political prognosticators, the president thoroughly enjoyed turning the Democrats’ “Blue Wave” mantra on its head. He struggled to imagine any scenario in which the nation delivered a rebuke to his government. Sensing this, and playing to his ego, Stepien and senior administration officials encouraged Trump to mobilize Republicans by making the election all about him. “Tell them that you’re on the ballot,” Stepien urged the president.
There was another pressing imperative, something White House aides were pounding into Trump’s head as he prepared to travel the country campaigning on behalf of Senate candidates. “You cannot—absolutely cannot—attack Christine Blasey Ford,” Kellyanne Conway warned him.
Just around that time, what had once seemed a pro forma confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court—tipping its balance rightward for years, perhaps decades, to come—was being derailed by bombshell accusations that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape Ford when the two were teenagers. The president’s allies knew restraint would not come easy: He had been accused during the 2016 campaign of sexual misconduct by at least fifteen women, and when Ford’s accusations surfaced, his first response in private was to liken Kavanaugh’s plight to his own.
To the shock of just about everyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump stayed on message. At his first public appearance following the twin talks from Stepien and Conway, he addressed the Kavanaugh situation with the most delicate touch imaginable. “Brett Kavanaugh, and I’m not saying anything about anybody else, Brett Kavanaugh is one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing or meeting,” the president said at a rally in Las Vegas. “So, we’ll let it play out, and I think everything is going to be just fine. This is a high-quality person,” he added. (Speaking to Sean Hannity before the rally, Trump did question why Ford’s story hadn’t been reported to the FBI “thirty-six years ago.”)
Similarly, the president showed discipline in deleting “Red Wave” from his midterm lexicon, agreeing to make the election a referendum on himself. “Get out in 2018,” he told a Missouri crowd a few days later, “because you are voting for me in 2018.”
This strategy would prove helpful to protecting and expanding the Senate majority. But it did nothing to slow the Democrats’ stampede toward control of the House. After two years of roller-coaster news cycles driven by a president who thrived on tumult and governed with a showman’s attention to shiny objects, Democrats were poised to regain the House majority by following a simple set of rules: Tailor the message to fit the district, talk about policy, and above all, don’t take Trump’s bait.
Whereas Trump sought to paint the opposition party as deviant radicals bent on the republic’s destruction, many of the most effective Democratic challengers were running as centrists, emphasizing their affection for guns and objection to the growing debt. And whereas Trump sought to make the election about himself, Democratic candidates were methodical in focusing the electorate’s energy on the alleged failures of his party: Republican tax reform that had exploded the deficit and disproportionately benefited the wealthy; Republican efforts to take away health care access from millions of people; and Republican politicians whose acquiescence to Trump had deepened the country’s partisan divide and further diminished its faith in government.
With the GOP expecting a full-frontal progressive assault on the president, leading Democrats—from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján, to the party’s biggest donors and elder statesmen—advised House candidates to run hyperlocal, nonhysterical campaigns that avoided Trump as much as possible while emphasizing independence from the national party. In dozens of cases, this meant pledging not to support Pelosi as Speaker.
It was working. All around the country, in supposedly safely red districts where Republicans had gone unchallenged for years, Democratic recruits had put the incumbents back on their heels.
The money and enthusiasm on the left had also scared dozens of other GOP incumbents into retirement, weakening the party’s defenses. Of the forty-four districts vacated by Republicans who retired, resigned, or sought higher office, Democrats aggressively targeted half of them.
The most notable Republican to call it quits was Ryan, who nonetheless insisted on serving through the year’s end to help protect the majority. The decision to stay as a lame-duck Speaker irked some in the party and uncorked a gusher of internal gossip. Kevin McCarthy felt exposed by the decision, believing that his best chance to succeed Ryan in the next Congress was to have a running start; sensing