Yes, I know midterm elections as supposed to go against the party with the White House. Sometimes by a large margin, at other times not.
But I do believe that we are looking at an exception this year, especially in the Senate. There won't be any "red wave" in the House, either. Perhaps a marginal improvement in the GOP's position in the House, but the size of its will be a disappointment. My guess? If Pelosi is no longer Speaker a year from now it will be because she has decided to step aside in favor of a younger-generation Democrat, not because any Republican holds the post.
As to the U.S. Senate -- I'm guessing the Democrats win a minimum of two seats, enough to make Manchin and Sinema figures of lessened importance.
The voters of deep-red Kansas, God bless them, have revealed the depth of popular revulsion at the overreach of the U.S. Supreme Court as now constituted, and by association revulsion at Mitch McConnell and the shenanigans by which SCOTUS has reached this point.
More guesses? The Republican Party is on its way out the door as an effective political force. We are facing a new "era of good feelings."
After the decline of the Federalist Party, the Democrats were the only effective political party in the country for a short period, until the rise of the Whigs. Nobody's feelings about this were very good, but the Federalists were seen as allies of the Brits, who had burnt Washington.
The Democratic Party (which was in the process of shortening its name from the awkward "Democratic-Republican") was then composed of a range of figures from John Calhoun on one end to Daniel Webster on the other. It could not hold together for long as such. In time, Webster and others with analogous views formed the Whig Party, which absorbed into itself the vestiges of the old Federalists.
Where the new Whigs will come from, I don't know. Maybe from Kansas.
There may be reason for optimism about congressional elections this November, but I am less optimistic that the Republican Party is on its way out the door as an effective political force. This is because the Supreme Court, by endorsing partisan gerrymandering, has ensured that it will retain power even as a minority party. Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that, in Indiana, which just enacted a near-total ban on abortion, "Republicans generally receive 56 percent of the statewide vote," yet, in the state legislature, the GOP holds "39 of 50 Senate seats and 71 of 100 seats in the House." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/08/post-roe-abortion-indiana-kansas/
ReplyDeleteI see little hope for this country unless the Democrats in Congress add four justices to the Court, but the Democrats are too timid even to seriously consider that. And, if we are to become a democracy, those four justices, along with the Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor, must be willing to strike down partisan gerrymandering and to overturn Citizens United as well as this past term's rogue decisions of the Court's six Republican politicians -- "politicians" because they have abandoned their role as judges.
Marcus makes the point that the right to abortion is usually determined by state legislatures, as it was in Indiana, and not by the voters directly, as it was in Kansas.
DeleteHow many states have initiative/referendum procedures that would allow activists to press for an analogous determination?
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