“Bof! »
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
This is the usual reaction, in the United States as elsewhere, to the midterm elections. And that’s kinda normal. In American politics, the quest for the Holy Grail is the race for the presidency.
This year it’s different.
Many Americans feel like the sky is about to fall.
The reason is as simple as it is obvious: the future of American democracy could be decided during this election. This is what Joe Biden and Barack Obama have repeated over the past few days with a particularly acute sense of urgency.
The specter of Trumpism hangs over these elections, a bit like a vulture stalking its prey.
A resounding failure by the Democrats could be the equivalent of an earthquake whose aftershocks would be felt until the next presidential election.
Since Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the former president and his allies have been trying to set up an infrastructure, in various states, that would allow them to influence the outcome of the race for the White House in 2024.
The Republican billionaire never digested his defeat. And he fears he will be doomed to lose, in the future, if he plays by the rules of the game. Therefore, he looks for creative ways to circumvent them.
And since in the United States the power to administer federal elections rests in the hands of the various states, there are loopholes that can be taken advantage of if we want to derail the presidential election of 2024.
The idea this time is to elect unwavering allies of Donald Trump in positions related to the counting of votes or the certification of results. Members of both houses of the US Congress, of course. But also within states, governors and secretaries of state.
We have learned in recent weeks that the majority of Republican candidates in these key positions have already refuted or questioned Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, buying into the “big lie” of Donald Trump, who continues to claim that ‘he won.
It is therefore understandable that the stakes of the mid-term elections this year are very different from those of the last decades (some of the Republican candidates could moreover refuse to recognize their own defeat if they are beaten).
Because in general, in Washington, this election is considered a simple referendum on the American president, two years after his election.
On the other hand, what does not seem to want to change this year is that generally, the president in power loses feathers during the mid-term elections. That is to say seats in one of the chambers of the American Congress, or even in both.
Note that Joe Biden does not arouse great enthusiasm. His approval rating dropped to 38%, according to a mid-October poll by the Pew Research Center.
He is therefore as unpopular as Donald Trump was two years after being elected. It’s not a very good sign.
Of course, polls show that the state of democracy worries many Americans. In their view, this is a fundamental question.
The problem is that it remains a bit too abstract an issue when you have trouble paying for your fill-up and have to juggle to pay the rest of the bills while inflation continues to wreak havoc. .
Even the historic rollback of abortion rights in the United States, which mobilized so many voters in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision that buried the judgment Roe v. wade (last June), no longer seems to play as much in favor of the Democrats as they had believed a few months ago.
Everything leads us to believe, as journalist Judith Lachapelle explained recently in a report in Arizona, that a good part of Americans will vote with their wallets this year.
Let’s hope for the future of the United States – and ours, by extension – that it will not forget that democracy also has a price.