Democrats, heed the warnings: 18 months to a Republican Congress -- unless you fight
Last edited Sun Jul 11, 2021, 10:05 AM - Edit history (1)
A GOP win in 2022 isn't inevitable. But it's extremely likely — unless Democrats act boldly, and right now
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/10/democrats-heed-the-warnings-18-months-to-a-republican-congress--unless-you-fight/
Since the Civil War, midterm elections have enabled the president's party to gain ground in the House of Representatives only three times, and those gains were in single digits. The last few midterms have been typical: In 2006, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, his party lost 31 House seats. Under Democrat Barack Obama, his party lost 63 seats in 2010 and then 13 in 2014. Under Donald Trump, in 2018, Republicans lost 41 seats. Overall, since World War II, losses by the president's party have averaged 27 seats in the House.
Next year, if Republicans gain just five House seats, Rep. Kevin McCarthy or some other right-wing ideologue will become speaker of the House, giving the GOP control over all committees and legislation. In the Senate, where the historic midterm pattern has been similar, a Republican gain of just one seat will reinstall Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.
To prevent such disastrous results, Democrats would need to replicate what happened the last time the president's party didn't lose House or Senate seats in a midterm election — two years after Bush entered the White House. The odds are steeply against it, as elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich points out: "Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11. According to a retrospective FiveThirtyEight average of polls at the time, he had a 62 percent approval rating and 29 percent disapproval rating on Election Day 2002. And in this era of polarization — where presidential approval ratings are stuck in a very narrow band — it's hard to imagine [President] Biden ever reaching that level of popularity."
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With new census data, the once-in-a-decade chance to redistrict means that Republican-dominated state legislatures can do maximal gerrymandering. "Because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races," FiveThirtyEight politics reporter Alex Samuels says, "Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor." All this year, awaiting census figures to manipulate, Republican legislatures have been enacting outrageous new voter-suppression laws, many of the sort recently greenlit by the Supreme Court and calculated to destroy voting rights.
In the face of impending election disasters in 2022 and beyond, denial might be a natural coping mechanism, but it only makes matters worse. Reality should now spur a sustained all-out effort — in courts, stated legislatures, Congress and public venues — to safeguard as many democratic processes as possible for next year's elections, while organizing against the dozens of major voter-suppression tactics of recent years.
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