Midterm elections will dramatically change political landscape

AMERICA:Increased polarisation, right-wing populism and a struggling economy could spell a wipeout for Democrats

THOMAS MANN holds the Averill Harriman Chair of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a prominent think tank that is close to the Democratic Party. He has written more than a dozen books about US politics, many of them about Congress.

During his 40 years in Washington, Mann has observed 20 midterm elections. This year’s poll, on November 2nd, is atypical, he says: “In most midterm elections, there is no overwhelming sense of angst in the country. So usually it plays out as a series of local elections that cumulate to a national result, with incumbents winning 98 per cent of the seats.”

Not so this year. The presidential party invariably loses seats and a poor economy also dictates losses for the party in power. Add to that the new energy that the populist, right-wing Tea Party has infused among Republicans, and Democrats fear a wipeout.

“I feel like someone dying on a battlefield,” a Democratic activist told me this week. “I think it’s going to be a total disaster.”

Mann’s prediction is only slightly more optimistic for the Democrats. The Republicans need a net gain of 39 seats to take the 435-seat House of Representatives. He estimates they will win around 45. But Democrats have rebounded in several recent opinion polls, and Mann nonetheless gives them a one in three chance of keeping the House.

Mann thinks the GOP will pick up at most eight Senate seats, leaving them just short of a majority. “In the Senate, I give the Republicans no better than three in 10 chances of taking the majority,” he says.

Whatever the result of the election, the American political landscape will be dramatically altered. “If the Democrats hold on, it will be by the skin of their teeth,” Mann predicts. Republicans will be “pushed by their activists to continue to refrain from any engagement or bargaining or compromise”.

If Republicans take the House, they’re expected to launch investigations into every aspect of the Obama administration. There is the precedent of the late 1990s, when Republicans made a sport of summoning White House officials to testify in hearings, and ultimately attempted to impeach Bill Clinton.

There will be severe limitations on what President Barack Obama can accomplish with Congress. “The focus will shift from legislative initiative to foreign affairs and executive leadership, whatever happens,” says Mann.

Climate change is a prime example of how the US president will proceed. Systematic Republican filibusters in the Senate stymied his attempts to pass legislation, so he now intends to work through the Environmental Protection Agency. The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to regulate toxic emissions – including green house gases – enabling Obama to enact policies without Congress.

By making the Republicans look “retrograde and not responsive”, Mann believes Obama can position himself well for the 2012 presidential election.

The biggest post-midterm transformation will be in the character of the Republican Party. Almost no one in the GOP establishment has dared to criticise the amorphous Tea Party, and some, like Senator John McCain, have veered sharply toward it. “[Senator] Jim DeMint [a Tea Party sympathiser] is rising up and the new Republicans who are coming in are very conservative,” says Mann. “The Republican conference in the Senate will move even farther to the right, and some will be demanding fairly radical steps.”

The Tea Party’s supporters are “suspicious of government and resentful of any form of redistribution”, Mann says. “They believe the stimulus and the healthcare plan took dollars paid by middle-class citizens and steered them to the undeserving.”

On the international scene, Mann expects there “will be a lot of rhetoric that will reinforce around the world the impression that America has lost control”. He rejects two tenets of the current common wisdom about the midterms: that a Republican victory will force Obama to move towards the political centre, and that there are parallels between 1994 and the present.

“Obama is a centrist,” Mann explains. “Republicans portray him as a crazy, left-wing radical, when he’s nothing of the sort. Did he nationalise the banks? Did he try to push the single-payer, government healthcare plan? No!” As for parallels with 1994, “The polarisation has got so much worse,” says Mann. “Now, the most active people in the Republican Party are saying, ‘Don’t you dare negotiate and deal with the devil’. It’s a denial of the whole Madisonian system.”

Until 1970, the filibuster was used approximately once a year to block legislation in the Senate. Over the past four years, Republicans have used the tactic on average 65 times annually. “We’re having serious governing problems,” admits Mann. “Intensely polarised parties, with this set of political institutions, produces some real pathologies. And yet, Barack Obama, in his first two years in office, had the most productive legislative record of any newly elected president since FDR.”