No US president since 1934 has managed to boost his party in a midterm election. The only exceptions: Bill Clinton in 1998, as voters reacted to his hysterical impeachment over the Lewinsky scandal, and George Bush Junior in 2002, after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Elections to elect new representatives and a third of the senators, in the middle of the presidential four-year term, are almost always a vote of political attrition for the president.
Therefore, the looming loss of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the threatened dominance of the Republicans in the Senate will not be a surprise on Tuesday. Nor is the political passion and polarization that characterizes this pre-election period a deviation. We’ve seen them before. But even under these conditions, the political scene in the US today is unprecedented. It is not only the extreme demonization of the opponent, the pre-civil political climate, in a country with 400 million guns circulating freely.
It is mainly that the electoral competition unfolds in the shadow of a Big Lie and a Big Denial. The Big Lie that the majority of Republicans play or accept is that Trump won the 2020 election, but the Democrats stole it from him. An outrageous claim, considering that Joe Biden won not only a clear majority of the electors but also 7 million more votes than Donald Trump. And yet, six in ten Republicans still believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
Donald Trump remains the most powerful figure in his party, leading to the political extermination of the few Republicans who (such as Lynn Cheney) dared to oppose him, and supporting with his weight the election of candidates who are his loyal followers. Foreseeing his defeat in the 2020 elections, Donald Trump spent months undermining them, making every effort to illegally overturn their outcome, and finally inciting a rabid mob of his followers to violently invade Congress.
In the same Congress whose infidel Republican members refused to attribute any responsibility to the great moral author of the invasion, fearing the effects of Donald Trump’s vindictiveness on their personal re-election. The Big Lie brings the Big Denial. A number of Republican candidates, following the lead of Donald Trump, are refusing to pledge to respect the election verdict if their opponent wins. Some are calling on their followers to resist a negative outcome by taking to the streets armed.
Democracy is not the perfect state, we know this since the time of Aristotle. Its historical superiority lies in the fact that all its alternatives turned out to be worse. But a functioning Democracy is based on some explicit and implicit rules. The alphabet of Democracy is that the winner of the election prevails and the loser recognizes the result. In the long tradition of the American Republic there has been no precedent like that of 2020. Even in the presidential election of 2000, and with half a million votes more than his opponent, Alan Gore was quick to congratulate George W. Bush as soon as he was declared (marginally) the winner in Florida .
Donald Trump’s policy playbook is shaping global trends. On the eve of the elections in Brazil, Joe Biden sent people to convince officials of Bolsonaro (who is a fan of Trump’s methods) not to consider a coup in case of his defeat. Bolsonaro has been persuaded not to attempt it, but refuses to recognize Lula’s victory and congratulate him.
The crisis of Democracy is severe when one of the two major parties of the USA, which produced great presidents and legislators, the party of Abraham Lincoln, behaves in an anti-democratic way. Even more so as Trump prepares to announce his 2024 presidential bid, riding the wave of a Republican victory on Tuesday.
Joe Biden sums up our era as a clash of Democracy with its world-wide adversaries. However, there will be no more critical, more agonizing, more decisive in its global effects, field of this confrontation than the American Republic itself.
