Time was when the world could safely ignore American midterm elections, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened, and whether voters shaded the Congressional map a bit more red or blue, the Great Republic, like the Mississippi, would just keep rolling along.
Tuesday’s U.S. midterms are a different animal. At stake are two big issues: In the short term, the future of Donald Trump’s presidency; and in the long term, the future of American politics itself.
If Mr. Trump and the Republicans lose control of one of the houses of Congress, the President’s ability to pursue his agenda will be hamstrung. If the Democrats win control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Mr. Trump’s ability to do anything requiring Congressional approval, including law-making, will be blocked.
America’s Founding Fathers created a system of government that is basically designed to make governing hard. Sometimes that looks like a mistake. Right about now, it looks like a stroke of genius.
Unlike the Parliamentary system, the United States divides power among three elected bodies. Party discipline is also much weaker than in Canada, with Senators in particular exercising a high degree of independence. It’s why Republicans, after seven years of promising to kill Obamacare, were unable to amass enough votes to do so even after the 2016 election left them in control of the White House and both houses of Congress.
If a couple of dozen Congressional districts flip from Republican red to Democratic blue on Tuesday night, giving the Democrats a majority in the House, a lot of Mr. Trump’s plans for the next two years, from rewriting the rules of citizenship to further ballooning the deficit with another tax cut, will become difficult or impossible. If voters put one or both houses of Congress in Democratic hands, it likely won’t lower the temperature in American politics. But it will lower the pace of change, since it would mean legislative gridlock. That would not be a bad thing.
After two years of the Trump Presidency, America and the world need a breather.
The irony is that the U.S. economy has been sailing along for years. Unemployment is lower than it’s been in decades. America, with the developed world’s highest levels of income inequality, is finally starting to see some real wage growth at the low end of the income scale. Economically speaking, most Americans haven’t had it this good in quite some time.
More than three decades ago, Ronald Reagan capitalized on a similarly rosy economic situation, running under the slogan “Morning in America.” The contrast with Mr. Trump could not be starker. His chief message of the 2018 campaign, the approach the President has always most delighted in, and the one the GOP has largely embraced, is one of fear.
He and his party have mostly spent the last few weeks appealing to the cultural insecurities of the GOP’s white and rural base. If you only consume conservative social media, you’re convinced that America is under attack from waves of migrants caravans. Morning in America? No, it’s two minutes to midnight. And when the clock strikes, murderous invaders will cross the border.
Mr. Trump is the chief bullhorn for inflammatory rhetoric, but American public life is becoming increasingly overheated, on both sides of the aisle. Republicans fear-monger about migrant caravans but some prominent Democratic voices are calling for the abolition of ICE – one of the agencies that enforces America’s immigration laws. Mr. Trump feeds off such rhetoric; left-wing activists in turn feed off Mr. Trump. It’s a vicious political circle.
That said, the Democratic Party has not yet swung as far left as Republicans have veered right. In swing districts, Democratic candidates are almost exclusively running on practical issues that matter to real people, like health insurance. Wins for them have a shot of pulling both parties back toward the centre, where most Americans live.
Yes, a Democratic Congress means divided government, and divided government means gridlock – which isn’t such a bad thing in the Trump era.
But if they eventually want to pass legislation, members of both parties will have to reach across the aisle, do deals and make compromises.
There used to be a name for that. It was called “politics.”