The husband of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, was attacked with a hammer at the couple’s California home two Fridays ago. “Where is Nancy?” Paul Pelosi’s assailant asked, echoing the chilling threats issued by January 6 rioters at the Capitol. It would be comforting to brush off the assault as the act of a lone, deranged conspiracy theorist, but the callous response from Republicans has been shocking.
It is not just Don Jr who has been milking the assault for laughs by retweeting a “Paul Pelosi Halloween costume” of underpants and a hammer. As his father toys with another run at the White House in 2024, rivals for the nomination have been cynically copying the elder Trump’s abrasive style of politics.
Glenn Youngkin, who was elected governor of Virginia last November, was supposed to point the way to a more sensible, post-Trump future in which the GOP took a robust stand on culture war issues, but recognised Joe Biden as the legitimate US president and kept their distance from his predecessor’s vast, vanity-fueled election conspiracies.
If victory in this week’s midterms means firing up the base in the hope of boosting turnout and shoring up wildly unsuitable candidates for office, few Republicans are shirking the task. Worse than that, they are being radicalised in the process. With an eye to running for president himself one day, Youngkin has been campaigning in Arizona for Kari Lake, a former TV host and Republican candidate for governor, who believes Democrats are “demonic”, opposes all abortion, thinks the 2020 election was “rigged” in her home state and refuses to get vaccinated.
All restraint is being cast aside in an effort to break the 50-50 deadlock between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. The Senate race is regarded as too close to call, although according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, Republicans have been gaining momentum in the final stretch and are now leading the Democrats by 48-45 points. That should be enough to deliver a three-seat majority.
Most pundits predict a comfortable working majority for Republicans in the House of Representatives, where Democrats currently hold a slim majority. RealClearPolitics is predicting GOP gains of anything from a relatively modest 12 seats to a 49-seat landslide. If the House changes hands, the politics of retribution – resulting quite possibly in Biden’s impeachment – would begin as soon as new members take their seats in January.
Egged on by Trump, Republicans are preparing to bog Biden down with non-stop investigations, ranging from probes into his son Hunter’s alleged corruption, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, immigration and the handling of Covid19 by Covid tsar Dr Anthony Fauci, a hate figure for anti-vaxxers. Politics would become even more of a blood sport than it is at present, aimed at blocking Biden’s path to a second term in office.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican senate minority leader, had mused in August that “candidate quality” could become a problem for his party. We will see what happens on election night, but right now the looniest Trumpians appear to be closing in on the Democrats. Two years after the 2020 election, Americans remain as divided as ever and have shown no inclination to emerge from their trenches.
Democrats had hoped to defeat their most oddball opponents, but that confidence has evaporated. The senate majority leader, Charles Schumer, was last week caught on a hot mic admitting the race for Georgia was “going downhill”. In this state — which handed the narrowest of victories to the Democrats in 2020 – Herschel Walker, an African-American former US football star endorsed by Trump, has been pummelled by scandal yet appears to be edging ahead of Raphael Warnock, the incumbent senator.
“A second woman has now claimed you paid for her abortion and your second wife claimed you held a gun to her head. Why are millions of Georgians still voting for you?” the satirical TV show, Saturday Night Live, put it to an actor playing the anti-abortion Walker. “Gas!” he beamed.
And there you have it, in a nutshell. High petrol prices, inflation at 8.2% and interest rates at 7% are prompting many Americans to vote with their wallets in defiance of Cassandra-like warnings about democracy in peril. Add to that surging crime, an influx of immigrants and lingering concerns about Biden’s mental acuity and the stage could be set for a GOP sweep of both chambers.
Is it too soon to write off the Democrats? Unemployment is low at 3.5% and Biden is overseeing huge investment in infrastructure. There are two further reasons why there is all to play for.
First, the bitter partisanship in America is encouraging a high turnout on both sides, much as it did during the 2020 election. Then, the Democrats’ commitment to early, mail-in voting helped them to overpower Republicans, who largely voted in person on election day (they shot themselves in the foot over fear of cheating). The Democrats could once again benefit from the extra time to squeeze out votes.
A second “known unknown” is whether women will boost the Democrats after the Supreme Court stripped away their abortion rights under Roe v Wade. Hopes flared in August when women in the bible-belt state of Kansas firmly rejected a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Across America, young women have been registering to vote in large numbers but their impact may not be decisive as it appears.
“Both parties have been energised, but the Republicans are a little more energised than the Democrats, which could be worth an extra 1% of the vote,” said a sceptical Sabato. “Without Trump in the White House, it is much harder to get Democrats to engage.”
Biden himself remains unpopular. His approval ratings drifted upwards over the summer but have settled in the lower 40s. Already America’s oldest president, he turns 80 on November 20, a turn-off for young voters. I overheard one anti-Trump voter complain at a New York bar last weekend, “The Democrats are going to get their asses kicked because they have done a terrible job for the last two years. If I were to debate Joe Biden I’d beat him, even though I have way less knowledge than him. And Kamala Harris is clever but nobody likes her.”
The Democrats have their own “candidate quality” problem – and not just in the White House. In Pennsylvania, their candidate for senate John Fetterman, who was felled by a stroke earlier this year, was brutally exposed as unready for prime time in a TV debate with the Trump-endorsed celebrity doctor, Mehmet Oz. Fetterman’s stroke-induced confusion prompted comparisons with the alleged cover-up of Biden’s own fitness for office.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Trump has been plotting with other Republicans to challenge a host of close results, not least as a dry run for similar shenanigans in 2024. Still smarting from the loss of Pennsylvania in 2020, Philadelphia is said to be ground zero for these efforts. This is the hellscape into which the US could be plunged in six days’ time, leaving moderate voters lost in no-man’s-land.
Yet Youngkin used the attack on Pelosi to joke gracelessly about dispatching his high-profile wife from Washington in this week’s elections: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send [Nancy] back to be with him in California.”
