Politico reports:

Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it.

They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the balance of his first term, much less with a credible path to a second.

Those things Democrats did not get.

To the contrary, the GOP defeat was not nearly as severe as the Democratic one in 2010, at a similar point in Barack Obama’s presidency, nor the one two years into Bill Clinton’s first term in 1994.

This leaves 2018 as the “Yes, but” election—not fully satisfying but by no means fully deflating for partisans of either side. [Continue reading…]