November 6, Election Day 2018
WHICH PARTY CONTROLS CONGRESS
AND WHAT HAPPENS TO DONALD TRUMP
Whichever side you’re on, the Election of 2018 looms likely to be the most momentous of the New Millennium to date and possibly the most consequential of the last half-century and beyond.
But if either side tomorrow wins big, it will not be good for America:
A “blue tide” will mire the country in presidential and possibly judicial impeachment proceedings to the extent that Congress will get nothing done for many months or even years to come.
A “red tide” will anoint an unpopular President and render him unstoppable.
Historically in America, the incumbent president’s party loses seats in Congress in the midterm election when the president is not on the ballot. Hence the conventional wisdom/expectation that the current Republican majority in the House of Representatives will diminish if not disappear in tomorrow’s election — a factor which ordinarily would have little to do with Donald Trump personally.
However the Democrats and the President himself have made Trump the major factor in this midterm election even though he is not running in 2018, a virtually unprecedented occurrence for which the pollsters seem to have no valid benchmark on which to base predictions.
In the last hundred years there have only been three times that the president’s party has gained congressional seats in the midterm election, and each of those times the president himself was a major factor in the election even though he was not on the ballot.
The first occurrence was when Franklin Roosevelt was President in 1934, two years following his landslide victory over Herbert Hoover; and his enormous popularity resulting from bold moves to lift the country out of the Great Depression made him a personal favorite in the balloting that year. In 1934 the Democrats increased their majority in the House by nine votes.
Your vote matters! Maryland polls are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
And the third happened in 2002 when George W. Bush was riding high during a tumultuous year during which the country recovered well from the Osama bin Laden terrorist attack of 9/11 2001.
It remains to be seen how Trump’s status will affect the election tomorrow. He is arguably the most unpopular president ever, yet he has unprecedented high approval ratings among Republicans, with most GOP candidates running this year having made the determination that their chances of winning are better by aligning themselves with the President than against him.
Notably Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland is one of the few Republicans running this year to have distanced himself from President Trump, to the extent that Hogan has been endorsed by many leading Democrats, an almost unthinkable political reality; and Hogan is considered a shoo-in for reelection.
Trump’s unpopularity is analogous to that of President Harry Truman in 1946, when the Democrats lost 54 seats in Congress based on Truman’s unpopularity in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s death the year before. Truman would not overcome his unpopularity until his surprising upset defeat of Republican Thomas Dewey in the election of 1948.
So if you haven’t early-voted or mailed-in an absentee ballot…. Be sure to get out and vote tomorrow!
The results are sure to affect you personally and all of America as well, in undetermined ways, for many many years and possibly even decades to come.
And Donald Trump will either be impeached — or the odds-on frontrunner for President in the next election.
VoB Staff report
alforman@voiceobaltimore.org
