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On Balance | Republicans’ Trump loyalty may backfire in US midterm elections, but divisive politics is here to stay
- The first signs are emerging that the party that has aligned itself with Donald Trump may not trounce Democrats in the midterms as expected
- However, US President Joe Biden’s speech on September 1 indicates that there is a long way to go before his promise of uniting the country is fulfilled
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Beijing and Moscow are surely looking forward to the US midterm election season’s political paroxysms as a welcome distraction from the economic, environmental, pandemic and military setbacks they are trying to manage.
Calls for things such as Christian nationalism by US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and further cuts to women’s reproductive rights by Senate candidate Blake Masters – members of the right flank of the Republican Party, otherwise known as the “MAGA” (“Make America great again”) wing – might not solve China’s or Russia’s problems, but they at least highlight how the United States are anything but.
Democrats and independents, meanwhile, cannot be sleeping soundly. They have become accustomed to Republicans lashing out at their opponents with extreme rhetoric that centrists have dismissed as emanations from the hallways of an insane asylum, only to watch these candidates prevail and bring their ideas into Congress and the state houses.
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Who would have thought that Senate hopeful Herschel Walker, who has been endorsed by former US president Donald Trump and who has been marred by a previous false claim that he was an FBI agent and revelations that he has children previously unknown to the public, would be ahead of Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in some polls?
In a characteristically incomprehensible appearance earlier this summer, Walker spoke about climate change, suggesting that when Georgia’s “good air decides to float over” to China, it might end up replacing China’s “bad air”. Not even this nonsensical argument against measures to fight the climate crisis has dented his popularity.
After years of watching Trump knock institutions, including the US intelligence community, to the delight of authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Democrats seemed poised to win significant majorities in Congress in 2020. However, they barely managed the thinnest majority possible in the Senate and not much better in the House.
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