‘’Understanding everything in the American elections’’
The renewal of Congress is traditionally the occasion of a disavowal for the tenant of the White House. Joe Biden approaches the November 8 deadline with particularly short majorities.
Joe Biden is the President of the United States for at least two more years, but will he have the means of his policy? This is the whole point of the mid-term elections of November 8, which put all the seats in the House of Representatives and a little more than a third of those in the Senate to the vote.
For whom and for what do we vote?
In the United States, the midterm elections, or “midterms”, are about as decisive as that of the president. Organized in the middle of the presidential mandate, they renew a good part of Congress, the federal parliament. The 435 seats in the House of Representatives (comparable to French deputies) are put to the vote, which are put into play every two years, and about a third of the hundred seats of senators, who have six-year terms – this year, 35 are in the balance: fourteen are occupied by the Democrats and twenty-one by the Republicans.
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Many states take advantage of the midterm elections to elect their governors, or the heads of the local executive: they will be 36 – out of 50 – to do so this year. The Americans will also renew practically all the local assemblies, which decide on the policies specific to their State and can go in a direction very different from the projects carried by Joe Biden at the White House.
Finally, on the occasion of the midterms, several states will have their constituents vote on important reforms, in particular concerning the right to abortion, which is no longer recognized at the federal level since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court quashed, in June, Roe v. Wade of 1973. This will be the case in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont, according to the Guardian and the Associated Press agency.
What’s at stake for Democrats and Joe Biden?
Midterms often act as a referendum for or against the tenant of the White House. Regularly, the party in power leaves feathers there. In 2018, under Donald Trump, the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives by tumbling 40 seats, while increasing their majority in the Senate by two seats. In 2014, the punishment was for Democrats led by Barack Obama: minus thirteen House seats; minus nine in the Senate, with a loss of majority at stake.
This year, Democrat majorities are very narrow: five seats in the House, and only one in the Senate. Joe Biden’s camp is therefore particularly in danger.
So much for arithmetic; on the merits of the political debate, the tenant of the White House has a lot to do to defend his action in a context of galloping inflation. To rally progressives around him, he straddled the battle horse of abortion, promising that in the event of victory in the midterms, the first law of Congress will guarantee the right to abortion.
Implicitly, the battle of the “filibuster”
Faced with the Republicans, Joe Biden implores the Americans to allow him to circumvent a parliamentary rule which prevents him from legalizing abortion throughout the territory, or even from banning assault rifles. This is the “filibuster”, a strategy of obstruction simply consisting of a speaker talking indefinitely without being able to be interrupted.
Implicitly, the battle of the “filibuster”
Faced with the Republicans, Joe Biden implores the Americans to allow him to circumvent a parliamentary rule which prevents him from legalizing abortion throughout the territory, or even from banning assault rifles. This is the “filibuster”, a strategy of obstruction consisting quite simply, for a speaker, of discoursing indefinitely without being able to be interrupted.
On paper, the Democrats now have the absolute majority in the House and the Senate which would allow them to eliminate the use of filibuster. But two senators from their own camp have already said that they do not intend to go in this direction.
Towards the election of “deniers”?
These midterms, finally, are marked by the impact of Trumpism: “In many Republican primaries in the spring and summer, denying the legitimate results of the 2020 elections was the ticket” for a nomination in the midterm elections. -mandate, notes the Washington Post.
That means Republicans who don’t recognize Joe Biden as the nation’s legitimate president could land congressional seats or other high-level positions. Some of these “deniers”, as the American press calls them, sensitive to the conspiracy theories of Donald Trump who has always disputed his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden, would be called upon to oversee the 2024 presidential election, including in the famous “key states”, with all the anti-democratic disturbances imaginable.
In an investigation into the subject, the agency Bloomberg quotes Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, among others, who wrote on Twitter: “Stealing an election then hiding behind calls for unity, and leftists rejoice. »
