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Democrats have been hearing for months the midterms are already over and they’re going to lose. The media claim there’s little Democrats can do about it. Midterm election history and rising prices on gas and groceries almost guarantee Americans will return government control to the Republicans they threw out a year and a half ago with the largest presidential vote in history.
That sounds unbelievable. If true, American democracy is in big trouble. But it’s also a gross distortion of both political history and the popularity of the extreme Republicans who continue to support their soundly defeated president.
Let’s take history first. The last time a Republican president was driven out of office for criminal behavior—Richard Nixon in 1974—it took seven years for the party to repair the damage from Nixon running a burglary ring out of the Oval Office before Republicans regained the presidency under Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the 1974 midterms after both parties demanded Nixon’s resignation, Republicans lost 49 House seats, four Senate seats and four governorships.
Attack on Democracy
The difference this time is Donald Trump’s crimes were far worse and Republicans have done nothing to distance their party from him. The twice-impeached Trump violently attacked democracy itself. He sent a murderous mob to threaten the lives of his own vice president and members of Congress to try to stop them from certifying President Biden’s election so Trump could remain as president after losing the job.
Despite running from the howling mob just like Democrats, most Republican House members voted against impeaching Trump and most Republican senators voted to acquit him. That would only make twisted political sense if Trump and his divisive policies were popular with any Americans other than the hateful white supremacists and armed militias he attracted to the party. They’re not.
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All but the dumbest Republicans realize how dangerous Trump is, but they’re desperate to hold onto Trump’s loyal voters—including the lunatic fringe—to win the midterms. Democrats are hoping it blows up in their faces.
Wrong Side of Voters
It easily could. Trying to please Trump voters puts Republicans on the wrong side of every national issue Americans care most about right now: Preventing the open sale of military assault weapons to any mass murderer who wants one. The sudden abolition of the constitutional right for women to make their own decisions about their bodies, health care, personal lives and whether to give birth every time they become pregnant. Guaranteeing the right to vote for every qualified American and having those votes fairly counted in every state.
It's less surprising than you might think that Republicans are in the minority on so many important issues. Republicans have been a minority party in the U.S. for far longer than many realize.
We get a distorted view of the partisan breakdown of our own country because it’s not reflected currently in either the House or Senate. Even after Biden won more than seven million more votes than Trump, the Senate is divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. So, we’re an evenly divided country, right? Wrong. The 50 Democratic senators won the votes of 87 million Americans. The 50 Republican senators won the votes of only 63 million.
Unfair Advantage
That unfair advantage for small Republican states over large Democratic states is built directly into the Senate’s structure. Only two senators are elected from each state giving Wyoming’s 500,000 people equal representation with California’s 40 million. Republicans take this as a license to repeatedly block legislation favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
The unfair Republican advantage in the House is the result of pure political corruption. After the racist Tea Party backlash against President Obama’s 2008 election gave Republicans unchecked control of Wisconsin and other states in the 2010 midterms, the party used the new census to corruptly gerrymander legislative and congressional voting districts assuring permanent Republican majorities for the next decade. After the 2020 census, Wisconsin Republicans extended that corruption for l0 more years with assistance from Trump’s radical new Supreme Court.
Republicans are obscenely out of step with America’s democratic values and certainly don’t deserve to be back in power after November. But the media now says the only issue that will matter in the midterms is whether Biden and Democrats can bring down rising prices.
Biden continues adding hundreds of thousands of higher paying jobs every month creating the fastest economic recovery in U.S. history. That certainly helps working class families deal with those rising prices.
The least helpful political response has been Republicans babbling nonsense about reopening pipelines and meaningless clichés like “Drill, baby, drill.” Pipelines carry oil, they don’t produce it. Oil companies have thousands of drilling permits they aren’t using because they can make more money gouging customers with high gasoline prices.
It's just another reason never to give Republicans another chance to destroy democracy.
