2017 was Democrats’ no-good, very bad year

The prognosticators had it wrong from the beginning. 

First, democrats and the mainstream media predicted Donald Trump wouldn’t win the presidency. The famed FiveThirtyEight blog run by Nate Silver wrongly predicted Hillary Clinton had a 72 percent chance of winning. Even Reuters admitted that they and others got it wrong when they forecast Hillary’s chances as high as 99 percent, thus giving Trump a mere 1 percent chance to squeak out a victory. They were all wrong right up until election night, when Trump scored the largest upset in American history.

{mosads}Next, democrats and the mainstream media predicted he wouldn’t make it to Inauguration Day, engaging in an eleventh-hour campaign to sway electoral college votes against him. (As it turns out, more electoral college votes were cast against Hillary than Trump).

Then, the mainstream media and other analysts predicted that within days of Donald Trump taking office, the stock market would tank and widespread financial panic would spread across the globe in contagion.

Citibank predicted that a Trump victory would tank the stock market by three to five percent. It never happened. 

Economist Paul Krugman predicted that markets would be “plunging” and a Trump inauguration would all but guarantee “a global recession, with no end in sight.” It never happened.

In fact, when the markets did go up in an apparent “Trump bump” in the days before Inauguration, a CNBC analyst barely gave Trump credit and suggested that while the market would temporarily rise it would face a massive selloff in the days following the inauguration once the reality of a Trump presidency set in.

They were all wrong. In fact, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Within days of taking office, the stock market broke through 20,000 for the first time in American history.  By the end of Trump’s “first 100 days,” the stock market had broken through 21,000 for the first time in history and was up 14 percent. By August, it was up a whopping 20 percent. All told, the stock market experienced more than 70 record days during President Trump’s first year in office. 

As for the left’s suggestion that President Trump would cause World War III with his Tweeting? They were wrong about that, too. President Trump actually did the opposite, surprising the world by bringing together with his Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, an unlikely and unanimous coalition of nations against North Korea. The coalition for a unanimous resolution against North Korea included China and Russia, which experts said would never happen.

In the final days of 2017, President Trump won the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — the largest tax cut in American history. And like a cherry on top of Trump’s trademark two scoops of ice cream, the president managed to also repeal the individual healthcare mandate — effectively the beginning of the end of Obamacare as we know it.

 The President is #winning, just as he predicted he would.

With the exception of Doug Jones’ win in Alabama, democrats were the big losers of 2017.

The only people who had a worse year than democrats were Harvey Weinstein’s publicists. 

By miscalculating Trump, Democrats ended up sitting on the sidelines during the biggest stock market rally in American history, the largest tax cut in American history, and the most significant coalition against nuclear proliferation in the 21st century.

Sadly for democrats, they appear to be careening into the new year doubling down on their strategy of serving as “the resistance.”

Democrats are counting on the tax cut plan to backfire, especially in swing districts. But just as the above polling and predictions did not ring true, neither will this one. Instead, democrats will face a midterm election in which the economy will be booming and constituents will have more change in their pockets.

When campaign mail pieces begin to hit mailboxes ahead of November 2018, democrats won’t be able to boast that they were part of any significant “progress” in recent American history — in fact, their GOP opponents will more than happy to point out that they voted against all of it.

With no message, no fundraising success, no party unity, no viable candidates for 2020 on the horizon, and nothing left to resist other than their own economic prosperity, the resistance will prove to be disastrous for democrats in 2018.

Jen Kerns has served as a GOP strategist and writer for the U.S. presidential debates for FOX News. She previously served as communications director and spokeswoman for the California Republican Party, the Colorado Recalls over gun control, and the Prop. 8 battle over marriage which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.