Midterms will Test Trump’s Influence

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The American midterm Congressional elections are now a little more than two months away. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested. When the House recessed in August, there were 220 Democrats and 211 Republicans, with four vacancies.

This will be the first election affected by the redistricting that followed the 2020 census. Partisan gerrymandering – the creation of congressional maps that intentionally give one party an edge-- has continued to skew in favour of Republicans.

The primary season for each of the two major parties is now over. And on the Republican side, attention has been paid to how much sway Donald Trump still has over the party he basically captured in 2016.

It will be watched especially closely by presidential aspirants like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, former vice-president Mike Pence, and Ted Cruz, one of the two U.S. senators from Texas.

Can former President Donald Trump help, or hinder, Republican hopefuls in House races this fall? High-profile primary losses for vocal Trump critics, among them Wyoming’s Liz Cheney and Michigan Representative Peter Meijer, who both voted for Trump’s impeachment last January, demonstrate Trump’s ongoing power.

In fact only two of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol will be on the ballot in November. Of the ten, four lost primaries, four decided not to run for re-election, and two survived. 

As well, nationalist hardliners now in a number of high-profile races for governor, like Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon and Doug Mastriano, the party’s nominees in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, respectively, also indicate a party that is not about to disown Trump.

For Repub­lic­ans, the road to a House major­ity of 218 starts with their contin­ued domin­ance in the seat-rich South, the coun­try’s fast­est-grow­ing region. Since the south­ern realign­ment of the 1990s and early 2000s, the South has become a crit­ical anchor for the GOP’s hunt for a House major­ity. Before then, Repub­lic­ans had been held to under 200 seats in every House elec­tion after 1956.

In large states like Texas, Geor­gia, and Flor­ida, Repub­lic­ans were able to create an addi­tional seven Repub­lican-lean­ing districts and are now favored to win 70 per cent of the region’s 155 seats, up from an already command­ing 66 per cent before maps were redrawn. It gives Repub­lic­ans the poten­tial to win up to 114 seats in the region, over half the number needed for a major­ity.

Redis­trict­ing in the Midw­est and Great Plains resul­ted in 62 districts that Repub­lic­ans have a chance to win, includ­ing 43 safe districts.

To win a majority, Repub­lic­ans must hold all 208 districts, in the new maps, that Donald Trump would have won in the 2020 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion, plus at least some of the 30 districts that Joe Biden narrowly carried that year.

That seemed likely going in 2022, given strongly pro-Repub­lican midterm dynam­ics, but perhaps things are changing, with races having tightened in recent weeks. So while it has been considered a slam-dunk the GOP would wrest control of the lower chamber from the current Democratic majority, is this still the case?

Immediately after the Supreme Court last June overturned Roe v. Wade, the decision striking down federal abortion rights, Democrats began to gain ground.  In three special House elections that followed, Republicans saw their margins of victory decline.

Republicans won a special election in Minnesota’s First Congressional District on Aug. 9 by only four percentage points, in a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2020. Likewise, on June 28, just a few days after Roe was overturned, Republicans won a special election in Nebraska’s First Congressional District by only five points, in a district that Trump carried by 15 points.

And in New York’s 19th House district, seen as a bellwether seat that has voted for Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and narrowly for Joe Biden, on Aug. 23 Democrat Pat Ryan upset Republican Marc Molinaro by three per cent.

Does this portend trouble on Nov. 8? History still favours the GOP. There have been 19 midterms since the Second World War. In 16 of them, the party controlling the White House lost five or more seats in the House. In the 2014 midterms, when Barack Obama was president, the Democrats lost 13—more than the number that Republicans need to gain this year to take control.