Local columnist Bill White says he hoped for two outcomes from the recent midterm election. He hoped voters nationwide would repudiate President Donald Trump, and that Lehigh Valley voters would “boot out” their local state representatives, who he called “a bunch of do-nothing chair-fillers.

“I didn’t get everything I wanted,” White told a full house at the Hot Topics luncheon in Emmaus Nov. 12, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Lehigh County. “I declared the evening a draw.”

The appearance by White, who has worked in various capacities at the Morning Call for decades, has become a post-election tradition at the League luncheon, with an informative and often humorous take on the results.

He said the “blue wave” that had been predicted by pundits before the election “didn’t amount to much more than the usual midterm election pushback” against the president’s party, at first. However, as results from close elections trickled in over the next week, “it became a bigger wave,” generated to a great extent by the unprecedented number of women running. Locally, Susan Wild, who won the election in the newly created 7th Congressional District, was a part of that phenomenon, he said.

However, on the local front, he was disappointed that most incumbents in state races, even those who refused to debate their opponents, were re-elected.

He tied what happens in the state legislature to the issue of redistricting reform, which he, and the League, has strongly supported. He praised FairDistrictsPA for doing a great job of educating voters about the need for reform, even though they failed to get a constitutional amendment adopted in time for the 2020 redistricting.

But he said the good thing about the publicity surrounding redistricting reform means people will be paying attention to the process the next time.

While the redistricting in 2010 in Pennsylvania heavily favored Republicans, White stressed that it shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “Democrats do the same thing,” he said. “We need to take it out of the hands of politicians.”

He said the two Congressional elections that took place in parts of the Lehigh Valley (one for the two-year term in the new 7th District and the one to fill the two months remaining on Charlie Dent’s term in the old 15th District) were a perfect example of the impact of gerrymandering. The 15th District was redrawn in 2010 to include more Republican voters, but no longer included the entire Lehigh Valley, while the 7th District designed by the state Supreme Court is more compact and once again includes the entire Valley.

Wild won the 7th District seat by a fairly comfortable margin, while her Republican opponent, Marty Nothstein, was leading in the 15th District race. The result wasn’t final at the time of White’s talk.

Nothstein ultimately lost, so remains on Lehigh Count y Council.

White called the way Trump behaved in the run-up to the election disheartening. He was “more interested in shoring up his base” than in supporting his party, he said.

He said he “sees conservative values being abandoned” in the direction Trump and his supporters are taking the Republican party.

When asked if he could think of any positive things the Trump administration has done, he couldn’t come up with anything other than the strong economy, and he said that started before Trump took office.

“I have a hard time getting past the coarsening of everything,” he said.

He said he knows former Ohio governor John Kasich is thinking about a primary challenge to Trump in 2020, as is former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake.

He also said he favors a number of reforms in the way elections are run, such as open primaries, term limits, making Election Day a holiday, measures to make voter registration easier, not harder, and allowing voters to rank their preferences in primary elections.

The Lehigh County League of Women Voters holds its Hot Topics luncheons the second Monday of every month, September through April, at the Superior Restaurant in Emmaus. The Dec. 10 speaker will be Lehigh County Executive Phillips Armstrong.

For information on future luncheons, go to lwvlehighcounty.org.