What has been called the most consequential election in recent American history will take place on November 8, a week from today. It is not a presidential election. It is designed to elect or re-elect a one-third of the 100 members of the Senate. But it has come to be seen as a referendum on the sitting president two years into his term, with two more to go.
Traditionally, the President’s party loses seats in both chambers, altering the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches. Sometimes the losses are so substantial that the president is reduced to a lame duck for all practical purposes, if not a hostage of the opposition.
President Obama was prescient to have pursued his signature legislative accomplishment — the Affordable Care Act during his first term, when the Democratic Party controlled healthy majorities in both houses. Even so, securing it was a titanic battle in which he had to make many compromises that diluted it.
If he had scheduled the project for a second term, he would have in retrospect had little to show for his presidency. For he entered his second term without the legislative majorities that had made the ACA possible, the Republican Party having taken control of the House and neutered the Senate
The losses the President’s party usually suffers in midterm elections bear little correspondence to the actual policies and programs the president has pursued. It is the opinion polls that drive public perception of the president’s performance. Public opinion, a protean creature, has no independent existence. It is shaped by covert and overt propaganda, disinformation, an individual’s psycho-social makeup, so-called pocket-book issues, among them the price of gasoline, over which the government has little control, as well as intangibles.
Take President Joseph Biden as a case study. He restored a sense of normality after the armed assault on the Capitol designed to keep Donald Trump in office after his defeat, led the country through the ravages of Covid-19, steered it toward economic recovery and full employment, enacted an infrastructure programme to replace or refurbish America’s crumbling highways and railways, and set out to redeem a campaign promise to forgive or reduce student loans for by as much S20, 000.
Yet, Biden’s approval rating has remained stubbornly well below 50 percent, except for a brief period.
Meanwhile, he has had to contend daily for attention since taking office with his disgraced predecessor, who seeks to disparage and undercut him at every opportunity. It an extra-terrestrial were to land in America today, it would have a hard time figuring out who, between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, is America’s President.
For days, Biden may not figure significantly in the news. But Trump is in the news all the time, every day, promoting policies that are flagrantly subversive of the U.S. Constitution and election candidates committed to advancing not the uncoerced will of the people but his preferences and prejudices.
To that end, Trump has endorsed and campaigned vigorously for some of the most odious candidates for federal and state elections, persuaded that his support alone will override public aversion. In this, Trump might well be taking a page from Roman Emperor Nero’s playbook. Didn’t Nero make his horse a Senator?
Trump sees this way of doing business not as a mark of his contempt for the state institutions and all they stand for, but as a measure of his capacity to inflict his will on the self-same public with its approval. That capacity and the immense satisfaction he draws from it count for everything in his universe.
Trump and his acolytes have steered away the GOP from the pursuit of democracy, the rule of law, government based on the consent of the people as expressed in free and fair elections and all such noble precepts that undergird America’s claim to exceptionalism.
Inspired by Trump and drawing strength from his proxies in the Supreme Court which is at bottom the Republican Party in judicial robes, state legislatures have been enacting electoral laws that seek to curtail or trammel the right to vote – a right that generations of Black Americans fought and bled and died to win,
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With a sense of urgency that should serve far nobler ends, they are enacting laws that make it harder and harder to vote. In one state, it is an electoral offence to offer someone on the line a bottle of water or a sandwich. In some states, you can show up to vote only to be told that your eligibility has been challenged, and you cannot vote until the challenge has been determined.
These who used to work the polls during elections have quit in large numbers, unable to put up with daily threats of violent assault or assassination from hard-right vigilantes.
Trump and his acolytes claim that such measures are warranted to forestall electoral malpractices. But malpractices on a scale that corrupts election outcomes virtually never occur in America. The measures that Republican-controlled states are enacting at such a s furious pace nothing but solutions in search of a problem.
But they can count on the super-majority in the U.S. Supreme Court to conjure up reasoning or doctrine that confers constitutional validation on the most restrictive measurers they can devise.
A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that Americans regard the threat to democracy as an important issue, though not a threat they should do something about. Political scientists, historian and philosophers tell us this is one of the ways in which democracies die.
This, then, is the context in which Americans will be going to the polls next Tuesday.
The Democrats hold a slender majority in the House, and a plurality of just one in the Senate if Vice President Kamala Harris deploys her casting vote to break what is otherwise guaranteed to be a 50:50 tie.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling precedent that protected the right to an abortion, the polls were unanimous that the Democrats faced nothing short of a wipeout in Congress, in the gubernatorial mansions, and in the state legislators.
When women turned out in huge numbers to register to vote and vowed with the more liberal sections of the public to show their resentment at the midterms, the fortunes of the Democrats rose somewhat. They might not face a wipeout after all, the experts were saying. They would lose the House for sure, but might just keep the Senate and stay competitive overall.
Biden’s legislative accomplishments also gave Democrats a bump in the approval ratings
But after a while, the poll numbers for Biden and the Democrats dissipated.
At this writing, the indications are that Republicans will prevail in the midterms. If they do, those on the other side of the political spectrum should be afraid. For they will set America on a reactionary course that will, in practice, repudiate the exceptionalism that America claims.
If the Republicans don’t win, those on the other side should be very afraid. Many of the GOP’s stalwarts have declared, following Trump’s example, that they would not accept the election results unless they won, and others have been perfecting the rules that would empower them to certify losers as winners and winners as losers.
And they are foresworn to violence to achieve these ends.
This rite is not going to make for a pleasant passage.
It is a reflection of the present that an assailant broke into the San Francisco home of House of Representative Speaker Nancy looking for her, and not finding her, hit it her 82-year-old husband on his head and body with a hammer. He is still in hospital at this writing, receiving treatment for serious injuries.