Trump has said that the United States shouldn’t have midterm elections this year because midterm voters often vote against the president’s party. Democratic congressional leaders have said they expect Trump to disrupt and dispute the midterms.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump told Reuters in a recent interview. He then boasted that his presidency had accomplished so much that “when you think about it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told the Associated Press that Democrats are concerned that Trump will try to prevent open and fair midterm elections.
I am probably part of the 0.001% of people who actually had interest in and read exit polling from 2024, because it contains data that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, particularly on the left who have blamed repeated losses on voter turnout.
The problem is not turnout, the problem in American democracy is the subversion of the broadest swath of people, the tuned-out, overworked, misinformed liberal majority in America.
The last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout in American history.
What they didn’t have though was people who had any involvement in the issues or understanding how the political system works, and apparently no attention spans at all. Many millions of the people who voted for Trump were people who voted for Obama or supported Bernie Sanders, and that should spark a massive conversation about leftist/democrat messaging, but is largely glossed over. And a massive swath of the voting was literally hinged on the price of eggs at the time, and the well-known effect of voters making their decisions based on current economics and the party currently in power.
A lot of this came from forces foreign and domestic doing everything they can to salt the discourse, poison all the wells and boost all the weirdest, worst nonsense on both sides so that average people who only get their news and information from two hours of facebook or twitter scrolling every week had no idea what was going on.
So yes, “just vote harder” didn’t and won’t work going forward. Our chance at turning this around though is that people right now are a LOT more unhappy with our politics than they were in 2024, everyone in 2024 were far more comfortable and didn’t actually believe the stories about Trump being a fascist dictator, and tuned out his previous administration because attention spans broadly are melted. Right now if elections were held, or canceled, Trump will get wiped out one way or another.
The GOP’s only hope of retaining power is literally a fascist takeover, they know it, they’re just too dumb broadly to pull it off so I have a good feeling midterms are going to be a violent spank in the ass, and Trump will likely not finish his term. This country has actually survived many similar periods. If enough people can get their brains disengaged from the slop then we have a chance.