Unintended Consequences: Understanding the U.S. midterms

Qaisar Shareef is the author of When Tribesmen Came Calling: Building an Enduring American Business in Pakistan, published by Blue Ear Books. His past columns in the Pakistani national English-language newspaper The News, explaining American politics and society to readers in Pakistan, are archived here.

The dust has settled on the U.S. midterm elections. Democrats have found much to cheer about in the results. It was widely expected the Republican Party would make major gains, as has been typical of past elections when one party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. Instead, the Republican Party has been able to pick up only nine additional seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a very slim majority and the speakership of the House.

In the Senate, on the other hand, the Democrats kept control and in fact picked up an additional seat in Pennsylvania. A large number of candidates endorsed by Donald Trump, all supporting mostly extreme positions including 2020 election results denial, were defeated. While the Republican Party’s base mostly stayed with them, the party performed poorly among centrist, non-partisan voters, whose support is needed to win any statewide election.

While the Democrats are rejoicing over better-than-expected results, the U.S. remains a deeply divided country. With control of Congress now split between the two parties, it’s widely expected that no major legislation will pass over the remainder of Biden’s term. The Republican leadership has already announced that they will be focusing on investigating what they see as the many policy failures of the Biden administration, from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive student loan debt to low-income households. Another major focus for the incoming Republican majority in the House will be to investigate the business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. With multiple such investigations soon to be underway, the Republican leadership is not even naming what their legislative priorities for the country will be, if they have any.

In addition to being deeply divided, the U.S. remains a country also more or less evenly divided. A very large number of Senate and gubernatorial races in the recent midterms were decided with a less than 5% vote differential. Out of the 50 states, 26 will be led by Republican governors and 24 by Democrats. Similarly, both the House and the Senate will now be led by different parties with the slimmest of majorities.

The next election, including for president, will be in 2024. Candidates are already starting to declare their intention to run, with Donald Trump being the first to jump in the race. Biden has not officially announced his intentions, but it is expected he will run again in spite of his age. He just turned 80 years old. While Biden appears frail at times, he has managed to accomplish very significant legislative and policy measures in the first two years of his presidency, and that with the slimmest of margins in Congress.

If Biden indeed decides to run, it is unlikely he will see much opposition from within his party. This despite there being some angst among Democrats about a Biden candidacy, mostly related to his age.

Republicans face a somewhat different issue. Trump remains very popular among the Republican base, even though his extremist, MAGA politics have turned out to be a big loser in these midterm elections. It’s also not in the U.S. political tradition for a former president who has lost an election to run again. Therefore, Donald Trump and his legacy have now become a big challenge to the Republican Party’s prospects. Yet, Trump remains the most popular politician among a majority of self-identified Republicans. No one within his party seems to have the courage to confront him yet. Their best hope may be that somehow Trump’s legal troubles will catch up with him and prevent him from running again.

There is another important way in which the deep national divide will play out in the 2024 presidential elections. While voters vote for individual presidential candidates, the country actually elects its president indirectly through what is called the Electoral College. Under this system, the winning candidate from each state gets the entirety of the votes from that state.

Since most states in the U.S. are now comfortably either “red” (Republican) or “blue” (Democratic), their choice for president can be fairly reliably predicted. This means the election will be decided by a very small handful of so-called “swing” states that remain unpredictable: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Together these four states account for less than 10% of the country’s population, but they are collectively expected to determine who the next president will be. As a result, both parties will focus almost exclusively in their campaigns on these four states, and perhaps one or two more such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The remaining 45 or so states, accounting for 90% of the country’s population, are going to be largely ignored. A somewhat perverse outcome of the U.S. electoral system thus is the effective disenfranchisement of 90% of the country’s voters. It is hard to imagine that this would have been the intent of the framers of the constitution.

The U.S. electoral system is now suffering from the proverbial unintended consequences of a system set up centuries ago. What must happen for the country to get out of this predicament remains unclear.

Qaisar Shareef is the author of When Tribesmen Came Calling: Building an Enduring American Business in Pakistan, published by Blue Ear Books. His past columns in the Pakistani national English-language newspaper The News, explaining American politics and society to readers in Pakistan, are archived here.