LEFT TURN

Democrats take control of houses

Winning majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate would be a worst-case scenario for the Republican party and would effectively cripple and politically isolate Trump. And depending on the level of support won by the Democrats in the midterm elections, it would pave the way for impeachment proceedings against the president.

With a 10 percentage-point lead over Republicans, Democrat control of the lower house seems likely. A win of two more seats in the Senate and the 10 it holds in states that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential race, and the writing is on the wall for the Republicans who hitched their political fortunes to the television reality star’s firebrand populism. And if the results are, in President Barack’s own words, “a shellacking”, then more moderate Republicans are likely to put as much distance between themselves and a politically toxic president as quickly as possible.

A Democratic majority in both houses means more investigations into the events of the 2016 president campaign, more criminal prosecutions and turning a tide on a series of conservative judges at every level of the US judiciary. Former president Obama’s political legacy will be saved, and the defeat would mean a long period of soul searching for the Republicans who became the voice of angry white men.