According to a majority, Republicans are poised to take control of the US House of Representatives and possibly the US Senate after the midterm congressional elections in November. If current projections hold, the Republican Party will gain between twenty and thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives, giving them their largest majority since the late 1920s at the top of that range. A general reading of the numbers, along with Democrats facing serious structural realities and national headwinds, suggests that even the current 50-50 Democratic majority in the Senate is in serious jeopardy.
But this isn’t a post about the midterm horse race or an analysis of what it might mean for policy in the next Congress — it’s an early warning to both parties to be cautious in their responses to what may happen on November 8. Both parties can misunderstand what voters are telling them with their ballots — or lack of ballots — and the consequences of getting the wrong message from the public are far more serious than who controls the legislative branch for the next two years.
The Diamonstein-Spielvogel project on the future of democracy
If the electoral scenario described above plays out, many Republicans will crow about their “victory,” with midterm results to confirm their recent direction and, in turn, to confirm that Trumpism remains not only successful, but beneficial to their future. While it’s true that some candidates supported by Donald Trump lost primaries, he still scored around .700 in races not involving Republican incumbents (a more reliable measure given that the front-runners tend to have a lot of advantages).
Renewing America
Ideas and initiatives to restore America’s economic power.
Ideas and initiatives for renewing America’s economic strength.
But there’s a big difference between winning — having voters say “I like X or Y about Republicans” — and simply not losing. And the truth is that while midterms can give Republicans the appearance of victory, the election results are far more likely to be tied to Democratic defeats. This may interest you : Meretz’s problem is not identity politics, it is symbolism. Despite poll after poll showing Republicans on their way to a large majority, figures released last week showed Republicans in Congress had just 23 percent support, with 68 percent disapproving. That they are considered the lesser of two evils is no cause for celebration, and in no way should it be confirmation that the party is on the right track.
Democrats risk learning unfounded lessons from the midterm elections. When Republicans lost presidential races in 2008 and 2012 (with Democrats gaining congressional seats at the same time), many on the right argued that their candidates were simply “not conservative enough.” If Republicans ran more to the right, the party would be rewarded with victory, their argument went. A similar dynamic is likely to emerge among many Democrats after midterm defeats. The hard-left fringe of the party, once confined to Dennis Kucinich’s Iowa caucuses, has gone mainstream within the party, with entities like “The Squad” gaining increasing influence. While the argument that Democrats should move further to the left may be seductive to a growing number of party members, broad opinion polling suggests that this is not actually a sensible path to take. President Joe Biden and his advisers are no doubt aware of this, but with recent numbers showing Biden doing extremely poorly among Democrats, and with 94 percent of all voters under the age of thirty (leaning to the left) , says they would rather have another candidate, moving to the center is a risky political proposition.
There will be an even more poisonous temptation on the Democratic side to blame their losses on state election rules, which in recent months have been labeled “voter suppression,” saying those rules decided the outcome of the election. To be clear, for the purposes of this discussion, I am not taking a position one way or the other regarding these laws. They are an extremely complex mosaic of complex state-level efforts that require much more in-depth analysis. But no matter how one views these actions in the states, the reality is that Democrats have broad handicaps — inflation at levels not seen since the early 1980s, Biden’s staggering unpopularity, a slew of retiring officeholders, and the fact , that any given president’s party tends to lose about two dozen seats in the midterms — suggesting they’re on track for significant losses regardless of the new election rules. After the 2020 election, Trump and the majority of House Republicans seriously threatened the foundations of America’s democratic system and the rule of law with their despicable “stop the theft” efforts, with disastrous results. For Democrats to continue this erosion in 2022 — with what little evidence there is that these laws have changed the outcome of any race — is playing with truly dangerous fire.
Why worry about it now, a hundred days after November?
The Diamonstein-Spielvogel project on the future of democracy
Because cooler heads on both sides should start thinking hard today about how they will handle not only their immediate post-election rhetoric, but also how the results will affect their governing strategies in 2023 and 2024. Will their parties in the short term benefited from accepting some of the above misinterpretations are the wrong question. The real question that party leaders must grapple with is what effect their actions, if rooted in these misconceptions, will have in widening and deepening the chasm that separates the “two Americas,” further extending the downward spiral that poses a potential existential threat to the American experiment.
