Will US reject Trumpism?
It has been 728 days since the United States elected Donald Trump as president. Now it finally has a chance to decide how it feels about him. Henry Cooke reports from Washington.
Two years ago this week Americans went to the polls and elected Donald Trump president. The political world has been in chaos ever since. Scandals that would once have seen weeks of coverage fade into irrelevance in days. The United States has gone from a champion of the liberal free-trade-loving world order to one of its fiercest critics.
Daily news reports chronicle factionalism and dysfunction within the White House, where officials are hired and fired at a rapid rate, and you can reportedly stop the president doing something by stealing papers from his desk. A woman protesting against white supremacists was killed by a white supremacist, and the president said there was blame on ‘‘both sides’’.
And yet, away from DC, life has gone on. The economy has continued a massive upswing, with unemployment low and wages on the rise. The Republicans, who have absolute power over the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, has not achieved its ideological goals of dismantling Obamacare or social security. The lights are still on.
Now, 728 days later, the country finally has a chance to decide how it feels about Trump, with the midterm elections today.
Technically, Trump isn’t on the ballot. Midterm elections happen in between presidential election years, deciding the fate of all 435 House of Representatives members, about a third of the Senate, and many governorships and state houses.
That means that, while Trump will still be president tomorrow, he could lose all power to change laws or spend serious amounts of money, as the House and Senate have power over that. He could also find himself under a level of investigation outstripping everything that has come before, with impeachment far from impossible.
What’s at stake
The big prizes today are majorities in the House and the Senate. Currently, Republicans have majorities in both, with 51 seats of the 100-seat Senate and 235 seats of the 435-seat House.
Every single House seat is up for re-election this year. These work a bit like our own seats in New Zealand, and are distributed roughly proportionately to population: so California has 53 seats, while Alaska has just one.
If you believe the polling, the Democrats look very likely to pick up the 21 extra seats needed for a majority in the House today. Recent ‘‘generic ballot’’ polls show a 10-point lead for the party across the country, and polls in battleground areas show the Democrats ahead in many of them too. Those battlegrounds are increasingly in well-educated suburban areas long held by the Republicans – most of the very urban seats are considered ‘‘safe’’ for Democrats while the really rural ones are ‘‘safe’’ for Republicans. I’ve visited several of those blue-leaning suburban seats in the past few weeks, and one of the consistent themes that came across was of embarrassment.
The Senate is a very different story, despite the fact the Democrats need just two more senators to take control. Indeed, the Democrats could easily lose more ground in the Senate, even if the country as a whole swings more behind the Democrats. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that the Senate is not proportional like the House is: every single state gets two senators, so a tiny Republican state like Wyoming with a population not much larger than Wellington gets the same number of votes as the Democratic stronghold of California, where almost 40 million people live.
The second is the timetable. Senators serve six-year terms, so just 35 are up for re-election this
year. And it is an extremely rough map for the Democrats, as they are playing defence far more than offence. The party already holds 26 of the seats up for re-election, of which 10 are in states that voted for Trump in 2016, some by up to 19 points. Meanwhile, the Republicans are defending only nine seats, of which just one is in a state that went to Hillary Clinton in 2016 – Nevada.
This atrocious map has led to the Democrats widening their field of attack and going after some more long-shot races in Texas and Tennessee, all while playing some serious defence elsewhere. Given they are bound to lose at least one current senator – probably Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota – they will need to win Nevada, Arizona, and one of those longshots to gain control.
A referendum on Trump? Kind of
Obviously, every single race is local. The Senate particularly favours maverick candidates able to buck their party and appear bipartisan – that’s why the Democrats in Trump states such as Missouri are still competitive.
But these are races for national office, and voters understand that. The president himself has described the race as a referendum on his time in office. At other times he’s described it as a kind of apocalyptic precipice, saying that Democrats, if elected, will open the borders and unleash waves of crime. (His main campaign slogan has been ‘‘Jobs not mobs’’.) Meanwhile, his main opposition on the campaign trail, former president Barack Obama, has also described it as a referendum on Trumpism, a chance for the US to push back into ‘‘reality-based governance’’.
In terms of national issues, nothing has come close to healthcare and immigration. Despite the booming economy, and a godsend of a jobs report in the middle of the campaign, Trump has been far more keen to talk about the ‘‘caravan’’ of migrants on its way to the southern border than he has about the economy.
He’s said Democrats want to open up US borders completely, allow illegal immigrants to vote, and even implied the Left has been supporting the caravan financially. None of this is backed by any evidence, but Democrats do have a more liberal outlook on immigration than Republicans. Trump’s rhetoric on this issue has risen to such a level that CNN, NBC, and Fox News have stopped playing his latest ad on the topic because they view it as too offensive.
On the other side of the ledger, the Democrats have been desperate to talk about healthcare above all else. Indeed, topics like the Russian election meddling and other corruption allegations have barely got a look in.
Surprisingly, the Democrats’ 2010 healthcare reform, known as ‘‘Obamacare’’, which subsidises health insurance for a lot of low-income people and prevents insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions, has become very popular as Republicans have tried and failed to dismantle it.
The pre-existing conditions protection is now politically untouchable, leading to Republicans all over the country promising to keep it, including the president. And yet the Republican incumbents can’t escape their multiple votes to repeal the law, meaning Democrats have lots of ammo for attack ads.
Polls suggest healthcare is the most important issue for voters, but immigration is not far behind.
The money and the early vote
Two other signs are giving Democrats confidence: fundraising and the early vote.
The Democrats have massively outstripped the Republicans for fundraising this cycle, mostly from small donors and probably on the back of antiTrump sentiment. The Democrats and their allied outside groups will spend roughly US$2.5 billion this cycle, well above the Republicans’ US$2.2b. Their biggest advantage is in the House, their most likely target. In the 69 most competitive House races, Democrats have raised US$252m to Republicans’ US$172m. This huge spend means that basically every ad on American TV in certain states right now is political, as are all the ads on social media.
There’s also the early vote. Democrats typically suffer in midterms thanks to their core constituencies – the young and ethnic minorities – not bothering to turn out and vote. This election their people seem to be coming out, particularly in Florida and Georgia, two states where a popular AfricanAmerican has a good chance of becoming governor. (The logic goes that people turn out to vote for the governor’s race then end up voting for other Democrats down the ticket.)
As of the day before the election, 36m people had voted, well above the total early vote in the last midterms of 21m. Three key states for the Democrats – Arizona, Texas, and Nevada – have surpassed the total vote from last time, all with early voting. Young people seem to be driving that surge: in Nevada and Texas, there are five times the number of voters under 30 than in the last midterms.
And yet, early vote tea-leaf reading is remarkably hard. You cannot tell how many of those people would have voted anyway, and simply showed up early because it was more convenient. And the race may have energised Trump voters to come out and defend him.
There’s another reason to believe the Democrats are going to have a good night. Trump himself has started to set up a narrative whereby any loss is not his fault, noting repeatedly that he’s ‘‘not running’’ but that he has a ‘‘tremendous impact’’ with the campaigning he has had. Then again, multiple reports suggest Trump didn’t think he was going to win in 2016 either, and a small polling error could easily see those predictions of a Democratic House takeover blown to smithereens. You never know.