“It’s a bloodbath!” That’s how Donald Trump’s eldest son described the midterm election results on Twitter around 8 p.m. Tuesday night. It is unknown in which parallel world Junior lives.
Posted at 12:48 a.m.
As of this writing Tuesday, it was clear that Republicans were making gains in the House of Representatives.
Nothing very surprising. Polls had predicted the Grand Old Party was on course to regain control of the lower house of the US Congress, whose 435 seats were at stake on Tuesday.
On the other hand, the fate of the Senate seemed very uncertain. By midnight, the two parties were nearly tied as the vote count continued.
Difficult, in these circumstances, to speak of a carnage, a “bloodbath” or even a republican wave.
The first results of these mid-term elections seem to be part of the most banal normalcy. Historically, this election, which comes two years after the election of the president, tends to punish his party and, by the same token, to restrict his power.
Barack Obama has been there. Donald Trump too. And now it’s Joe Biden’s turn.
And can we really be surprised? The latter, with a popularity rating that barely exceeds 41%, is anything but at the top of his game.
And what about his party? Although Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress since 2021, they have managed few legislative home runs since taking office. A few players from their right field gave the whole team a hard time. The Democrats now seem to be paying the price for their internal bickering and rising cost of living.
Many voters who spoke to reporters as the ballots came out said the economy in general and inflation in particular guided their choices. Nothing new there either. In 1992, it was on the basis of the mantra “it’s the economy, stupid” that Bill Clinton stole the presidency from George HW Bush.
All of this, however, could make us forget that under their air of normalcy, these elections are completely out of the ordinary. Of the Republican candidates who appeared on ballots across the country, 291 questioned Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election without proof.
And on Tuesday, according to preliminary results, they were doing particularly well. Around 11 p.m., the washington post indicated that at least 113 of them had won their stake, to sit in Washington or in the States. A handful were defeated while dozens more were still awaiting their fate.
These elected officials, supporters of Donald Trump’s “big lie”, will now have the ability to harm the democratic process by using the levers of the state.
Worrying.
And Donald Trump, in all this? The 45e President has already claimed that he will have big news to announce – read, his candidacy for the presidency in 2024 – as early as next week. On Tuesday, we waited to see how his foals fared in the Senate race. Only JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegant, had been declared the winner in Ohio on Tuesday night. “If they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I shouldn’t be blamed at all,” the former president said.
In the evening, however, the former reality star had to swallow his saliva wrongly seeing the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, win a resounding victory. The announced cockfight between the two politicians is already making American political commentators salivate.
It’s not just Joe Biden who will have to roll up his sleeves after this election.
No, these mid-term elections do not seem to have given rise to the carnage so feared by many, but neither have they been the great outcry that we might have hoped for. Against anti-democratic excesses. Against misinformation. And against the narrowing of women’s abortion rights. These battles are yet to be fought.