Perspective from the 19th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
After a hard-fought election, including the national mid-term yesterday, it’s tempting to draw huge conclusions.
But, to me, such conclusions represent steps too far, at least until we see how winners use their platforms to govern.
- Were election results a tsunami as some national news outlets have suggested? Too early to tell.
- Did Democrats produce a seismic triumph in the elections. Yes, but too soon to tell whether the earthquakes continue.
- Were the results a blistering rebuke of Trump, resetting the balance of power in Washington, D.C.? If so, good.
- Is the country headed in an entirely new direction? We’ll see.
The New York Times has it right this morning when it writes this:
“The country still faces many long-term problems to which neither party has offered clear solutions. And over the next two years, while Trump remains president, Congress and judges will need to be prepared to counter further attempts by him to undermine the constitutional order.
“Nonetheless, this is a day to feel pride. Aspiring authoritarians often use legislative elections to cement their power and further undermine democracy. In 2026, the American people refused to allow Trump to do so. The system has held.”
The Times added that three groups deserve special credit for the results: Election workers, legal advocates, and judges.
“Election workers did their jobs this year in the face of relentless pressure from Trump. He has long claimed that widespread fraud decides American elections, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Election workers across party lines responded to these lies by doing their jobs as diligently as they long have, helping people cast their ballots and counting those ballots.”
Further, when Trump tried to interfere in the elections — through executive orders that sought to complicate voter registration, bar states from counting some mail, and direct the Postal Service to decide which voters would receive mail ballots — advocates quickly responded by filing lawsuits.
And judges upheld the rule of law, not Trumpism.
Atlantic Magazine put it this way:
“Trump has been forced to face his political mortality. He asked voters to make these mid-term elections a referendum on him, to imagine that his name was on the ballot. They listened — and then rejected him. It is a stunning, widespread rebuke.”
The Washington Post went on record in favor of compromise as Democrats take control of Congress. Finding what I like to call the “smart middle” is tough to do, but hard views from the left and right are not the best solutions; the middle is the place to be, most of the time.
I’ll leave it to light night host Jimmy Kimmel to have the last word this morning – at least almost the last word.
“If you really look at Trump, his priorities are insane. They have no relation to what Americans are worried about. Americans are worried about corruption, inflation, climate change, war, wealth disparity, health care, housing, measles, and democracy itself. Now let’s take a look at the 10 subjects MAGA seems to be worried about: Transgender, testosterone, Black Helen of Troy, windmills, ballrooms. Mexicans, reflecting pools, racism against whites, Tylenol, Canada and Canada.”
And this footnote: I had hoped that, in Oregon’s governor’s race, Republican Christine Drazan would have a chance to be the first Republican governor in Oregon in 40 years. She had to run against Trump in blue Oregon, so Democrat Tina Kotek won re-election. I thought Drazan would have been a better manager of state agencies, an issue that, however important it is to me, doesn’t translate well on the campaign trail. Now, we’ll see how Kotek does on this and other issues, retaining, as she will, Democrat super-majorities in both the House and the Senate.
