On September 13, with the last party primary election of this year in New Hampshire, , coming to an end, the camp of the 2022 midterm election can be said to be officially confirmed; although for political media and Washington Washington observers, the election began a year or even a year and a half before Election Day, the vast majority of the public's attention was only turned to the election from the Labor Day weekend and the end of the last primary election. This election, which involved all 435 seats in the federal House of Representatives, 35 seats in the federal Senate, 36 seats in the governor and countless other state and local positions, does not involve whether the White House of Representatives has changed hands, but it also has an equally far-reaching impact on the direction of American politics.
On May 17, 2022, local time, North Carolina, USA, the midterm election primary was held, and people voted at the polling station.
Around the midterm elections, one of the most famous traditional cognitions (conventional wisdom) is that the ruling party that won the White House two years ago often fails big or small, and in the past 30 years, this expectation has not been fulfilled in only two midterm elections. Dan Pfeiffer, who once served as the head of public communication in the Obama White House, explained that this is because although the midterm elections are entirely legislative branches, they often become a referendum on the current White House performance in the hearts of voters; and even the most intelligent and capable politicians often cannot realize all their promises during the campaign under the limitations of real factors, and even encounter unpredictable natural disasters, economic fluctuations, international conflicts and other crises. At this time, frustrated voters often ignore the various complex reasons behind the problem and punish the ruling party that controls the White House by giving the legislative branches to the opposition. The Obama administration's experience in the 2010 midterm elections is very typical: because it cannot get the cooperation of the Republican Party and needs to negotiate with several conservative senators in the Democratic Party, there are some frustrating compromises in both his rescue plan and the "Obamacare reform". Coupled with the demonization of the latter by the tea party movement that rose at the same time, the Republican Party added 63 seats in one fell swoop in one fell swoop, becoming the most violent swing of the House of Representatives seats since 1948.
Local time, March 11, 2022, Philadelphia, USA, US President Biden said at the Democratic Party Annual Meeting that the upcoming 2022 midterm elections will be the most important in modern history, and Democrats must continue to control the Senate and the House of Representatives to advance the key economic agenda during their term of office.
Just a few weeks ago, almost everyone believed that the Democratic Party would repeat the 2010 defeat in November this year: Since the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal last year, Biden's approval rating has been declining all the way, once as low as 33% that even Trump did not touch. In the "generic ballot" around the midterm election itself, it means that there is no specific seat or candidate in the poll issue, but directly asking the respondents "what party do you tend to support in this election"), the Republican Party's leading position once reached three percentage points. This is easily transformed into the fact that the Republican Party won control of the two houses in November when there is a gerrymandering phenomenon that is biased towards the Republican Party. In addition to the chaotic scenes left by Afghanistan's withdrawal, Biden's important domestic legislative agenda stagnated, the crisis of milk powder supply cuts, the continued disruption of the global supply chain by the epidemic, and the rise in prices and energy prices brought about by inflation are all important reasons for lowering the Democratic Party's support rate.
But today, less than two months after the election, no one can still predict with such confidence that the "red wave" will definitely come. When talking about coping strategies, all Democratic electoral strategy advisers, including Feffer, said that the only way out for the Democratic Party is to redefine the competition from a referendum on its own administration to a referendum on extremism within the Republican Party: Trump, " Trumpism ", his extreme stance on multiple cultural, social, and economic issues... Surprisingly, it is largely a series of choices from the Republican Party itself to convert this into reality.
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The number one factor among them is naturally Trump. As we all know, the United States has a part of voters whose ideology is conservative but cannot accept Trump's personal characteristics. Although their number is not huge, it is enough to determine Biden's victory in many swing states in 2020. Therefore, for other federal and local elected positions, the closeness of Republican candidates to Trump can be said to be largely determined whether they can get the support of this group of voters. Glenn Youngkin won the state that has been turning blue for nearly a decade in the Virginia gubernatorial election last year.
Local time on September 17, 2022, Ohio, USA, former U.S. President Trump addressed supporters at a rally in Youngstown .
But Trump is obviously unwilling to give up his control over the Republican Party, and has successively screened out a group of candidates who are loyal to him and his "election fraud". These candidates can no longer maintain any "independence" in the general election, keep a distance from Trump, and the screening mechanism selected by "loyalty" as the only condition is often extremely poor in campaigns in many key constituencies.
This is particularly obvious in the competition in the Senate. Originally, regaining control of the Senate should be the most accessible goal of the Republican Party. Not only did the Senate election itself give the Republican Party a disproportionate advantage, but the Republican Party also gained control by just a net increase of one seat. But Trump clearly couldn't stand the urge to intervene in such a widely watched competition, and he endorsed the worst and least-good candidates among the most critical swing states.
Take Ohio as an example. This is a Midwest state with deeper red in recent elections. It has a large number of white blue-collar working-class voters living in rural areas. It can be said to be one of the most stable votes for the Republican Party since entering the Trump era. Trump also won by 8 percentage points in both elections. The competition generated by the retirement of Republican Senator 1 Rob Portman in this state should not be suspense. But the winner of the Republican primary is arguably the worst candidate for Ohio, conservative political author J. D. Vance, who, from his resume alone, has the "New York/Washington Elite" background that typical Ohio Republican voters are most disgusted by years of demonization of conservative opinion leaders: a graduate of Yale Law School and a venture capitalist. His work that made him famous is a memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" that explains Trump's voter mentality to high-educated groups on the East and West Coasts, and was a Trump critic for a long time, but when he discovered this opportunity in Ohio, he quickly turned 180 degrees on this point. His campaign funds are almost all from Silicon Valley Conservative rich man Peter Thiel - another factor that doesn't really inspire the enthusiasm of blue-collar workers voters.
Relying on this fund, Trump's endorsement, and votes were scattered by candidates, Vans won the Republican primary with less than 33% of the votes, but his performance before and after this can be said to have completely failed to understand Ohio's political pulse: until today, he is often missing in Ohio, absent from many traditional municipal festivals that are regarded as a must-pass station for politicians, and is not even concerned about very critical fundraising activities, but is busy attending meetings held by conservative celebrities across the United States and around the world; his political speech on social media is often not related to the concerns of ordinary voters, but is more keen to participate in the national-level "cultural war" topics: attacking professional women, sexual minorities, judicial investigations of Trump and his accomplices, etc. In response, many Republican figures in the state have also begun to express their concerns and dissatisfaction with Vance losing this red state seat that should not have been a problem.
At the same time, the Democratic Party nominated a candidate with a personal political opinion and style that is extremely suitable for Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan. He has a congressional resume for nearly 20 years. His image has always been a traditional trade unionist who focuses on the rights and interests of the blue-collar working class. He is a member of the "Blue Collar Caucus" in the House of Representatives. After the Democratic voters shifted from the higher-educated urban professional class, he can find out which positions of his party are not popular in his state and always show his independence in a timely manner: he supports the transfer of manufacturing back to the United States, opposes the "defund the police" that is not popular among conservative voters in the state, criticizes the Biden administration for its recent spending policies, including student loan exemptions, etc.; he is also very good at "retail politics" that is very important in Ohio and other states. politics)” means traveling to as many areas in the state as possible, holding small and medium-sized events that may not be very important to win the support of voters in these areas, and at the same time, using their advantages in fundraising to launch large-scale advertisements that interpret their positions and "personality" to the state media.
The right judgment between the two's campaign levels has allowed Ryan to achieve much greater success than Vance in the face of voters' "definition" himself. More and more Republican voters said in the poll that although he still opposes the Democratic Party's ideology and dislikes his style of conduct, he can view Ryan more independently and is not disgusted with him himself; some polls have even shown that Ryan has gained a certain degree of lead. The words of a well-known conservative radio anchor in Ohio summed up the current situation of the campaign well: In his opinion, Ryan was a "full hypocritical liar", but also "running the most efficient campaign I've ever seen."
Similar phenomena are not only happening in Ohio, Trump's behavior of pushing the worst and most unattractive candidates to primary victory to ensure that the party's loyalty is to him touches every swing state that is crucial to the Republican Party: In the long-standing Republican center and recently began to turn blue, the Republican Party hopes to defeat Democratic newcomer Senator Mark Kelly. As a Democrat, Kelly also has a resume that conservative voters don't hate. He served as a captain of the Marine Corps. He is a NASA astronaut who has traveled to space four times and has good cooperative relationships with many municipal and municipal Republican politicians; and his Republican rival, Blake Mastell Master) has won the favor of Trump and the Republican basic voters by adding fire to election fraud and lies. However, when the party primary election is over and candidates need to face the public in the entire state, his extreme positions in many aspects immediately became Master's biggest disadvantage, so that his team was found to frequently modify his campaign webpage and delete his extreme positions on issues such as abortion rights, immigration, guns, and the 2020 election. Even the largest Political Action Committee (PAC), the Senate Republican caucus, clearly expressed his lack of confidence in his victory and withdrew nearly $8 million in campaign funds. In the similar situation, Trump elected former football athlete Herschel Walker to challenge Democratic Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock. Walker not only had no political experience before, but also faced charges of domestic violence and other accusations, and also threw many ridiculous and extremely falsified lies around his resume. In this comparison, Warnock, who was originally regarded as the most threatened Democratic senator in the mid-term of this year, has already won a six-point lead in the latest Quinipia University poll. A few months ago, the senator seats in Nevada and New Hampshire, which made Democrats worried that they could not hold, have gradually swung back to the "safety" category under the influence of similar factors.
. Even when the Democrats nominate imperfect and controversial candidates, the Republican candidates will even "fight" with greater disadvantages. The most typical one is the vacant Senate seat in Pennsylvania : current lieutenant governor John Fetterman who won the Democratic primary election Fetterman, a politician who does not hide his populist color. Although he avoided all substantive policy debates in the primary election, he still relied on the anti-elite "outsider" character and the support of a part of the Democratic Party "Handers -Trump voters" to defeat opponents with more detailed policy proposals than him in the primary election; the Republican Party could have seized such an opportunity to prove that it has the seriousness and sincerity of governing, but still nominated a more clownish and politically experienced former variety show celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz" as a candidate under Trump's endorsement. It is not difficult to imagine that this is not a very inspiring campaign. Apart from the most common "talk points" of both parties, both rarely mention any substantial policies, but more so than creating more popular "negative campaigns" that attack each other more popularly on social media. However, Oz often reveals the ground and ignorance of a wealthy celebrity in both campaign advertisements and daily moves. Fetterman's populist color just fits the unique political aesthetics of many Penn voters; so, although many Democrats say that this is not a very proud election battle, Trump's poor candidates selected for the Republican Party have made Pennsylvania the most likely to win for the Democrats in the swing state. Of course, in order to make the entire midterm election completely a choice between one's own side and extremism, the Democrats did not completely passively wait for Trump to pick the worst candidate in each campaign and bind himself to it, but instead reactivated a political strategy involving intervening in the Republican primary.
In 2012, when Claire McCaskill, the then Democratic Senator, sought re-election, she was facing an unoptimistic situation where her support rate in a red state campaign and Obama's was not significantly ahead; so she took the initiative to "select" the opponent she wanted to face the most, and the most extreme and most regarded by centrist voters as unacceptable by Rep. Todd Akin, the most extreme and centrist voters, and took the initiative to "fund" him to produce and place advertisements to promote his achievements to Republican primary voters when his campaign funds were lagging behind his opponents. With her "help", Akin won the primary, and his extreme statements such as "violators of rape will not get pregnant at all, so they don't have to consider treating them as exceptions when abortions are prohibited" have also caused a lot of trouble for the Republicans as scheduled in Missouri. In the end, while Obama lost Missouri by more than ten percentage points, McCasky, from the same party, defended her Senate seat by a larger gap, and she was also regarded by many Democrats as a genius in campaign strategy because of this strategy.
Local time October 14, 2020, , Michigan, , Peter Meijer delivered a speech at the event.
After that, this strategy was largely shelved and there was no chance of reusing it. Until this year, the Democrats once again faced a situation where a party's presidential approval rating was not ideal, and at the same time, the Republican side suddenly had countless candidates with better than Aikin. Therefore, this strategy is copied and pasted into multiple selections of different levels.The most popular example occurs in a House of Representatives constituency in , Michigan, where the area represents the newly elected Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, who is an ideological moderate and a "Problem Solvers Caucus" that advocates bipartisan cooperation, is one of the only 10 Republican Representatives who voted for the impeachment of Trump after the "1.6 Capitol Hill Riot" and did not hide this position for his political future. As expected, in this year's primary election, he faced John Gibbs, a challenger who had worked in the Trump administration and endorsed by him. Gibbs, his extremist color is so strong that he once stood up for conspiracy theories originated from the "QAnon" movement. Meier represents a purple swing constituency. The Democrats hope to turn it blue and judge that Gibbs is not accepted by crucial centrist voters because it is too extreme and is a more easily defeated opponent. Therefore, as the most critical period of the primary election, it launched an advertisement introducing the Republican primary voters to Trump's endorsement, anti-immigration, and anti-abortion positions, and spent as much as $435,000, more than what Gibbs himself raised in the entire election campaign. As expected, Gibbs won the party nomination in the primary, which means that the possibility of the Democratic Party turning the seat blue increased significantly in November, and the political media Politico's rating for the seat has also been adjusted from Toss up to "leaning to Democratic Party victory" to "leaning to Lean Democratic."
Similar situations also occur in Maryland . Although as one of the most stable blue states in the whole of the United States, Maryland voters have elected Republican Governor Larry Hogan for two consecutive terms. It is not difficult to imagine that he is not a typical Republican today. He has the sincerity and ability to govern, cooperates well with the state legislature controlled by the Democratic Party, and is not weaker than Democrats when criticizing Trump's extremism in attacking democracy. Therefore, he has maintained a very high support rate in Maryland so far. But this year, Hogan has expired two terms and cannot continue to participate in the election, and endorsed a moderate candidate similar to himself in the Republican primary; and such a blue state governor's seat is naturally a low-level fruit for the Democrats. Once the Republican nominee is too extreme, it is easy to get it. So he placed a large number of advertisements for another candidate endorsed by Trump three weeks before the primary election to help make the candidate who supports the conspiracy theory of election fraud and advocates restricting abortion rights. The predictions of the Maryland governor's seat by major political media have also been adjusted to "basically determine that the Democrats will win (Solid Blue).
Looking across the country, the Democratic branches responsible for Congress and governor campaigns have spent nearly $44 million in Michigan, Maryland, California , Illinois and Colorado to promote the far-right candidates in the Republican primary. The strategy began to attract more attention and controversy after the two primary games surrounding Mayer and Hogan. When criticizing the "1.6 riot", Trump's illegal hiding confidential documents and attacking law enforcement agencies, and the Republican Party's authoritarian style in red states, Democrats, including Biden, often call on elected officials at all levels of the Republican Party to have the courage to cut seats with Trump's party, surpass the party's struggle and maintain democratic consensus. However, when some of them really make this choice, the "reward" of the Democratic Party's "reward" is to inspire extreme voters to punish them and make them lose their political future, which will naturally make Democrats' various calls for "voting for themselves is about defending democracy" without credit, and it is also easy to alienate many centrists and Republican voters who support some of their policies and oppose their extremes.After losing the primary, Mayer said in an interview that the behavior of intentionally promoting extreme candidates for political interests, knowing its dangers, is just like hoping to overturn the election results by inciting riots. In an interview after the primary, Maryland Gov. Hogan, in addition to continuing to accuse Trump of the endorsed candidates of being a "QAnon whack job", he also criticized Democrats for making it more difficult for decent Republicans to retake their party.
Another criticism of this comes from a more practical perspective: In a year when the Democratic Party’s election situation is still not optimistic, even the extreme Republican candidate is not completely unlucky in a swing constituency. Once such a situation occurs, the United States will not only face a Congress where an extremist force has more seats and can influence important investigations and legislation, but also a terrible situation where Trump's facilitators have the right to influence how the election will be carried out in the next coup. The most dangerous example of this is the gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania: convinced by data from centrist voters that “want to see a moderate Republican candidate”, the Democrats “helped” an extreme Doug Mastriano who was endorsed by Trump to win the primary. In the Democratic Party's expectations, this result guaranteed a lead of at least ten percentage points on its own side, but as Biden's support rate continues to decline in the state, the gap between the candidates for governors between the two parties is gradually narrowing, and once dropped to within three percentage points, which is equal to the error range of the poll itself - in other words, the real support rate between the two may be no longer different. Mastriano not only directly organized a bus for participants in the January 6 riot and participated in the riot on the same day, but one of his central propositions in the election was that he would immediately have the power to "cancel the certification of the 2020 election results" and could also directly appoint the Secretary of State responsible for the implementation of the election. As one of the swing states that have played the most important role in the elections in recent years, Pennsylvania will undoubtedly trigger an unprecedented constitutional crisis with no one to imagine the consequences of the Democratic presidential candidate in the future.
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So, compared with some political means with doubts about legitimacy and feasibility, it may ultimately play a key role in the November election results, or which side can give the most convincing answers to issues of public concern, or "pull" the center of the election to issues that are most beneficial to them. And more and more signs indicate that the Republican Party has lost its persuasion in the fields it once was good at because of its increasingly difficult-to-hide extremist colors.
Local time on January 27, 2022, Virginia, United States, Governor Glenn Youngken, United States.
This field is the so-called "cultural war" issue, involving all social and cultural issues including race, gender, education, climate, gun control, abortion rights, etc. In recent elections, inciting and even creating controversies around them is the fastest tactic for the Republican Party to win. In the last year's gubernatorial election in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, an important reason for the victory of Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, was largely the debate over "critical race theory" that was created out of nothing; in contrast, the Democratic Party's victory in the 2018 midterm election was because enough candidates were highly disciplined and focused on the livelihood issues centered on protecting and expanding Obamacare. The change in this dynamic comes from the fact that in the past two years, the Republican local government has gone from reviewing school curriculum and books to using public power to investigate the parents of sexual minority children, which has exceeded the tolerance of more and more public, but the most important watershed is naturally the June 1 U.S. Supreme Court overthrows "Roy v. Weide" and suddenly terminates the constitution's verdict on the protection of women's abortion rights for nearly 50 years.The ironic normality in a campaign is that the party considered "loser" in a topic often has higher enthusiasm. Over the years, the Republican Party has used the promise of nominating conservative justices to overturn the Roy case and united a large number of "single-project voters", so many observers have long seen that what the Republican Party hopes is not that Roy is overturned so quickly, but that this bait that can always be used to inspire voters' enthusiasm for the longest possible; and with the judgment being made, the enthusiasm of voters on both sides has been reversed: in many states such as Kansas , Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the number of registered female voters surged by 35% after the judgment was issued. In the states with the most significant changes, 70% of newly registered voters after the judgment were women. More importantly, many abortion rights activists are extremely effective in talking about this issue and conveying their importance to the public: concepts commonly used in Washington such as "pro-choice", "pro-life", and "reproductive rights", are either too technical or have lost their practical significance to the general public in the constant party struggles and redefinitions. So they start from scratch, looking for the most important political values for voters in their respective regions, and using them to reinterpret the importance of abortion rights.
The most successful attempt to do this, of course, happened in Kansas referendum on whether the state constitution guarantees the right to abortion. In this red state where Republican candidates often lead in double-digit numbers, when anti-abortion Republicans successfully merged the referendum into the primary election with often low turnout, they basically had no expectations of encountering any resistance; but abortion rights activists in Kansas saw a strong liberalism temperament shared by voters from both parties in the state. Therefore, Republican voters, their advertisements contain a large number of Reagan-style vigilance against the big government that the Republicans often use: deprivation of abortion is to expand the "government mandate" and the government intervenes in your "personal privacy", "personal life", and "personal freedom". In addition, they certainly do not forget to tell many individual stories of life saved by the right to abortion. In the end, the result of 59% of voters in a red state, leading the other party, supporting the implementation of the protection of abortion rights in the constitution, can be said to be shocked by most political observers in Washington.
has many signs that confirm the same trend: After the Supreme Court verdict was made, five special elections to fill the vacant House seats in Nevada, Minnesota, , Alaska, and New York were held, with all Democratic candidates winning votes significantly exceeding the 2020 election; in the special elections to fill the vacant House seats in Alaska, another Republican, the Republican city, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola broke almost everyone's expectations and defeated Sarah, the actual initiator of the Tea Party movement and the continued favor of Trump, former governor Sarah, who won the continued favor of Trump. Palin; and the special election in the 19th constituency in New York is regarded as the most accurate prediction of the midterm election results for many reasons: Biden's vote rate here is two percentage points higher than Trump, similar to those in several important swing states, the population structure of the constituency is similar to the middle voters that Democrats need to fight for the most, and the issues that both candidates choose to focus on are also the hardships of both parties that can save themselves in the midterm elections - Democratic candidate Patrick Lane (Pat Ryan devotes most of his energy to promoting the significance of this year's midterm elections to protect abortion rights: if the Democrats can expand their leading seats in both houses, the protection of abortion rights established in Roy's case can become federal legislation, and the Republican victory means that federal abortion bans may be put on the agenda, thus allowing New York's areas with abortion rights protected by the blue state government to face similar dangers as many red states today; and his Republican opponent chose to count on the public's dissatisfaction with inflation and energy prices, although the improvement in these aspects has continued for some time; eventually, Ryan won the election by a three-point advantage, which greatly increased confidence in November by many Democrats facing difficult elections.
Local time July 19, 2022, Washington, DC, USA, Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez from New York, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota , and Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier from California , walked towards the U.S. Supreme Court amid the protests overturning the Roe v. Wade case.
So, many Democrats naturally want to see the Republican Party continue to shoot themselves in the foot on the issue of abortion rights, and continue to be unable to find a self-consistent, unified and moderate response strategy, and at least the facts so far meet this expectation: on the one hand, many people, including the above-mentioned Arizona candidate Mastell, have secretly modified their campaign web pages because of the adverse effects of the wind; on the other hand, just a few days ago, one of the most well-known Republican senators, Graham (Lindsey Graham), drafted a law to ban the federal government's fifteen weeks of rebirth, which is more than ten weeks less than the Roy case guaranteed. The public sentiment aroused by this move undoubtedly has wasted many candidates' efforts to moderate their positions.
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combines the above factors, and the election situation of this year's midterm election can be said to be much more complex and changeable than the traditional cognition mentioned at the beginning: When the political news and poll information website 538 just opened its predictions of the midterm election results in the summer, its prediction of the Senate was more than half the possibility of the Republicans taking back control, but after witnessing the poor performance of a series of "Trump-sected" candidates Today, the probability that the Democrats can maintain a Senate majority is as high as 71%; for the House, at the beginning of the year, Republican House leader McCarthy 's expectation for the election result was to win more than 60 seats, but today, most polls' forecasts for Republican new seats have been reduced to only about 10 seats. After the last primary election day on Tuesday, including Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer (Steny) Democratic House leaders such as Hoyer and Jim Clyburn have even expressed their confidence in keeping the House as never before.
If the predictions for both houses eventually come true today, although the Republican Party, which only controls one legislative branch, cannot pass any legislation that restricts abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and threatens important social welfare projects including Obamacare, it is enough to create many disturbances and threats to the democratic system: In addition to obstructing the Biden administration’s many important legislation necessary to deal with severe geopolitical situations and domestic problems that need to be resolved, many Republican members of the House of Representatives have made it clear that they will get back the majority of the future plans to conduct witch hunting investigations, that is, based on conspiracy theories such as the far-right and even the QAnon Forum, they also threaten to target Attorney General Garland (Merrick) due to the investigation of Trump. Garland), members of the "1.6 Committee", and public officials who led the US epidemic response based on conspiracy theories around the new crown epidemic and vaccines, who have touched the interests of the Republican party because of their jobs. This will undoubtedly bring chilling effects to countless colleagues who do not have the same popularity and protection, and will not help recruit people with ideals for serving the public's welfare into this industry, while continuing to increase people's distrust of these institutions. Not to mention that in local public offices outside the federal level, many positions responsible for running public services such as elections, schools, medical systems, infrastructure, etc. are likely to be occupied by some people who do not believe that everyone has the right to vote, believe that students have no right to learn history in a comprehensive way, women have no right to have an abortion, and a minority of sexual minor parents do not have the right to support their children's choices.
So, although "your choice is about everything about this country" is a slogan that is used too much and too exaggeratedly in every election, it can be said to be quite true in the midterm elections less than two months later. The "choice" here includes many people: whether Republicans have the courage to oppose dangerous and extreme parts of the party, how Democrats will choose to treat partisan opponents who adhere to valuable principles, and whether countless voters will place the existence of democratic systems and civil rights in a more important position than some party ideologies, and clearly see the box they have blacked out on the vote, which can be enough to determine the existence of American democracy.
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The number one factor among them is naturally Trump. As we all know, the United States has a part of voters whose ideology is conservative but cannot accept Trump's personal characteristics. Although their number is not huge, it is enough to determine Biden's victory in many swing states in 2020. Therefore, for other federal and local elected positions, the closeness of Republican candidates to Trump can be said to be largely determined whether they can get the support of this group of voters. Glenn Youngkin won the state that has been turning blue for nearly a decade in the Virginia gubernatorial election last year.
Local time on September 17, 2022, Ohio, USA, former U.S. President Trump addressed supporters at a rally in Youngstown .
But Trump is obviously unwilling to give up his control over the Republican Party, and has successively screened out a group of candidates who are loyal to him and his "election fraud". These candidates can no longer maintain any "independence" in the general election, keep a distance from Trump, and the screening mechanism selected by "loyalty" as the only condition is often extremely poor in campaigns in many key constituencies.
This is particularly obvious in the competition in the Senate. Originally, regaining control of the Senate should be the most accessible goal of the Republican Party. Not only did the Senate election itself give the Republican Party a disproportionate advantage, but the Republican Party also gained control by just a net increase of one seat. But Trump clearly couldn't stand the urge to intervene in such a widely watched competition, and he endorsed the worst and least-good candidates among the most critical swing states.
Take Ohio as an example. This is a Midwest state with deeper red in recent elections. It has a large number of white blue-collar working-class voters living in rural areas. It can be said to be one of the most stable votes for the Republican Party since entering the Trump era. Trump also won by 8 percentage points in both elections. The competition generated by the retirement of Republican Senator 1 Rob Portman in this state should not be suspense. But the winner of the Republican primary is arguably the worst candidate for Ohio, conservative political author J. D. Vance, who, from his resume alone, has the "New York/Washington Elite" background that typical Ohio Republican voters are most disgusted by years of demonization of conservative opinion leaders: a graduate of Yale Law School and a venture capitalist. His work that made him famous is a memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" that explains Trump's voter mentality to high-educated groups on the East and West Coasts, and was a Trump critic for a long time, but when he discovered this opportunity in Ohio, he quickly turned 180 degrees on this point. His campaign funds are almost all from Silicon Valley Conservative rich man Peter Thiel - another factor that doesn't really inspire the enthusiasm of blue-collar workers voters.
Relying on this fund, Trump's endorsement, and votes were scattered by candidates, Vans won the Republican primary with less than 33% of the votes, but his performance before and after this can be said to have completely failed to understand Ohio's political pulse: until today, he is often missing in Ohio, absent from many traditional municipal festivals that are regarded as a must-pass station for politicians, and is not even concerned about very critical fundraising activities, but is busy attending meetings held by conservative celebrities across the United States and around the world; his political speech on social media is often not related to the concerns of ordinary voters, but is more keen to participate in the national-level "cultural war" topics: attacking professional women, sexual minorities, judicial investigations of Trump and his accomplices, etc. In response, many Republican figures in the state have also begun to express their concerns and dissatisfaction with Vance losing this red state seat that should not have been a problem.
At the same time, the Democratic Party nominated a candidate with a personal political opinion and style that is extremely suitable for Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan. He has a congressional resume for nearly 20 years. His image has always been a traditional trade unionist who focuses on the rights and interests of the blue-collar working class. He is a member of the "Blue Collar Caucus" in the House of Representatives. After the Democratic voters shifted from the higher-educated urban professional class, he can find out which positions of his party are not popular in his state and always show his independence in a timely manner: he supports the transfer of manufacturing back to the United States, opposes the "defund the police" that is not popular among conservative voters in the state, criticizes the Biden administration for its recent spending policies, including student loan exemptions, etc.; he is also very good at "retail politics" that is very important in Ohio and other states. politics)” means traveling to as many areas in the state as possible, holding small and medium-sized events that may not be very important to win the support of voters in these areas, and at the same time, using their advantages in fundraising to launch large-scale advertisements that interpret their positions and "personality" to the state media.
The right judgment between the two's campaign levels has allowed Ryan to achieve much greater success than Vance in the face of voters' "definition" himself. More and more Republican voters said in the poll that although he still opposes the Democratic Party's ideology and dislikes his style of conduct, he can view Ryan more independently and is not disgusted with him himself; some polls have even shown that Ryan has gained a certain degree of lead. The words of a well-known conservative radio anchor in Ohio summed up the current situation of the campaign well: In his opinion, Ryan was a "full hypocritical liar", but also "running the most efficient campaign I've ever seen."
Similar phenomena are not only happening in Ohio, Trump's behavior of pushing the worst and most unattractive candidates to primary victory to ensure that the party's loyalty is to him touches every swing state that is crucial to the Republican Party: In the long-standing Republican center and recently began to turn blue, the Republican Party hopes to defeat Democratic newcomer Senator Mark Kelly. As a Democrat, Kelly also has a resume that conservative voters don't hate. He served as a captain of the Marine Corps. He is a NASA astronaut who has traveled to space four times and has good cooperative relationships with many municipal and municipal Republican politicians; and his Republican rival, Blake Mastell Master) has won the favor of Trump and the Republican basic voters by adding fire to election fraud and lies. However, when the party primary election is over and candidates need to face the public in the entire state, his extreme positions in many aspects immediately became Master's biggest disadvantage, so that his team was found to frequently modify his campaign webpage and delete his extreme positions on issues such as abortion rights, immigration, guns, and the 2020 election. Even the largest Political Action Committee (PAC), the Senate Republican caucus, clearly expressed his lack of confidence in his victory and withdrew nearly $8 million in campaign funds. In the similar situation, Trump elected former football athlete Herschel Walker to challenge Democratic Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock. Walker not only had no political experience before, but also faced charges of domestic violence and other accusations, and also threw many ridiculous and extremely falsified lies around his resume. In this comparison, Warnock, who was originally regarded as the most threatened Democratic senator in the mid-term of this year, has already won a six-point lead in the latest Quinipia University poll. A few months ago, the senator seats in Nevada and New Hampshire, which made Democrats worried that they could not hold, have gradually swung back to the "safety" category under the influence of similar factors.
. Even when the Democrats nominate imperfect and controversial candidates, the Republican candidates will even "fight" with greater disadvantages. The most typical one is the vacant Senate seat in Pennsylvania : current lieutenant governor John Fetterman who won the Democratic primary election Fetterman, a politician who does not hide his populist color. Although he avoided all substantive policy debates in the primary election, he still relied on the anti-elite "outsider" character and the support of a part of the Democratic Party "Handers -Trump voters" to defeat opponents with more detailed policy proposals than him in the primary election; the Republican Party could have seized such an opportunity to prove that it has the seriousness and sincerity of governing, but still nominated a more clownish and politically experienced former variety show celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz" as a candidate under Trump's endorsement. It is not difficult to imagine that this is not a very inspiring campaign. Apart from the most common "talk points" of both parties, both rarely mention any substantial policies, but more so than creating more popular "negative campaigns" that attack each other more popularly on social media. However, Oz often reveals the ground and ignorance of a wealthy celebrity in both campaign advertisements and daily moves. Fetterman's populist color just fits the unique political aesthetics of many Penn voters; so, although many Democrats say that this is not a very proud election battle, Trump's poor candidates selected for the Republican Party have made Pennsylvania the most likely to win for the Democrats in the swing state. Of course, in order to make the entire midterm election completely a choice between one's own side and extremism, the Democrats did not completely passively wait for Trump to pick the worst candidate in each campaign and bind himself to it, but instead reactivated a political strategy involving intervening in the Republican primary.
In 2012, when Claire McCaskill, the then Democratic Senator, sought re-election, she was facing an unoptimistic situation where her support rate in a red state campaign and Obama's was not significantly ahead; so she took the initiative to "select" the opponent she wanted to face the most, and the most extreme and most regarded by centrist voters as unacceptable by Rep. Todd Akin, the most extreme and centrist voters, and took the initiative to "fund" him to produce and place advertisements to promote his achievements to Republican primary voters when his campaign funds were lagging behind his opponents. With her "help", Akin won the primary, and his extreme statements such as "violators of rape will not get pregnant at all, so they don't have to consider treating them as exceptions when abortions are prohibited" have also caused a lot of trouble for the Republicans as scheduled in Missouri. In the end, while Obama lost Missouri by more than ten percentage points, McCasky, from the same party, defended her Senate seat by a larger gap, and she was also regarded by many Democrats as a genius in campaign strategy because of this strategy.
Local time October 14, 2020, , Michigan, , Peter Meijer delivered a speech at the event.
After that, this strategy was largely shelved and there was no chance of reusing it. Until this year, the Democrats once again faced a situation where a party's presidential approval rating was not ideal, and at the same time, the Republican side suddenly had countless candidates with better than Aikin. Therefore, this strategy is copied and pasted into multiple selections of different levels.The most popular example occurs in a House of Representatives constituency in , Michigan, where the area represents the newly elected Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, who is an ideological moderate and a "Problem Solvers Caucus" that advocates bipartisan cooperation, is one of the only 10 Republican Representatives who voted for the impeachment of Trump after the "1.6 Capitol Hill Riot" and did not hide this position for his political future. As expected, in this year's primary election, he faced John Gibbs, a challenger who had worked in the Trump administration and endorsed by him. Gibbs, his extremist color is so strong that he once stood up for conspiracy theories originated from the "QAnon" movement. Meier represents a purple swing constituency. The Democrats hope to turn it blue and judge that Gibbs is not accepted by crucial centrist voters because it is too extreme and is a more easily defeated opponent. Therefore, as the most critical period of the primary election, it launched an advertisement introducing the Republican primary voters to Trump's endorsement, anti-immigration, and anti-abortion positions, and spent as much as $435,000, more than what Gibbs himself raised in the entire election campaign. As expected, Gibbs won the party nomination in the primary, which means that the possibility of the Democratic Party turning the seat blue increased significantly in November, and the political media Politico's rating for the seat has also been adjusted from Toss up to "leaning to Democratic Party victory" to "leaning to Lean Democratic."
Similar situations also occur in Maryland . Although as one of the most stable blue states in the whole of the United States, Maryland voters have elected Republican Governor Larry Hogan for two consecutive terms. It is not difficult to imagine that he is not a typical Republican today. He has the sincerity and ability to govern, cooperates well with the state legislature controlled by the Democratic Party, and is not weaker than Democrats when criticizing Trump's extremism in attacking democracy. Therefore, he has maintained a very high support rate in Maryland so far. But this year, Hogan has expired two terms and cannot continue to participate in the election, and endorsed a moderate candidate similar to himself in the Republican primary; and such a blue state governor's seat is naturally a low-level fruit for the Democrats. Once the Republican nominee is too extreme, it is easy to get it. So he placed a large number of advertisements for another candidate endorsed by Trump three weeks before the primary election to help make the candidate who supports the conspiracy theory of election fraud and advocates restricting abortion rights. The predictions of the Maryland governor's seat by major political media have also been adjusted to "basically determine that the Democrats will win (Solid Blue).
Looking across the country, the Democratic branches responsible for Congress and governor campaigns have spent nearly $44 million in Michigan, Maryland, California , Illinois and Colorado to promote the far-right candidates in the Republican primary. The strategy began to attract more attention and controversy after the two primary games surrounding Mayer and Hogan. When criticizing the "1.6 riot", Trump's illegal hiding confidential documents and attacking law enforcement agencies, and the Republican Party's authoritarian style in red states, Democrats, including Biden, often call on elected officials at all levels of the Republican Party to have the courage to cut seats with Trump's party, surpass the party's struggle and maintain democratic consensus. However, when some of them really make this choice, the "reward" of the Democratic Party's "reward" is to inspire extreme voters to punish them and make them lose their political future, which will naturally make Democrats' various calls for "voting for themselves is about defending democracy" without credit, and it is also easy to alienate many centrists and Republican voters who support some of their policies and oppose their extremes.After losing the primary, Mayer said in an interview that the behavior of intentionally promoting extreme candidates for political interests, knowing its dangers, is just like hoping to overturn the election results by inciting riots. In an interview after the primary, Maryland Gov. Hogan, in addition to continuing to accuse Trump of the endorsed candidates of being a "QAnon whack job", he also criticized Democrats for making it more difficult for decent Republicans to retake their party.
Another criticism of this comes from a more practical perspective: In a year when the Democratic Party’s election situation is still not optimistic, even the extreme Republican candidate is not completely unlucky in a swing constituency. Once such a situation occurs, the United States will not only face a Congress where an extremist force has more seats and can influence important investigations and legislation, but also a terrible situation where Trump's facilitators have the right to influence how the election will be carried out in the next coup. The most dangerous example of this is the gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania: convinced by data from centrist voters that “want to see a moderate Republican candidate”, the Democrats “helped” an extreme Doug Mastriano who was endorsed by Trump to win the primary. In the Democratic Party's expectations, this result guaranteed a lead of at least ten percentage points on its own side, but as Biden's support rate continues to decline in the state, the gap between the candidates for governors between the two parties is gradually narrowing, and once dropped to within three percentage points, which is equal to the error range of the poll itself - in other words, the real support rate between the two may be no longer different. Mastriano not only directly organized a bus for participants in the January 6 riot and participated in the riot on the same day, but one of his central propositions in the election was that he would immediately have the power to "cancel the certification of the 2020 election results" and could also directly appoint the Secretary of State responsible for the implementation of the election. As one of the swing states that have played the most important role in the elections in recent years, Pennsylvania will undoubtedly trigger an unprecedented constitutional crisis with no one to imagine the consequences of the Democratic presidential candidate in the future.
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So, compared with some political means with doubts about legitimacy and feasibility, it may ultimately play a key role in the November election results, or which side can give the most convincing answers to issues of public concern, or "pull" the center of the election to issues that are most beneficial to them. And more and more signs indicate that the Republican Party has lost its persuasion in the fields it once was good at because of its increasingly difficult-to-hide extremist colors.
Local time on January 27, 2022, Virginia, United States, Governor Glenn Youngken, United States.
This field is the so-called "cultural war" issue, involving all social and cultural issues including race, gender, education, climate, gun control, abortion rights, etc. In recent elections, inciting and even creating controversies around them is the fastest tactic for the Republican Party to win. In the last year's gubernatorial election in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, an important reason for the victory of Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, was largely the debate over "critical race theory" that was created out of nothing; in contrast, the Democratic Party's victory in the 2018 midterm election was because enough candidates were highly disciplined and focused on the livelihood issues centered on protecting and expanding Obamacare. The change in this dynamic comes from the fact that in the past two years, the Republican local government has gone from reviewing school curriculum and books to using public power to investigate the parents of sexual minority children, which has exceeded the tolerance of more and more public, but the most important watershed is naturally the June 1 U.S. Supreme Court overthrows "Roy v. Weide" and suddenly terminates the constitution's verdict on the protection of women's abortion rights for nearly 50 years.The ironic normality in a campaign is that the party considered "loser" in a topic often has higher enthusiasm. Over the years, the Republican Party has used the promise of nominating conservative justices to overturn the Roy case and united a large number of "single-project voters", so many observers have long seen that what the Republican Party hopes is not that Roy is overturned so quickly, but that this bait that can always be used to inspire voters' enthusiasm for the longest possible; and with the judgment being made, the enthusiasm of voters on both sides has been reversed: in many states such as Kansas , Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the number of registered female voters surged by 35% after the judgment was issued. In the states with the most significant changes, 70% of newly registered voters after the judgment were women. More importantly, many abortion rights activists are extremely effective in talking about this issue and conveying their importance to the public: concepts commonly used in Washington such as "pro-choice", "pro-life", and "reproductive rights", are either too technical or have lost their practical significance to the general public in the constant party struggles and redefinitions. So they start from scratch, looking for the most important political values for voters in their respective regions, and using them to reinterpret the importance of abortion rights.
The most successful attempt to do this, of course, happened in Kansas referendum on whether the state constitution guarantees the right to abortion. In this red state where Republican candidates often lead in double-digit numbers, when anti-abortion Republicans successfully merged the referendum into the primary election with often low turnout, they basically had no expectations of encountering any resistance; but abortion rights activists in Kansas saw a strong liberalism temperament shared by voters from both parties in the state. Therefore, Republican voters, their advertisements contain a large number of Reagan-style vigilance against the big government that the Republicans often use: deprivation of abortion is to expand the "government mandate" and the government intervenes in your "personal privacy", "personal life", and "personal freedom". In addition, they certainly do not forget to tell many individual stories of life saved by the right to abortion. In the end, the result of 59% of voters in a red state, leading the other party, supporting the implementation of the protection of abortion rights in the constitution, can be said to be shocked by most political observers in Washington.
has many signs that confirm the same trend: After the Supreme Court verdict was made, five special elections to fill the vacant House seats in Nevada, Minnesota, , Alaska, and New York were held, with all Democratic candidates winning votes significantly exceeding the 2020 election; in the special elections to fill the vacant House seats in Alaska, another Republican, the Republican city, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola broke almost everyone's expectations and defeated Sarah, the actual initiator of the Tea Party movement and the continued favor of Trump, former governor Sarah, who won the continued favor of Trump. Palin; and the special election in the 19th constituency in New York is regarded as the most accurate prediction of the midterm election results for many reasons: Biden's vote rate here is two percentage points higher than Trump, similar to those in several important swing states, the population structure of the constituency is similar to the middle voters that Democrats need to fight for the most, and the issues that both candidates choose to focus on are also the hardships of both parties that can save themselves in the midterm elections - Democratic candidate Patrick Lane (Pat Ryan devotes most of his energy to promoting the significance of this year's midterm elections to protect abortion rights: if the Democrats can expand their leading seats in both houses, the protection of abortion rights established in Roy's case can become federal legislation, and the Republican victory means that federal abortion bans may be put on the agenda, thus allowing New York's areas with abortion rights protected by the blue state government to face similar dangers as many red states today; and his Republican opponent chose to count on the public's dissatisfaction with inflation and energy prices, although the improvement in these aspects has continued for some time; eventually, Ryan won the election by a three-point advantage, which greatly increased confidence in November by many Democrats facing difficult elections.
Local time July 19, 2022, Washington, DC, USA, Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez from New York, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota , and Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier from California , walked towards the U.S. Supreme Court amid the protests overturning the Roe v. Wade case.
So, many Democrats naturally want to see the Republican Party continue to shoot themselves in the foot on the issue of abortion rights, and continue to be unable to find a self-consistent, unified and moderate response strategy, and at least the facts so far meet this expectation: on the one hand, many people, including the above-mentioned Arizona candidate Mastell, have secretly modified their campaign web pages because of the adverse effects of the wind; on the other hand, just a few days ago, one of the most well-known Republican senators, Graham (Lindsey Graham), drafted a law to ban the federal government's fifteen weeks of rebirth, which is more than ten weeks less than the Roy case guaranteed. The public sentiment aroused by this move undoubtedly has wasted many candidates' efforts to moderate their positions.
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combines the above factors, and the election situation of this year's midterm election can be said to be much more complex and changeable than the traditional cognition mentioned at the beginning: When the political news and poll information website 538 just opened its predictions of the midterm election results in the summer, its prediction of the Senate was more than half the possibility of the Republicans taking back control, but after witnessing the poor performance of a series of "Trump-sected" candidates Today, the probability that the Democrats can maintain a Senate majority is as high as 71%; for the House, at the beginning of the year, Republican House leader McCarthy 's expectation for the election result was to win more than 60 seats, but today, most polls' forecasts for Republican new seats have been reduced to only about 10 seats. After the last primary election day on Tuesday, including Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer (Steny) Democratic House leaders such as Hoyer and Jim Clyburn have even expressed their confidence in keeping the House as never before.
If the predictions for both houses eventually come true today, although the Republican Party, which only controls one legislative branch, cannot pass any legislation that restricts abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and threatens important social welfare projects including Obamacare, it is enough to create many disturbances and threats to the democratic system: In addition to obstructing the Biden administration’s many important legislation necessary to deal with severe geopolitical situations and domestic problems that need to be resolved, many Republican members of the House of Representatives have made it clear that they will get back the majority of the future plans to conduct witch hunting investigations, that is, based on conspiracy theories such as the far-right and even the QAnon Forum, they also threaten to target Attorney General Garland (Merrick) due to the investigation of Trump. Garland), members of the "1.6 Committee", and public officials who led the US epidemic response based on conspiracy theories around the new crown epidemic and vaccines, who have touched the interests of the Republican party because of their jobs. This will undoubtedly bring chilling effects to countless colleagues who do not have the same popularity and protection, and will not help recruit people with ideals for serving the public's welfare into this industry, while continuing to increase people's distrust of these institutions. Not to mention that in local public offices outside the federal level, many positions responsible for running public services such as elections, schools, medical systems, infrastructure, etc. are likely to be occupied by some people who do not believe that everyone has the right to vote, believe that students have no right to learn history in a comprehensive way, women have no right to have an abortion, and a minority of sexual minor parents do not have the right to support their children's choices.
So, although "your choice is about everything about this country" is a slogan that is used too much and too exaggeratedly in every election, it can be said to be quite true in the midterm elections less than two months later. The "choice" here includes many people: whether Republicans have the courage to oppose dangerous and extreme parts of the party, how Democrats will choose to treat partisan opponents who adhere to valuable principles, and whether countless voters will place the existence of democratic systems and civil rights in a more important position than some party ideologies, and clearly see the box they have blacked out on the vote, which can be enough to determine the existence of American democracy.
