The 2018 American Elections Matter
By Habib Siddiqui
What is causing such excitement? After all, it’s not the time
for the presidential election, which is held once every four years. The next
one is scheduled for November 2020.
In a mid-term election all the congressional seats – 435
altogether - for the House of the Representatives are contested. A fraction (nearly
a third) of the Senate seats is also contested in the mid-term elections. [The
term of office for the Senators is six years, unlike that of the congressmen or
congresswomen, which is only two years.]
Currently, the three major branches of the government – the executive,
the legislative and the judiciary – are all controlled by the GOP – the
Republicans, threatening the checks-and-balances policy, which had hitherto
proven to be necessary for a functioning democracy. Without the GOP-controlled
Capitol Hill it is difficult to imagine judge Kavanaugh who had been accused of
serious character flaws of becoming an associate justice in the Supreme Court
of the US. The Obamacare has also been killed affecting the lives of tens of
millions of Americans.
Many Americans see President Donald Trump as a divider and not
a unifier. Under the weight of his irresponsible rhetoric, the USA has slid
into a highly polarized state where seemingly the white supremacists, racists
and bigots feel energized to unleash their hate crimes against the non-Whites,
non-Christians and others who are considered ‘different’. The latter see their
cases increasingly hopeless under Mr. Trump as the POTUS.
Hate crimes
against Jews and Muslims have skyrocketed. A
progressive political event hosted by Broad City's Ilana Glazer was abruptly
cancelled on Thursday (November 1) night, after anti-Semitic messages—including
"die Jew rats," "Kill all Jews," and
"Hitler"—were found in the historic Brooklyn synagogue where the
conversation was set to take place. According to police, multiple floors of the
Union Temple in Prospect Heights were vandalized with the hateful, threatening
messages. The vandalism was discovered at around 8 p.m., just as attendees were
arriving for the latest episode of Glazer's Generator
Series, a live interview program featuring activists, politicians
and cultural figures.
New York state senate candidates Andrew Gounardes, Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, and comedian Jim Gaffigan were all scheduled to appear on the panel, which aims to "humanize policy through storytelling." But at 8:30 p.m., organizers informed the crowd of about 200 people (which included my son Hassan) that they had decided to postpone the event for security reasons.
Domestic
terrorism swept the country on October 27, when a white gunman stormed a Jewish
synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 elderly worshipers in what has been described
as the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the U.S. history. The terrorist attack
came a day after an avid Trump supporter in Florida was arrested and charged
with mailing bombs to more than a dozen of the president’s prominent critics
(including the philanthropist George Soros and actor Robert De Niro), and three
days after a white gunman fatally shot two African-Americans at a grocery store
shortly after trying and failing to enter a black church. People fault Trump’s
rhetoric for such spikes in hate crimes.
As noted by
credible analysts, the attackers – often described as lone wolves - had been
radicalized by a white supremacist ideology. Published reports say that the
Pittsburgh shooter told a SWAT officer, while in
custody, that he had wanted to kill Jews because Jews were trying to commit a
genocide on his people. The White Supremacists are saying: “Open your Eyes! It’s the filthy evil Jews Bringing the Filthy
evil Muslims into the Country!!”
Is it difficult
to see the central conspiracy of contemporary white supremacist movements in
the United States: the idea that there is a massive plot to make white people
extinct and that everything from immigration from Muslim countries to accepting
refugees from war-torn countries and giving political asylum to Central
American migrants to multiculturalism are a threat to their very existence, let
alone the privileged status? It’s hard to decouple President Trump’s
influence on these supremacists when he says that he would rather have
Norwegian immigrants settle in the USA than Africans and Haitians from ‘shithole’ countries.
Last year we
saw a White gunman killing 58 and injuring 525 music lovers in Las Vegas before taking his
own life. It was a monstrous crime, the deadliest mass shooting in
modern U.S. history and yet, the T-word was not used to describe this heinous
mass terror. While a
year-long police investigation has failed to find the killer’s motive, the
enormous power of the pro-Republican gun-lobby NRA and its culpability could not be neglected in this massacre, as we also
witnessed with the mass shootings this year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkside, Florida.
Many
mainstream White Americans are also genuinely concerned about the direction
America is heading under Trump on a plethora of issues. They are tired of his arrogance,
demeaning remarks about women and minorities, relentless tweets, remorseless
lies – half and full, despotic and abusive manners, unfathomed hostility
towards the free press (minus, of course, the media outlets that are managed by
Rupert Murdoch), and divisive policies at home and abroad that are pushing the
boundaries further apart. Old friends are ignored, if not rebuked or reproached
while new ties are tried and forged that may prove too fragile. Trump has
withdrawn from the Iran Nuclear deal and has reinstated sanctions against Iran,
violating international norms and laws. His confrontational policies with leaders
of the European Union, Canada, Mexico, China, Turkey and the Palestinian
Authority, let alone Iran, have made him look like an unruly bully who needs
being disciplined. Through his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the
Zionist State of Israel, he has lost international credibility to be a
trustworthy partner and mediator for peace in the Middle East.
This year’s mid-term elections thus, carry extra weights for all
those who would like to see a change for the better by undermining Trump’s
power within the Capitol Hill.
Currently, the U.S. Senate has 51 Republicans and 49
Democrats (including two independents). There are 35 senatorial seats that are
up for election in 2018, of which 26 are held by the Democrats. In order
to control the Senate, that Democrats need to win 28 of these
contested seats, which means that they must retain not only all their previous
seats but must also add two others that are currently held by the Republicans. It
is not going to be an easy task for them. Forecasters say that Democrats have
only one in six chances of controlling the Senate.
If the pre-election forecasts are accurate then the Democrats have a
much better chance (six in seven chances) of winning the House congressional
races in 2018. For that to happen, however, the Democrats need to win a net 23 GOP-held districts. Still, only
minor shifts across the House map could help Republicans cling to a majority.
House control has enormous stakes. Not only will it help to
determine the country's path on health-care, tax and immigration policy, but
also it will shape whether Congress looks more deeply into Trump's finances or
potentially pursues his impeachment.
Trump knows that the 2018 midterm elections are going to be a
verdict about his presidency and as such, he has been campaigning doggedly for
the Republicans in tossup districts and states as if it’s 2016 election de ja
vu.
To his conservative base, Trump has delivered on his election
promises by being tough against others, repealing the Obamacare and filling up
vacant federal court seats with conservative judges. His anti-immigrant
policies and speeches have also been popular amongst many Republicans. Despite
the big tumbling of the stock market in the recent months, economy seems strong,
growth is up, and unemployment is the lowest in many years.
There is surely much that Trump could brag about his last two years
of presidency. But the question is: will such achievements be enough to
maintain the status quo in the Capitol Hill? Will the voters cast their ballots
in favor of the Republican candidates who would continue supporting Trump’s
ultra-nationalist causes and conservative views that have divided the country into
the red and the blue and invigorated the white supremacists with their rather
weird narratives that see them victims in a fast-changing demographic landscape
where in order to protect their kinds and thus, making ‘America great’ again they
must attack and kill first the ‘others’. Is that the ‘new’ America that most
Americans like to morph into? I don’t.
Americans truly need a change to curtail Trump’s power. This
Tuesday will show how serious are they to bring about that desired change.
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