“This is a political earthquake the likes of which I haven’t seen since 1994,” Joe Scarborough said after Democrats won majorities in both the House and Senate.
The MS NOW host and former Republican congressman argued that the midterm results had altered the direction of national politics. Republicans had controlled Washington for the previous two years. Now, he said, Democrats would dominate Congress.
The geographic breadth of the result drove his assessment. In Kansas, a minister became the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat since 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt first won the White House. Texas elected a Hispanic woman as governor and a Christian seminarian to the Senate. Georgia voters chose a Black woman as governor, while a Paralympic basketball star returned Iowa to the Democratic column.
The Wall Street Journal described historic Democratic advances into deeply Republican states. The New York Times called the upsets across the country a national rebuke to Donald Trump. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote that the outcome “seemed something far more consequential” than an ordinary midterm swing and that the president’s “hold on national politics finally gave way”.
Why 1994 is the comparison
Scarborough entered the House in 1995 after winning Florida’s 1st congressional district with 61 percent of the vote. He was the first Republican to represent the Florida Panhandle since Reconstruction. His victory formed part of the Republican Revolution, which gave the party a House majority for the first time in 40 years.
He served from 1995 to 2001, winning 72 percent in his 1996 re-election and facing only write-in opposition in 1998 and 2000. His committee work included Armed Services, Judiciary, Government Reform and Education. He also signed the Contract with America.
That background makes his comparison personal as well as numerical. He was part of the class that displaced a long-standing Democratic majority. This time, he was commenting from the other side of the partisan divide, having left the Republican Party to become an independent in 2017.
A warning for the winners
Scarborough’s prescription for Democrats was terse: affordability. He said they should concentrate on reducing the prices of gas, groceries and rent. He also called for affordable healthcare to be treated as a right rather than a luxury.
He distinguished that agenda from a campaign against Trump. The House Oversight Committee could pursue its investigations, he said, but the rest of Congress should avoid impeachment and focus on the cost of living for working Americans.
His own record illustrates the change in his political position. During his congressional career, he received a 95 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union in June 2000 and voted to impeach Bill Clinton in December 1998. In August 2016, he urged Republicans to “dump Donald Trump” as their presidential nominee.
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff struck a different note while addressing supporters after his re-election: “You doubted whether our republic would survive. Let tonight’s results give you courage.”
Scarborough now co-hosts Morning Joe with Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. He first secured the hosting role in July 2007 after joining a rotation of presenters auditioning for the programme that May.
Sources
- Joe Scarborough: This is a political earthquake the likes of which I haven’t seen since 1994
- Joe Scarborough
- Joe Scarborough Calls Trump’s Axed Rally Excuse a ‘Lie’ — Reveals What GOP Insiders Told Him
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- Dan Dakich reacts to MS NOW host Joe Scarborough's Pat McAfee take: 'They look like idiots'
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Photo: NBC News (CC BY-SA 4.0)
