US President Donald Trump is such a loathsome individual that many will read the outcome of the US midterm elections as a “repudiation” of him, even though his name didn’t appear on any ballot.
But there is something that the huge, global, anti-Trump consensus — in which I include myself — really needs to appreciate: extrapolating from the midterm results, Trump has a 8:1 chance of winning a second term.
It just seems so improbable. I think it relates to that old biblical reference, why do you notice the chip in your brother’s eye and not the plank in your own?
The Democrats did seem to deliver, winning the popular vote and retaking the House of Representatives. But I read a great piece by Columbia academic Musa al-Gharbi, who said virtually everything Trump says or does seems so beyond the pale that it becomes difficult to imagine that historical patterns might apply. Given the extraordinary context leading into the 2018 midterms, it may seem inconceivable that they yielded perfectly ordinary results.
But they did. The 2018 election results were consistent with the norm for a ruling party’s initial midterms, al-Gharbi says.
The midterm elections are a confusing time because a lot depends on which seats are being fought and which not. The way that broke this time was that the hotly contested Senate seats were largely being fought in red states, and the hotly contested House seats were being contested mostly in blue states.
Going all the way back to the American Civil War, there have only been two instances in which the sitting president’s party did not lose seats in the first-term midterms — Franklin D Roosevelt in 1934 during the Great Depression and George W Bush in 2002, in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Bill Clinton lost both chambers in the 1994 midterms, and Barack Obama, also coming off a high base, presided over the loss of 64 House seats — more than any previous president in 62 years.
This stands to reason because the political moment that brought the president to power would normally also bring in party members on his coat-tails, so the inclination would be for that tide to retreat somewhat during the president’s term. The average attrition during a party’s inaugural midterms is 35 House seats. Excluding the two exceptions, the average loss is 41 seats. Trump presided over a loss of 34 seats. In other words, absolutely normal.
Trump’s party gained seats in the Senate, but that too is normal. What, you might ask, about the exceptional turnout, which saw, for example, a full 10 percentage point increase in the youth vote? The turnout was much higher, but the vote split only slightly in the Democrats’ favour. In only one significant demographic did the midterm election reflect a “repudiation” of Trump, and that is suburban women. Democrats lost the suburbs by 12 points in 2016 but won them by 4 points this time around.
It’s a trope of the modern world that politics has become more partisan and sectarian. The forces of atavism have never been more apparent, they are present in the US but also very present in SA and many other countries. But, back to the chip and the plank issue, the left seems unaware of its own atavistic tendencies, and how off-putting they are to many in society. So when Trump stumbles, as he did in the midterm elections, they overstate the victory.
The left assumes the right is against the removal of barriers to social and professional advancement of all of the atavistic subsects of society: race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality. It seizes with the righteous glee of an avenging daemon on examples of racism or sexism, of which there are many.
But outside of that small subsect of the genuine deplorables, the truth is that broadly speaking the right supports the demand for equality. What it does not support is the wholesale imposition of special protections and interventions. It doesn’t support them for entirely defendable reasons: it considers them paternalist, regressive, open to all kinds of abuse and ultimately unnecessary because generally society does right itself over time.
Until the left understands its atavism as its weakness, it will always be confused by the resilience of Trump’s support, and that has lessons for SA too.
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