Midterm elections
Will US reject Trumpism?
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