Voters are more often drawn to issues that politicians can’t control in the short run, rather than those they can.
One of the strangest midterm elections in US history is in its final stretch, with just a month to go. The campaign would typically be a de facto referendum on the new president, rather than a preview of a looming rematch between Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump.
The race has involved a dramatic shift to the extreme right by much of the Republican Party aligned with the former president. And that has produced a set of candidates who are loudly campaigning on racist and Christian nationalist positions that, until now, would have been regarded as outrageous and disqualifying, including among doctrinaire conservative.
Mr Trump won’t be on the ballot, but his presence is pervasive, although many Republican candidates who won primaries because of his backing are of a remarkably low caliber.
The former president and his fixation on 2020 – in a recent speech he boasted about the size of the January 6 rally that degenerated into the attack on Congress, clearly glorying in the moment – give Democrats solid prospects of retaining the Senate and an unlikely but not impossible shot at keeping control of the House of Representatives.
Democrats are also hoping that the Supreme Court ruling last year eliminating any constitutional protection for abortion-rights will help drive turnout. The ruling seems to have had a bigger impact than initially expected, but its full effect remains untested.
Conventional wisdom holds that the two issues most Republican candidates are emphasizing – the surges in inflation and crime – are more powerful and emotive than the Democratic themes of abortion-rights and protecting democracy from persistent attacks by Mr Trump’s movement. Yet as Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman notes, if that’s true voters would be exhibiting a lamentable lack of understanding about what elected officials can effectively address.
Rising crime rates – primarily state and local concerns – result from a complex set of socio-economic factors. And while there are theories, baseless or not, that the Biden administration’s spending may have made inflation worse, it is a macro-economic and global phenomenon strongly linked to international catastrophes such as the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Moreover, Republicans under Mr Trump exhibited no greater fiscal prudence than Democrats under Mr Biden.
The public may well be eager to punish Mr Biden and his party, but their policies did little, if anything, to drive these negative trends. And there’s very little, if anything, that a new member of Congress, or even a cadre of them, could do that would have much impact on either problem.
By contrast, abortion rights and protecting democratic processes are immediately within the grasp of Congress, as well as state and local officials. These key Democratic themes may be widely seen, possibly including by much of the public, as more “abstract” and “theoretical” but in fact they are precisely the kind of concerns that elected politicians can and will address, one way or another.
In many key elections, however, it’s not just Republicans shouting about inflation versus Democrats shouting about abortion. There’s also the wave of unheard-of weirdness, extremism and incompetence on the Republican right.
Republican Georgia Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, a former football star, is campaigning on a total abortion ban, even for rape victims. He’s also been heavily critical of absentee fathers, especially in his own African-American community.
It was tricky enough when he was shown to have lied, even to his own staffers, about having children with four women and to be a stereotypical absentee father. Then a woman explained that, after he got her pregnant, he paid for her abortion, and, when it happened again, he urged her to have a second abortion. She refused and had one of his sons. Given the documentary evidence she has provided, the truth of her story is evident.
Mr Walker nonetheless categorically insists none of this is true and that, moreover, he has been “born again” and forgiven by God, which seems a contradiction. And he’s demonstrated neither repentance nor truthfulness, supposedly the bedrocks of such divine grace.
For anti-abortion zealots, Mr Walker’s former paramour should be a heroine, since she apparently refused his entreaties to have a second abortion and gave birth to their now 10-year-old son, who he has apparently deigned to meet on a mere three occasions.
The response of his supporters has been remarkably blunt. From state party leaders to rank-and-file voters, countless Georgia Republicans have said, in effect, that they don’t care if this is true, or if he’s lying to them, or anything except putting him in the Senate to reliably vote with fellow Republicans. Mr Walker’s campaign reports a significant uptick in donations following the revelations.
The race remains very tight with his Democratic opponent, incumbent Senator Rafael Warnock, maintaining a slight edge.
Most striking is the rise of “Christian nationalism” – the American equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood – on the Republican right. This joins other themes like a resurgent QAnon conspiracy cult, 2020 election denial and support for, or even participation in, the January 6 insurrection, and a shocking resurgence of openly vicious racism.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a first-term Georgia congresswoman whose QAnon-inflected radicalism has catapulted her into overnight party stardom, has repeatedly called herself a Christian nationalist and is an ardent proponent of the racist anti-immigration “great replacement theory.”
The paranoid and chauvinistic narrative that “they” want to dispossess “us” doesn’t stop with immigrants. In one of the most overtly racist speeches by a major US politician in many years, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville conflated Democrats, criminals, and “people who want reparations” – an obvious reference to African-Americans – “because they want to take over what you got.”
Along with immigrants and African Americans, Jews aren’t being spared. Republican Pennsylvania governor candidate Doug Mastriano, another avowed Christian nationalist with close ties to racist and anti-Semitic extremists, said that his opponent, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, demonstrated “disdain for people like us” because as a child he attended a Jewish school.
Such toxic candidates for Congress and governorships of major states are a key reason Democrats have a better chance in the midterms than expected. Even if this shockingly radicalized ascendant Republican faction ultimately fails, it is already doing tremendous damage to American political culture.
The results in states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan – where Republicans are running extremists and inept, manifestly unsuitable, candidates for vital governance roles – will do much to measure and shape the viability of the emerging, refashioned Christian nationalist and aggressively racist Republican Party.