The fight ahead for progressives

President Obama told the Democrats not to be apathetic. They were. If Republicans do win, the next two years will be fraught with the same nonsense the GOP has been pushing for the last ten years. They won. And it won’t be an easy battle, as evidenced from the history of midterm elections for the last one-hundred years. There are already signs of this from the mouths of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.

In 1938, even after his landslide reelection victory in 1936, FDR suffered a setback after overestimating his persuasive powers when attempting a “court packing” scheme that even Democrats opposed. He was going for a “Third New Deal" when the economy took a big downturn, while at the same time he was unsuccessfully trying to purge conservative Democrats from his party who were fighting his policies.

While Obama hasn’t taken the latter approach yet, the Democratic Party did desert many of its own in the midterms when it was obvious they couldn’t win.

Read more here.

More history to come.