D-Day for Donald
ON Tuesday, a baby-faced lawyer-turned-politician called Danny O’Connor could help decide the fate of US President Donald Trump: and the key to it all will be the voters of Dublin.
That’s Dublin, Ohio, of course.
Danny O’Connor is a fourthgeneration Irish American – his grandfathers were a police chief and a dock worker respectively – who attended Ohio’s Lehman Catholic High School and volunteered for a Jesuit charity as a lawyer. He’s made an unashamed play for the Irish-American vote in an area with strong ties to the Old Country. (To this day, Dublin, Ohio hosts what it calls the world’s biggest three-day festival of Irishness).
And if Danny O’Connor wins his battle for a seat in Congress on Tuesday, that result could well signal the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency. If Mr O’Connor loses, get ready for six more years of President Trump.
O’Connor is fighting to win Ohio’s 12th District in Tuesday’s US midterm elections. If voting goes in line with the polls, he and the Democratic Party could achieve a thumping victory against the Republicans across America. And while they can’t unseat Trump from office, they can certainly make his presidency incredibly difficult. Indeed, some argue that a big win for the Democrats on Tuesday could even see Mr Trump go to prison.
At stake is the upper hand in America’s frighteningly complex system of power. Essentially, there are three main power bases: the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives – generally just known as the House. (The generic term for both the Senate and the House is ‘Congress’ – just as the Oireachtas is the overall term for the Dáil and the Seanad here).
SO a party which controls all three has something close to absolute power: the President can propose legislation and his party majority in the Senate and the House will approve it. That’s the position US President Trump is in now: the Republicans hold the Presidency, the Senate and the House.
The problem for any president comes when the other party controls the Senate and/ or the House. They can block a measure he proposes if they don’t like it. It’s what both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had to endure during their presidencies: they were president, but because the Republicans controlled Congress, they couldn’t get much done.
And if Danny O’Connor and the Democrats win big on Tuesday, that’s the situation Mr Trump will be in too. If the Democrats win back the House, they will have a huge ability to block US President Trump’s legislative plans. If they win back the House and the Senate, they will be in an even more powerful position. As Mr Trump himself told US voters last week: ‘This election, you aren’t voting for a candidate, you’re voting for which party controls Congress. It’s a very important thing.’
And if the Democrats win really big, not only will they control the legislative agenda they would also be able to start going after Mr Trump personally. They could even begin the process of trying to have him impeached – that is, thrown out of office for misconduct. Again, Mr Trump himself told Republican supporters at a rally last week: ‘If I get impeached, it’s because you didn’t vote’.
The reality is slightly less stark: even with a majority, they would find it pretty hard to bring impeachment proceedings to a conclusion – for that, you’d need a two-thirds majority of the Senate. But the House could vote to impeach him, forcing the Senate to block that impeachment – and adding another layer of toxicity to his presidency.
And even if a Democratic majority in Congress couldn’t throw Mr Trump out of office, they could throw an unshakeable amount of mud. They could dig, dig, dig, using the force of the law and the resources of the US taxpayer. Many political controversies that have engulfed Mr Trump to date – his tax returns, past business deals, policies on immigrant children – would become the subject of full Congressional investigations.
A Democratic majority could also demand public hearings with Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr, who is a key figure in the Russia investigation. They could go after officials like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross – a
In three days, America goes to the polls – and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If the Republicans lose, President Trump could face impeachment; if they win, he’ll be looking at another SIX years in the White House. Our writer – the only journalist in Ireland to predict Trump’s presidency – tells you what to expect on...
major investor in Ireland – who has faced scrutiny over his financial dealings.
Any of these investigations – with public hearings conducted on oath – could damage Mr Trump. Potentially, they could dig up something explosive enough to unseat him. And we should bear in mind that the Republican party hierarchy has never liked Mr Trump, who they see as an obnoxious blow-in: if enough dirt was dug up by the Democrats, a good few Republicans would be happy to wash their hands of him. It would certainly make his re-election in 2020 a great deal harder.
And so far, it’s looking pretty good for the Democrats. Most polls have them six to ten points ahead; a majority of pundits are saying they should win back the House comfortably, and have an outside shot at winning the Senate too. Last Wednesday, leading Democrat Nancy Pelosi said she had gone from saying the party ‘expects to win’ to simply saying: we will win.
Besides, history is on their side. In truth, every sitting US president loses seats in the midterm elections – no matter how well they may be doing. This happened not just to Presidents Obama and Clinton, but to Republicans too – mostly in dramatic fashion. Franklin D Roosevelt, for example, lost a combined total of 126 House seats in the 1938 and 1942 midterms. Dwight D Eisenhower lost 48 House seats in 1958. Lyndon B Johnson lost 47 House seats in 1966. George W Bush ended up losing 30 House seats in 2006.
Even Republican icon Ronald Reagan lost 31 House and seven Senate seats in his two terms. It’s what happens, every time. And yet. And yet… Despite all the odds being stacked in their favour, four things should worry the Democrats.
The first is the American economy, which is booming. Just yesterday, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added 250,000 jobs in October, far above consensus estimates of 190,000. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7% – the lowest since 1969.
Perhaps even more importantly, wages grew at their fastest rate for close to a decade. While the economy isn’t usually the biggest factor in midterms, ‘jobs and the economy’ was cited more frequently than any other issue as the most important in a survey conducted in early October for The New York Times. And what’s more, Mr Trump is getting the credit. ‘The only economy in the world which is doing well is the United States,’ said Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist Ruchir Sharma this week. ‘This is as good as it gets’.
Even the Financial Times – hardly noted as a Mr Trump backer – credits his tax cuts with stimulating these record growth and confidence levels.
This means that a lot of Americans who do not personally like Trump do not want that growth agenda halted in its tracks. They want jobs and they want wage growth, and so far Mr Trump has delivered both. And so while they may talk him down in public, in the privacy of the ballot box it’ll be ‘the economy, stupid’.
The second difficulty for the Democrats is Republican incumbency. As with our own presidential election, starting the race as the incumbent – which the Republicans mostly are – gives them an advantage. Specifically, it means they helped draw the new electoral boundaries last time around, enabling them to make sure they are able to squeeze the most out of every Republican vote. Put together, this means that the Democrats could win the popular vote by quite a margin – but still not do well enough to win back either of the Houses of Congress.
The third issue is race. In the last week, Trump has made a major push on issues surrounding race and immigration. He has talked about using his power to end the automatic right of anyone born in the US to be an American citizen. He has talked about making it far harder to claim asylum. And he has sent thousands of US Army troops to the border with Mexico – ostensibly in response to a caravan trail of South American immigrants who are heading north. In reality, of course, it’s just a very potent way of suggesting to ordinary Americans that hordes of barbarians are descending on their country’s borders – and that only by voting Republican can they stop this tide.
AND the fourth, of course, is Mr Trump himself. The US President recently put out a video collection of a vast array of pundits recorded during 2015 and 2016 saying – categorically – he couldn’t possibly win the presidency. Even as polls closed two years ago, pretty much every analyst in the country was saying that Hillary Clinton had won. The truth is that most polls simply underestimate the extent to which people who don’t support Mr Trump in public will still go out and vote for him when the crunch comes.
Tuesday’s election is a national one, with thousands of different local issues that may tip the balance one way or another. But rust belt states like Ohio are critical for the future. It was those states that won the last election for Mr Trump: and generally those voters have seen things improve. No, their mines and steel mills haven’t all reopened: but for the first time they have a president who seems to give a damn about them, and things are getting slowly better – so why would they switch sides now?
That’s why Danny O’Connor’s battle for the 12th District of Ohio is so crucial.
Last time out, he lost the seat by less than 1%: if he can win this time, it suggests enough of a swing to the Democrat side to ensure that his party takes control of Congress – and potentially puts a halt to Trumpism. But if Danny Boy can’t overturn that deficit, it would suggest that the American people have once again decided to back US President Trump and his vow to Make America Great Again.
And if Trump pulls another victory from the jaws of defeat, he may well prove politically unstoppable in the future.