Tim is going to go vote with enthusiasm. He who was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative when I met him more than ten years ago in the Coachella Valley became fiercely anti-Obama… then a perpetually angry MAGA. He belongs to that group of voters “enthusiastic” about voting in 2022 (according to YouGov and the washington post).
Typically, midterm elections in the United States don’t stir up crowds and turnout is on average 17 points lower than in presidential election years: their predictability is such that they tire voters . However, this election year is decisive. Essential, even.
It must be said that eight weeks before the mid-term elections, in a very volatile environment, the variables likely to shape the trajectory that the United States will take are numerous. It is no coincidence that the fault lines that are emerging today and the level of political violence often refer (as Rachel Kleinfeld does in the Journal of Democracy) in the middle of the 19the century — a period that has seen its share of polarization, violence, crises and political assassinations. The end of this century, in particular, is a troubled and uncertain period, the atmosphere of which historian Jon Grinspan describes well in The Age of Acrimony. How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy (2021), arguing that the wobbles in American democracy are not unprecedented.
In fact, there have always been several “Americas”. Regional divisions (Rust Belt, Sun Belt, Bible Belt). Striking contrasts, but consistent with the continental dimension of the country. The particularity of state ecosystems has shaped this centuries-old union. However, the acidity of the Washingtonian polarization has fully won over the universe of the federated states, according to political scientist Jacob Grumbach, who published on the subject this summer. And the analogies of Kleinfeld and Grinspan, even if they have their limits, reflect the increase in geographical and political divisions within a country whose common ground is eroding.
Even adherence to a common project, to a common vision of the Union, is withering, as Professor Barbara McQuade explains when comparing the way Arizona and Michigan reacted to the sirens of the far right. — the first by embracing them, the second by rejecting them. However, these dividing lines could widen even more during the next November election, since the Americans will designate not only their representatives in Congress, but also their legislators, their governors, their directors of elections…
So many votes that will induce a differentiated perception of the legitimacy and probity of the next electoral cycle. From one state to another, alone in the voting booth – when they have been able to access it – voters will be even less equal than usual. And the result of this election will draw the contours of the next, crucial, in two years.
This political geography is superimposed on a health geography with real electoral repercussions. Public policies, which follow the political limits of the federated states, as the management of the pandemic has shown, affect life expectancy, long defined first by socio-racio-economic realities.
However, the current decline in longevity in the United States offers an unusual portrait: not only has American life expectancy recorded the largest two-year decline in a century, according to the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it declines there more than any other developed country.
In the country of Uncle Sam, at any age, more people die than elsewhere in the West – from overdoses of opioids, by firearms, in car accidents, from (yet) curable diseases. But even more, we now die (much) more in a red State than in a blue State, according to studies published in The Milbank Quarterly (2020) and in Social Science & Medicine: Population Health (2021).
Not taken into account in these analyses, because later, the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on abortion will accentuate these geographical disparities by affecting the reproductive health (and life expectancy) of women. And if case law extends, as is believed, to other categories of individuals, it will contribute to further increase these distortions. Thus, from one state to another, the legal and health status of Americans will no longer be the same. What the electoral result will accentuate.
In this context, the climate crisis carries all the risks of heightened tensions. For example, the necessary renegotiation of the water allocation of the Colorado River could sow the seeds of discord between upstream states trying to preserve the reservoirs of Lakes Powell and Mead, and those downstream whose population and water needs water are constantly growing. While the various actors (federal, federated, local) generally agree on the need to maintain a cooperative framework, the scarcity of resources, the different perceptions of needs and the survival of communities, farmers and industries in the American South could lead to fierce regional competition.
Last summer’s clashes around the Upper Klamath Lake dam in Oregon, fueled by far-right opportunist groups, attest to this. The interstate migratory movements that we are also beginning to observe (for example, from California to Texas). It will be remembered that in 1936, when sandstorms were blowing over the Dust Bowl, the governor of Colorado had briefly closed the state border to Oklahoma “undesirables”.
In 2022, American national divisions are fermenting in unprecedented ways at the federated level, as if space were contracting, and they threaten the state of the Union. In doing so, this usually rather neglected midterm election cycle is likely one of the most important in recent decades. One that can have a decisive impact on the state of the States. For the outcome of the 2024 election. And for the world, too.
But that’s for a future column.