Can the Republicans prevent Trump’s second coming?
In the end, to misquote William Butler Yeats, the centre did hold. And while final results are some way off, the American midterm elections are an abject lesson in the fragility of democracy and stable government.
The Republican Party’s anticipated red tsunami (so-called because, confusingly, conservative colours in the US are red while Democrats are blue), which polls predicted would put the House of Representatives and the Senate into GOP hands, turned instead into a mild whirlpool, as conservative hopes disappeared down the drain.
And while Republicans are set to take control of the House, although hardly in compelling fashion, the Senate race evenly teeters as of writing.
Central to that whirlpool – and Republican hopes in the 2024 presidential elections – lies Donald J. Trump.
The former president’s inescapable hold on the Republican Party, coupled with his role as kingmaker in appointing candidates who supported his revisionist views, made it all too easy for Democrats to paint their opponents as too extreme when it came to abortion rights or democracy itself.
Those two issues gave Democrats a fighting chance in the midterms, where voter turnout usually drops by around 20% from a presidential voting year. But blue voters did turn out, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Seven out of 10 voters, according to AP Votecast, a nationwide electoral survey, said the abortion ruling was an important factor when it came to midterm voting.
And while many blue candidates positioned themselves as advocates for choice, such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan (who won the governorship), others on the left, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, worried that Democrats weren’t concentrating on the issues voters were most worried about, such as rising
prices for food, housing and petrol.
With inflation cresting at 8%, it’s little wonder that half of voters in Votecast named it a significant issue in this election.
And much like the New Zealand Labour Government, the Biden presidency has struggled with a response to inflation that looks anything like it is solving the problem. With both administrations, first came claims it was transitory, only to be followed a short time later by blaming it on the war in Ukraine.
But if inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments around the world, as a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress wrote recently, Jacinda Ardern will be hoping that Kiwi voters will accept that it’s because of issues outside her control, just as many US voters have.
Close to half of AP Votecast participants did not blame Biden for higher prices but attributed the problem to outside factors.
To be here in the US, as I am now, serves as an abject lesson in what politics should never be; it’s a country where the weaponisation of its politics is complete, with a cavernous divide between right and left, and no room for compromise in the middle.
Central to that divide is Trump. On his social media site Truth
Social, he was hanging tough postelection, confusingly calling the midterms ‘‘somewhat disappointing’’, then in the next breath saying, ‘‘from my standpoint it was a very big victory’’.
Trump is still the strongest contender as the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election but there’s no doubt this week’s results will have weakened his position in the party.
It’s significant that Rupert Murdoch has celebrated the overwhelming win of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hailing him as the future of the GOP after DeSantis won by 20 points and managed to overturn Democratic strongholds in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.
The question now is, will the GOP lose its subservience to Trump and put its faith in DeSantis?
The Florida governor hasn’t yet declared his intention to run but, if he does, Trump has already hinted at a dirty war, threatening to reveal ‘‘things about him [DeSantis] that won’t be very flattering’’. What’s more, if Trump is prepared to take DeSantis down, he won’t baulk at tearing down the party that put him in the White House.
Which leaves voters here either apoplectic with rage or ashamed to discuss the perilous state of democracy. Raise the topic of the midterms and you’re met with polite pushbacks and a reluctance to discuss even the basics.
And that chaotic assault on democracy looks set to continue, with 168 election deniers being elected, and some of those able to influence the certification of the 2024 election in key states.
Those elected deniers are supported by election-denying voters, who make up 28% of all voters, and who doubt the legitimacy of this week’s election. Which leads to only one conclusion. America’s democracy is irrevocably broken. And it looks set to continue.
As Yeats wrote a century ago in his apocalyptic poem The Second Coming, ‘‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’’.