Polls set to give verdict on Trump’s America
NOTHING CERTAIN ON EVE OF MIDTERMS UNDER HIS PRESIDENCY
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The day of reckoning for American politics has arrived. Voters today will decide the $5 billion debate between President Donald Trump’s take-no-prisoner politics and the Democratic Party’s supercharged campaign to end the GOP’s monopoly in Washington and statehouses across the nation.
There are indications that an oft-discussed “blue wave” may help Democrats seize control of at least one chamber of Congress. But two years after an election that proved polls and prognosticators wrong, nothing is certain on the eve of the first nationwide elections of the Trump presidency.
“I don’t think there’s a Democrat in this country that doesn’t have a little angst left over from 2016 deep down,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, which spent more than ever before — nearly $60 million in
all — to support Democratic women this campaign season.
“Everything matters and everything’s at stake,” Schriock said. While he is not on the ballot, Trump himself has acknowledged that the 2018 midterms, above all, represent a referendum on his presidency.
The elections will also test the strength of a Trump-era political realignment defined by evolving divisions among voters by race, gender and especially
education. Trump’s Republican coalition is increasingly becoming older, whiter, more male and less likely to have a college degree. Democrats are relying more upon women, people of colour, young people and college graduates. By Election Day, both sides are expected to have spent more than $5 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Americans head to the polls in one of the most consequential midterm elections in decades — a nationwide referendum in effect on the first two years of President Donald Trump’s turbulent administration.
Under the American legislative system at the federal level, senators serve a six-year term in the upper house, with onethird of the chamber facing election every two years.
In the lower House of Representatives, Congressmen hold office on two-year terms. The US president is elected for a four-year term, which was held in 2016.
The entire lower house of 435 Congressmen is up for reelection, with 33 of the 100 US senators facing re-election.
At the state level, there are 36 contests to elect new governors — effectively the chief executive officers of the 50 states — who hold office for four-year terms.
For Republicans, the party that won the presidency and holds slim majorities in both houses, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The checks and balances built into the US Constitution mean losing control of one or both, could cripple their legislative agenda and likely set impeachment proceedings in motion against Trump.