Will Trump be curbed or emboldened?
A lot is riding on the upcoming midterm elections – for Trump’s presidency and for the Democrats’ chances of unseating him in 2020. Henry Cooke reports.
United States President Donald Trump wields an incredible amount of power. He’s president, of course, but his Republican Party also holds majorities in the US Senate, the House of Representatives, and state governments across the country. That means the party can write laws, pass them, choose how to enact them, and even draw the borders of where people can vote for them in the years ahead.
That power has not quite been used to its full extent yet. But that could all change in about a fortnight when Americans vote on November 7 (NZ time) in the ‘‘midterm’’ elections – so-called because they are held every four years near the midpoint of a president’s four-year term of office.
If the Democratic Party wins control of the House or Senate, Trump’s lawmaking agenda will be promptly put on ice. New investigations into his conduct in office would begin almost immediately – and possibly proceedings for impeachment.
However, if Trump’s party retains control over these bodies – or even gains seats – he would be extremely emboldened, both to boss around moderates in his own party and to use the public mandate of the win to do anything else he pleases to the country and
world.
What do voters care about?
From here in New Zealand, it might seem like all that matters in US politics is Trump.
To a certain extent, his presidency is the defining narrative in American politics. It’s probably a big part of the reason Democrats have such a huge fundraising advantage now. The party hold two-thirds of all the cash donated to House candidates this cycle, the biggest advantage in modern history. In the 69 most competitive House races, Democrats have raised US$252 million to the Republicans’ US$172m. (It pays to note that 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton outraised Trump too.)
It’s also likely to be a factor in why so many women are running for the Democrats this year – this is the president who once boasted about grabbing women by the genitals, remember.
But every election this year is technically local. US congresspeople and senators often run campaigns at odds with their party line to better suit their area’s voters and issues. Trump is not on the ballot. But big issues like healthcare and education are.
Many House Democratic candidates have swung left on healthcare, promising something closer to what we have in New Zealand, with public health coverage for every single American. Republicans have swung somewhat to the left as well in many states, promising to protect insurance for people with pre-existing conditions – one of the key tenets of the healthcare plan launched by former president Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ‘‘Obamacare’’.
Immigration is a big issue too, with Trump explicitly calling this the ‘‘caravan’’ election – pointing to two groups of migrants from
Central America moving through Mexico, who Republicans say feature Islamic terrorists intent on reaching the United States. (The Associated Press news agency notes there is no evidence of terrorists in the caravan.)
On the other side, quite a few House Democrats have signed up to the ‘‘Abolish ICE’’ movement – basically arguing that the US’ immigration and customs enforcement agency has become so brutal and xenophobic it needs to be disbanded.
And tensions over the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court continue to roil both sides.
There are also wider trends at work other than those involving Trump. Simple demographics and the increasing likelihood of people with college degrees to vote Democrat have made a lot of rich suburbs on the outskirts of major cities that usually vote Republican more competitive this year.
Take California’s 25th district in northern Los Angeles – a rich, well-educated, majority-white zone of people who have sent a Republican to Congress every election since 1993.
But Hillary Clinton won this district by 6.7 points – and the young Democratic challenger Katie Hill was four points ahead of her Republican rival in the latest poll. Not every suburb will vote for the Democrats (suburbs basically won Trump’s election in 2016, and it’s a big country), but they will be a factor in whatever happens.
There’s also the wider historical trend of midterm votes ‘‘moderating’’ the party in the White House: Obama lost the House in 2010, as did thenpresident George W Bush in 2006, and then-president Bill Clinton in 1994.
The most likely scenario
Frustratingly for pundits, the story of the midterm elections is at this stage looking like a bit of a mixed bag. Democrats are strongly favoured to win the House – but they are likely to actually lose seats in the Senate. The main reason for this is that the Senate and House are on different timetables.
All 435 House seats are up for re-election every two years, meaning all the country is getting a chance to vote for the composition of the House, and polls have the Democrats wellplaced across the whole country in those races, with a 13-point national lead in one poll this month.
Meanwhile, senators serve six-year terms, meaning just 35 of the 100 seats are up for reelection – and the selection of seats up for grabs is not very favourable for the Democrats.
The blues are playing defence much more than offence against the Republican reds. Of the 35 seats up for re-election, 26 are held by Democrats (or independents allied with them) already. Ten of those senators come from states that voted for Trump in 2016, so a lot of work is going into just making sure they keep those numbers up.
On the other side of the ledger, Republicans are defending just nine seats, and five of them are in states extremely unlikely to vote Democrat this year – Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Mississippi. Thanks to VicePresident Mike Pence holding the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, the Republicans also keep control if the Senate ends up at 50/50.
But the bad odds don’t make it impossible. The Democrats just need a net gain of two seats to win control. So if they retain control of every seat they currently hold – a tall task, to be sure – and also manage to flip purple states like Arizona and Nevada, they can do it.
Or they could lose one of those states they currently hold, like North Dakota, and pull off a massive upset in Texas, where long-shot candidate Beto O’Rourke has raised millions of dollars and is nipping at incumbent Senator Ted Cruz’s heels. These things are possible – but long shots.
It’s also entirely possible the Republicans do not lose control of the House. The Democratic coalition relies on ethnic minorities and young people, who usually don’t turn out to vote in non-presidential years in the kinds of numbers old white people do. Turnout in the last midterm election in 2014 was just 36.4 per cent, and polling suggests that number was even lower for Hispanic voters and young people.
Other fundamentals are also in good shape for the Republicans: the economy is booming, unemployment is very low, and in many battleground states, the House districts were drawn by Republicans to favour their own party.
(Those borders are themselves on the ballot, as the lines are to be redrawn after the census in 2020, and lots of state legislators voted on now will still be in place then.)
What does it mean for 2020?
The midterms are something of a testing ground for the Democratic hopefuls looking to take on Trump as the presidential nominee in two years.
None of them say it, of course. Democratic Senator Kamala Harris of California recently went to Iowa for a campaign trip, but she said she just wanted to get the vote up there. That Iowa is one of the key early-voting states in the Democratic Primary? Nothing to do with it! New Jersey Senator Cory Booker managed to make it there too, as did Vermont Senator and 2016 hopeful Bernie Sanders.
Outside of Iowa but very clearly considering a run are former VP Joe Biden and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who are both campaigning hard this year in the midterms.
Several races will be used as a testing ground for different electoral approaches, particularly in swing states. Florida, which has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1992, has a very tight governor’s race as a test case. Democrat Andrew Gillum is running well to the left of how people usually run in Florida – advocating for an expansion of public healthcare, some form of abolishing ICE, and a higher minimum wage. If he wins in two weeks many Democrats will take it as a signal to run 2020 campaigns focused firmly on Left-wing issues, not just an opposition to Trump. If he loses, people may read the opposite.
This year also acts as something of a set-up race for an attempt by the Democrats to retake the Senate in 2020, even though the party is unlikely to secure a majority this year. But if it wants to manage a majority in 2020, it will need to hold on to a lot of those seats it is now defending.