" While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled.

Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.

As I always say, in politics, what is supposed to happen tends to happen. I predicted in August that the Democrats would take the House but that alone was not enough for most Democrats. As much as this year’s midterms offered an obvious opportunity to rebuke President Donald Trump, little of what the arrogant Democrats and members of the mainstream media expected would happen actually did.

So much of what they said turned out to be wrong that it will take a while before the significance becomes clear. And if the 2018 midterms prove anything, it is that Trump is standing strong, while Democrats and their allies who thought Trump would have been affirmatively rejected are in fact the ones who have themselves been denied.

Democrats have underperformed in comparison with the historical markers and general expectations of a midterm cycle. The president’s party loses 37 seats in the House on average in midterm elections when his approval is below 50 percent — but Democrats aren’t projected to pick up nearly that many seats.

No liberal will want to admit it, but Trump is an asset to the Republican Party, while President Barack Obama was a disaster for the Democratic Party.

Let the message be clear: Voters had a chance to repudiate Trump, and they did not. Much of the commentariat has said this year’s elections are about who we are as a country and what America is all about. Well, a lot of America seems to be about supporting Trump. The Democrats thought Trump’s negatives would be enough to propel them to victory. The 2018 results show it is clear they need a different plan if they think they can win in 2020.

The midterms largely followed the conventional wisdom of how midterms are supposed to go. The president’s party lost some seats, but by and large what happened was far from the blue-wave rebuke that Democrats and their allies in the media said was going to happen.

So if the midterms were supposed to be bad for the GOP and all eyes were on Trump this year, the big question is whether anything about Tuesday night’s results supports the idea that Trump was a weight on Republican candidates.

Is Trumpism a political blight on the Republican Party? The answer is that Trumpism is a net plus. What that says about the GOP and America is unclear. But for the purposes of the 2018 midterms, Trump is a winner.

Trump and his allies have an appeal that the elites in New York and Hollywood cannot dismiss or combat. All of the 2018 Democratic heartthrobs lost. That must sap the enthusiasm of the resistance. For the most part, when voters had to decide, the angry left was rejected and Trump was rewarded.

" The Republican president, considered a lightweight and an ignoramus by many in Washington, suffered a setback in the off-year elections, losing several seats and effective control in the House, while maintaining and perhaps strengthening his party in the Senate. His leverage on domestic issues is reduced, but he retains the initiative on foreign policy and judgeships.

That’s a fair description of this week’s off-year elections — and of those in 1982, the last time voters paired a Republican president with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate. It also resembles results in 1962, when a Democratic president’s party gained four Senate seats and lost four in the House.

We know what happened after 1982 and 1962. The economy boomed, and Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, won landslide victories two years later. Voters then remembered the Depression and World War II, and they rewarded incumbents in time of peace and prosperity.

Voters today have no memory of those events, and there hasn’t been a presidential landslide since Reagan’s in 1984. Donald Trump, ace polarizer, is certainly not going to win one. Nor, Tuesday’s results suggest, is he likely to be beaten in one, either.

Senate results support that point. At this writing, Republicans gained three seats in heavily Trump states (Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota), held a solid lead in Florida and a shaky one in Arizona, while losing one seat in Nevada. Their majority, rising from 51-49 to 54-46 or 55-45, looks maintainable into the 2020s.

The three defeated Democrats and Florida’s Bill Nelson voted against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, while West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the one Democrat voting aye on Kavanaugh, held on to win by 3 percent. Senate races seem to have become contests to determine who gets on the Supreme Court. Similarly, one issue helping the apparent Republican gubernatorial winner in Florida, Ron DeSantis, is that he can appoint a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court. Courts making public policy can expect to be held accountable politically.

Democrats did gain a majority in the House, but the blue wave was a gentle wash, not a tsunami, aided by redistricting. In 1982, about half the Democrats’ 26-seat gain came from redistricting; this year, about a half dozen did, from post-2012 court-forced remapping in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. Pending final results, it appears Democrats have gained 30 to 35 seats in the House, for a total of around 230. That’s well behind Republicans’ 63-seat gain to 242 in the Tea Party year of 2010.

This was a Whole Foods wave, with about two-thirds (by my count) of Democratic gains coming in upscale and suburban districts dominated by high-income college graduates. Upscale suburbs in the Northeast, on the West Coast and in many Midwestern metro areas started trending Democratic in the 1990s. In 2016 and again this year, similar parts of metro areas in the South — Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas and even Oklahoma City — started doing so.

Other subgroups of what Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg dubbed “America ascendant” have not moved as sharply to the Democrats. Black turnout seems not to have been robust, even in Florida and Georgia, where black governor nominees Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were lavished with favorable media coverage. Both ran behind their poll numbers.

Hispanics voted 69 to 29 percent Democratic, according to the CNN exit poll. But if anything, that’s better for Republicans than in pre-Trump years. As for young people, the 2018 exit poll pegs under-30s as 13 percent of the electorate, about the same as in other years.

Overall turnout was robust, as expected, but among Republicans as well as Democrats, whose party identification edge was an unremarkable 37 to 33 percent. This confirms polls that show the Kavanaugh controversy raised Republicans’ enthusiasm to Democrats’ already high levels.

Democrats have to be disheartened by the defeats of Senate candidates Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Gillum in Florida and Abrams in Georgia. (Although the Florida race could be headed for a recount.) The nation’s second-, third- and eighth-most populous states are not yet tilting as Democratic as the states from which their new residents have fled.

“The prayers of both could not be answered,” Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. “That of neither has been answered fully.” So it is with this off-year election, in which candidates and voters re-litigated the astounding but now familiar presidential election of 2016.

If Donald Trump hasn’t shown he can improve on his 46 percent of the popular vote, the kind of candidates that Democratic primary voters prefer haven’t shown they can improve on Hillary Clinton’s 232 electoral votes. On to 2020. "