Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.
And if the Founding Fathers turn out to have fucked up again, I’m going to get mad.
My predictions:
House: 236 D 199 R
Senate: 51 R 49 D. PROVE ME WRONG!
If Republicans hold both houses — something they’re roughly as likely to do as they were to win the White House on Election Day 2016 — it’s hard to overestimate the disastrous implications:
But the model also gives Republicans a 15 percent chance of keeping both chambers — certainly not great odds, but a real shot nonetheless. That’s the scenario that’s concerning.
A Republican hold will have normal policy outcomes; it will make another tax cut bill more likely, and could embolden the party to take another run at repealing Obamacare.
But in terms of democratic backsliding, regular policy outcomes like health care bills matter less than the willingness of Congress to challenge the president and his excesses. And that’s what should worry us. A good midterm for the Republicans likely means several things: a continued lack of congressional oversight, support for Trump’s efforts to remake the courts and attack the press, and little more than mild tsk-tsking of the over-the-top demagoguery that has characterized the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
What’s even more troubling is if a Republican victory suggested public opinion is supportive of democratic backsliding itself. A Republican win alone is not enough to show that. But Gisela Sin, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies political institutions in both the US and Latin America, warns that authoritarian reversions in Latin America have typically happened with the support of a majority of the population, disgusted by Congress’s corruption and willing to embrace a more autocratic presidency.
The danger, for democratic institutions, is that a good night for Trump and Republicans will convince that party’s non-Trump leaders that how Trump has governed these past two years, and how he’s campaigned these last few weeks, is exactly what the American public wants.
On the other hand, if the Dems take the House we might get more Mom jokes, so I’d say it’s pretty much a toss-up what’s worse.