It’s one of the most important political trends in decades: years and years of losses at the ballot box for the Democratic Party, both in Congress and at the state level across the country.
And when did it start? When Barack Obama became president.
“One almost feels sorry for the Democrats,” said Lee Edwards, a courtly gentleman historian at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.
Edwards told CBN News huge Republican wins on Election Day 2015 just add to the 2010 Tea Party revolution and 2014’s election night.
“Which was a GOP tsunami,” Edwards commented. “And yet this White House and Democrats are trying to put on a happy face and say ‘Well, this is terrific and we’re going to look forward to what’s going to happen in 2016.'”
But President Obama will leave his party in much worse shape than he found it. And the actual numbers show it in stark detail.
When Obama took office in 2009, Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers in Congress, with Nancy Pelosi as House speaker and Harry Reid running the Senate. More than half the state governors were Democrats, and in state legislatures, Democrats had full control in 27 states.
Today, after nearly seven years of Obama as president, Democrats have lost 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 U.S. House seats, 12 state governorships and a whopping 910 seats in state legislatures. And now, the GOP controls both the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature in 24 states.
“This president said, ‘I’m going to be a transformational president.’ Well it seems to be what he’s done is to transform the Democratic Party into a minority party. And that’s not a transformation the Democrats want,” Edwards said.
As a student of political history, Edwards has studied U.S. presidents in-depth.
He said of Obama, “He’s the most self-absorbed president that we’ve had in modern times, maybe in American history. He believes in himself so deeply that he does not listen to and look at the returns at the ballot box. I’m sure Democrats from the House and the Senate are saying to him, ‘Look, can’t we maybe take a second look at these issues?'”
But White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s comments after the latest round of Democratic losses show that the administration isn’t backing down on its liberal positions.
“There have been other Democrats that have sought to run on this agenda, and they’ve been served well by making that decision,” Earnest told the White House press corps.
But that agenda – including issues like Obamacare and gun control – failed to help Democrats in key elections November 3 where Republicans kept control of the state Senate in Virginia and took the governor’s mansion in Kentucky for only the second time in decades.
Still, Obama has stuck with his policies no matter how much they’ve hurt his own party. And Edwards said there’s a reason for that – the president’s utter faith that he’s right.
“He’s stuck in believing himself to be the most brilliant president maybe since Thomas Jefferson,” the Heritage historian said.
Like all presidents, Obama wanted a strong, positive historical legacy. But the reality is, a major part of his legacy will be his own party decimated by years of historic election losses, both in the nation’s capital and across the country.
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