Now You Can See Everything

Okay.

So on the midterms, for the last couple of years, a lot of our clients and a lot of investors have wondered how voters would respond to the various unorthodoxies of this second Trump presidency.

And now that the midterms are over, you can see everything, which is the name of that Holmes movie.

It's a route.

The New York Times is projecting 52 Democratic senators as of midnight, plus two independents that caucus with the Democrats and 253 House members, Democratic House members.

And there have been four midterm elections since 1910 in which the president's party had controlled both chambers and then lost them.

Now there's five with this one.

But just to show you the magnitude of it, the first time it happened was in 1910 when the Democrats lost both chambers.

Wartime inflation hit 18%.

You had a Spanish flu.

Wilson break some truce he had in Congress.

So there's a lot going on then.

In 1946, the Democrats lost.

There was a post-war shortage of goods, meat, and housing because you had the end of wartime price controls and subsidies.

And so prices were skyrocketing.

And voters didn't like that.

In 1954, the Republicans, in Eisenhower's first term, the Republicans lost both chambers during the midterms.

And a partial reason why, apparently, was voter backlash against the Senator McCarthy Red Scare, for those of you that remember reading about that.

Interesting little fun fact, McCarthy's legal advisor was henchman Roy Cohn, who was a mentor and advisor for the first decade of Donald Trump's real estate career.

And then in 1994, The Democrats lost both chambers.

You had the Gingrich Contract of America.

And then Clinton ran into trouble.

The health care bill failed.

And then he passed the free trade agreement and the crime bill.

And that alienated some Democratic voters.