This Tuesday, the United States votes on legislative elections in an atmosphere of political tension, economic difficulties and clashes over individual liberties; elections that will decide the composition of Congress during the last two years of Joe Biden’s term, the future room for maneuver of his administration and, between the lines, will become a referendum on the figure of the president and his first 24 months in office.
Inflation has dominated much of the previous campaign debate and has become the great instrument of the Republicans to grow in polls where they are, at the very least, favorites to snatch control of the Democratic Party over the House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, where their 435 seats are at stake.
The battle for the Senate, where 35 seats will be decided on Tuesday, a third of the total number of seats in the chamber, looks more favorable to the Democrats, but it cannot be said that they have the victory in hand, because both parties are two seats away from obtaining the majority of the chamber, according to CNN estimates. The Republicans are by no means out of the question for a total victory in the U.S. Legislature.
To this must be added the profoundly local character of an election where governors and state secretaries will also be decided, as well as additional votes on issues as important in recent months as abortion rights or voting freedoms.
INFLATION AND ABORTION Inflation in the United States is approaching 40-year highs and 77 percent of Americans consider it a primary issue when deciding their vote, according to the latest poll published Sunday by ABC News/’The Washington Post’.
The Republican Party, according to this poll, is twelve points or more ahead of the Democrats in confidence ratings when it comes to managing the economic situation in the United States.
However, Democrats respond with a significant advantage in public confidence on the sensitive issue of abortion. In the poll, 66 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, the highest percentage in ABC/Post polls since 1995.
This is also an 8-point increase since April, two months before the conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to voluntary termination of pregnancy.
These themes came together in the final campaign weeks last Saturday, with Joe Biden calling for a vote to «protect democracy» while former U.S. President and still Republican Party front-runner Donald Trump — who is threatening to run for the White House again in 2024 — ended up calling for a «Republican tidal wave» to «save the American dream».
Despite such applauded measures as those that have facilitated the decline in unemployment (3.7 percent in October, close to lows not seen in decades) or the partial cancellation of the college debt, Biden comes to these elections with an approval rating of 38 percent, according to a survey published in late October by Pew Research, identical to Donald Trump’s approval rating at a similar point in his presidency.
Biden’s approval is lower than that of other recent presidents in the run-up to his first legislative election, such as Ronald Reagan (42 percent) and Bill Clinton (41 percent) or Barack Obama (46 percent). Those three presidents, like Biden, lost ground during their first two years in office.
TENSION, DISINFORMATION AND VIOLENCE Trump’s dominance in the Republican Party, impervious to accusations of instigating the assault on the Capitol in January 2021 or to the investigation opened by the FBI, including a raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion, on the possible appropriation of classified documents, are one more example given by experts of the political tension that continues to dominate the country.
This tension was reflected at the end of last month in the attack against the husband of the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who was assaulted at his home by the extremist David DePape, known for rejecting the result of the 2020 presidential election that gave the victory to Biden, the trigger for last year’s assault on Congress.
This attack completed the warning issued in mid-October by the Soufan Group, which warned in a report on the possibility of a new outbreak of political violence during the legislative elections, while the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) once again highlighted in a study the connections between the radicals of the Republican Party, extremist movements and disinformation platforms.
Thanks to false articles published in tabloids such as the ‘Santa Monica Observer’ or ‘The Gateway Pundit’, which even linked Paul Pelosi to his assailant without any proof, added to statements by Republican extremists such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Green, who indirectly blamed Biden for the attack by criticizing his inability to control violence in the cities, the discourse surrounding the attack became completely entangled.
«By the time the week of the attack was over, almost no one on the American right, whether an outspoken extremist or an ostensibly respectable conservative commentator, was acknowledging that the attack was an act of political violence,» according to the SPLC’s findings.
Little if anything has changed in the political atmosphere and «hyper-partisanship» since Biden took office, and every event only exacerbates this friction, whether it is the conservative Supreme Court’s anti-abortion decisions, the fight against the pandemic, the economic crisis stemming from the war in Ukraine, the prosecutions of participants in the Capitol Hill insurrection, the gun attacks on the nation’s schools, or the investigation against former President Trump.
According to a survey by ‘The New York Times’, 68 percent of the aspirants to occupy a place in Congress or in local governments believe that there were irregularities in these presidential elections, while Trump has begun in many ways to present his aspirations in these mid-term elections.
In fact, Axios sources, close to the former president, believe that he could announce on November 14, at the earliest, his new bid for the White House, less than a week after the end of the elections.
Adding all these circumstances, plus the amplification provided by social networks to the aforementioned narratives, the Soufan group expresses «concern» about the possibility that the United States could end up being prey to a «self-fulfilling prophecy»; one in which the «most serious predictions end up coming true», with the immediate effect of an increase in violence «before, during and after the elections».
