races, including in California and New Mexico. And, we can be sure that the Democrat Party, which has even argued for allowing non-citizen illegal immigrants to vote, is making full use of the mail-in ballot machine count laws to push through questionable votes and win elections. • • • ARE DEMOCRATS STEALING ELECTIONS? Since election day, the Democrats have picked up more than 12 additional seats in the House, and they have picked up two seats in the Senate -- just since election day on November 6. In 28 of the last 30 mid-term elections, the minority party has gained in congressional and state elections. However, Republicans solidified their Senate majority Tuesday night, knocking off several Democratic Senators in traditionally red states, National Review reported. VOX has a list of all of the lost House seats : “So far, Democrats have won 34 GOP-held seats for a net gain of 32 seats, more than the 23 they needed to take control of Congress.” • Canada Free Press says : "What Democrats can’t win legitimately, they steal through cheating and fraud. And it appears the rest of the country has given up on California. Could this be why Hillary Clinton thinks she has a chance in 2020?" • TheHill pointed out another possible rzson for Democrat xins, citing Texas demographics. TheHill wrote : "For a quarter century, Republicans have dominated Texas politics so much that the Democratic minority has often been an afterthought. The big political battles in Austin have been fought between conservative and centrist factions within the GOP, as Democrats watch from the sidelines. But Democratic gains in this year’s mid-term elections on the federal, state and county level show the prospect that Texas will become a swing state -- a promise Democrats have made for years -- is slowly coming to fruition. Texas’s evolution illustrates two of the defining inflection points in American politics today : A growing divide between liberal urban cores and conservative rural bastions; and a shift in attitudes of suburban voters turned off by President Trump and his Republican Party." • We would expect TheHill to blame President Trump. BUT, the article makes some valid points : "Those factors have helped turn states like Nevada and Colorado blue, as large metropolitan areas like Las Vegas and Denver dominate more conservative rural areas. At the same time, they have pushed states like Pennsylvania and Michigan toward purple status, as the once-dominant metro areas like Philadelphia and Detroit lose population and political influence. In fast-growing Texas, both of those fulcrums are tipping toward Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of new residents are moving into Texas every year, choosing to live in fast-growing cities and suburbs around the state’s four largest metropolitan areas. Six of the nation’s ten fastest-growing counties are in Texas. About one in every ten Texas residents did not live in the state when Senator Ted Cruz (R) first won his seat six years ago....This year, Democrats scored big wins in the fastest growing cities in Texas. The party won a dozen seats in the state House, mostly in clusters around Dallas and Houston. Forward Majority spent $2.2 million on those legislative races. Voters in Harris County, where Houston sits, kicked out a three-term Republican county executive in favor of a 27-year old political neophyte. Nineteen black women ran for judgeships in Harris County; they all won. Those gains in big cities came from a remarkable surge in turnout, and a realignment that shows just how solidly Democratic urban cores in Texas and around the nation have become....The counties that surround San Antonio, Austin and Dallas are some of the fastest-growing in the country, and the thousands of new voters who move there are not as conservative as those who have lived in Texas all their lives." TheHill says that : "Both Democrats and Republicans credited two specific campaigns for boosting turnout, fueling Democratic wins at the legislative and local level while Republicans once again swept statewide races. The two sides said O’Rourke’s campaign pushed thousands -- probably hundreds of thousands -- of new voters to the polls in the state’s largest cities. They also credit Governor Greg Abbott (R), who launched a major field campaign even in more sparsely populated rural parts of the state, votes that benefitted Cruz as well. There are few signs that Texas’s population explosion will slow any time soon. The state is expected to gain two or even three new House seats in the decennial reapportionment process, according to the demographer Kimball Brace. If suburban voters continue their march toward Democrats, and urban voters continue their march to the polls, President Trump and his Democratic opponent are likely to see Texas as an emerging battleground." BUT, while TheHill talks of the Texas demographic move toward Democrats, it says nothing of the Democrat penchant for "stealing" votes. If the border states of Arizona and California are enmeshed in mail-in ballot misuse that sounds suspiciously like using relaxed mail-in ballot laws to permit non-citizens, both legal and illegal, to vote, why would it not also by happening in Texas?? • The Washington Free Beacon provides another answer. Free Beacon Editor Matthew Continetti says : "The lesson of 2018 is that the political class is addicted to drawing lessons. Every two years, after the ballots are counted and the winners declared, our reporters, pundits, officials, activists, and analysts turn immediately to the next election. What do these results portend? Will Trump be reelected? Will the suburbs stay Democratic? This emphasis on the future allows the political class to indulge in its favorite activity: mindless speculation. For once, it might be more useful to look backward rather than forward. History has much to tell us. What it says is that the mid-term was about average. The New York Times projects the Democrats will pick up some 35 seats, giving them at least a 12-seat majority in the 116th Congress." Continetti says the fundamentals pointed to this result : "Only 2 of the last 14 presidents (FDR and GWB) have gained House seats in their first mid-term. Republican losses are in line with historical trends for a President with less than 50% support. The Democratic gain is a few seats higher than in 2006, while less than Republican gains in both 1994 (54 seats) and 2010 (63 seats). President Trump's approval rating in the exit poll was 45%. This is better than Reagan's approval in 1982 (42%) and about the same as Clinton's in 1994 (46%) and Obama's in 2010 (45%). Trump's approval is less than that recorded for Jimmy Carter in 1978 (49%) and George H.W. Bush in 1990 (58%). Carter and Bush lost seats in Congress, too. Donald Trump may be an extraordinary man, but in political terms he is an ordinary President." • But, states Continetti, the difference between the House and Senate results is unusual : "Not since 1970 has a President's party lost seats in the House while gaining them in the Senate. Nor were Democratic gains in statehouses as large as expected. At this writing, they have won the keys to seven more governor's mansions, but lost important contests in Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire." Republican leads in Florida and Georgia have not been certified, but it is clear now that the Republican has won in both states. Continetti reminds us that Democrats also won hundreds of state legislative seats, but nowhere near the amount needed to overcome the losses they experienced during the Obama presidency : "The split decision makes a kind of sense: This year's Senate map favored Republicans, even as a shift among suburban voters and independents helped Democrats.The high number of House Republicans who did not seek reelection, combined with a liberal gusher of money, was a boon for the party of Pelosi....The 2018 election was not an outlier. The rule of divided government is one norm President Trump hasn't violated. Since 1968, no period of unified government has lasted more than four years. As John F. Harris and Charlie Mahtesian of Politico observed : "In the 38 years since Ronald Reagan's victory, Presidents have faced having at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the opposition party in 28 years." I was born midway through Reagan's first year in office and have lived through almost every possible configuration of government. In January we'll be back where I began, with a Republican President, Democratic House, and Republican Senate." • The result was not a win for President Trump, according to Continetti : "The loss of the House means an end to conservative legislation and the beginning of investigations. Still, this year could have been much worse for Republicans, for Trump, and for conservatism. It wasn't. So it is a loss with an asterisk, and within historical expectations." • • • DEAR READERS, Will President Trump lose his job in 2020? Nobody knows because the past is a very poor predictor of the future in American politics. The President would do well to improve his numbers among the overlapping categories of independents, white voters with college degrees, and suburbanites. He narrowly won all three groups in 2016. Republicans lost them this year. But, Black and Hispanic voters, and young gay men, are inching toward the President, and he has two years to cement those new electoral alignments before 2020. Predictions two years ahead of an election are worthless. So what if President Trump doesn't command majority support. Neither did Reagan, Clinton, and Obama at this point in their presidencies. BUT, all three were re-elected. Continetti points out that the Republicans "fared poorly in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Democrats lost all three in 2010 before Obama won them two years later. Nor were Wisconsin and Michigan as bad as Republicans feared. Governor Scott Walker barely lost reelection to a third term. John James appeared out of nowhere to come within six points of a three-term incumbent whose margins in 2006 and 2012 were 16 and 21%, respectively." When we consider these losses in relation to the Senate victories in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota, and Florida, and to Mike DeWine and Kim Reynolds winning governorships in Ohio and Iowa, it is clear that working-class white voters have not abandoned Donald Trump's GOP -- neither has the forgotten and mostly silent broad sweep of middle America, where hard work, morality, God and country count, more than anything else. When it comes to the 2020 presidential choices, consider who won in 2016. Against the back-drop of the assortment of socialists, far-left socialists, and radical marxists now parading themselves as potential Democrat 2020 contenders, President Trump will effectively brand his Democrat opponent as someone largely outside the American mainstream. He will frame the debate. The political environment will almost surely include domestic growth, more jobs, lower taxes, no new wars, and settled trade disagreements. The President will point out who did all that -- and he will be re-elected. • But, in the meantime, the GOP and President Trump need to get on the vot fraud issue as never before -- not with shouts of "cheating" and "stealing," but in the courts, where the voter fraud, illegal non-citizen voting, unconstitutional state voting laws, and corrupt Democrat election practices can be outed and eliminated. We need to get rid of "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game In New York" and everywhere that it is practiced by Democrats before Election Day 2020 rolls around. There is not a minute to lose -- 2020 is just around the political corner.