Nothing special about these elections

The Democratic party is now 0-4 in special congressional elections since the inauguration of President Trump. Desperate to look like winners, the Dems invaded four Republican districts from which Trump elevated the incumbents into Cabinet positions or other federal posts, in the hope that a quickly unpopular president's coattails would drag the GOP nominees down to defeat. While all of these elections were closer than normal, in none were there enough Republicans willing to renounce their party to spite Trump. More to the point, in none were there enough Republicans willing to vote Democratic to spite Trump. They may be more confident that a Republican Congress can check Trump should he really go overboard, or they may just hate Democrats more. This losing streak actually makes the Democrats' situation look worse than it did in November. They've wasted incredible resources, including unprecedented millions in donors' money, on a set of Stalingrad like battles, obsessed with the prestige of turning a red district blue, in the hope that victory would prove that everyone sees Trump the way they do. As a result, they allow Trump to say that these elections were referenda on him, and that he won every time, when my suspicion is that they had relatively little to do with him. In some of these districts he ran well behind the congressional candidate last fall, and I doubt that many voters considered their choices in the special elections acts of loyalty to the President. The fact is that Trump with all his flaws does not give Republicans reason enough to repudiate everything they stand for by voting for a party still perceived to represent everything they oppose. All these races were longshots for the Democrats, and while I can understand their desire for a win, their faith that Trumpophobia was strong enough to win for them borders on the delusional. It seems as if they'd rather flip a red district than wait 'til next year and do the hard work necessary to win back their regular Rust Belt voters without alienating the rest of their base. There's still plenty of time to get to work on that, but an extra round or two of soul-searching may now be necessary. The opposition party in this country -- whether the Democrats or whatever might follow their crack-up -- has to mean more than opposition to Trump or opposition to "hate." This country needs a "left" to check a capitalist society's tendency toward plutocracy -- the Democrats have been sleeping on that job for some time now -- but it needs the right kind of left, and I don't know if anyone on the left has figured out what that looks like. I especially doubt if they'll find what it looks like in Republican congressional districts.