“The stakes are very high,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. These mid-term elections are a “watershed moment” for both parties, she added.
For Democrats, the issue is not just about regaining control of Congress. They persistently repeat that “Donald Trump and Republican officials represent an existential threat to America,” the political scientist explained to AFP.
On the Republican side, the 79-year-old president is counting heavily on retaining his parliamentary majority to push through the rest of his legislative agenda.
Otherwise, he keeps repeating, the Democrats would start impeachment proceedings almost immediately. A Democratic Congress could also block his appointments, launch investigations, and seriously impede the implementation of his policies.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs in November, and 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be renewed.
Republicans currently hold only narrow majorities in both houses, and Democrats hope to take control of the House of Representatives and even the Senate.
In the US, midterm elections are traditionally unfavorable for the party that won the White House two years earlier. And six months before the election, the outlook for Republicans is getting worse. More and more public opinion polls show record levels of dissatisfaction with Donald Trump, reports Hina.
“The president is pretty unpopular, and that’s usually a pretty strong indicator of how the president’s party will do in the midterm elections,” said Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University.
Many Americans feel that the Republican billionaire has failed to improve their economic situation, even though he was elected in part on that very promise. The war launched against Iran is also proving very unpopular, as is the rise in fuel prices it has caused.
Democrats have accused Trump of authoritarianism since he returned to the White House, and his very repressive policy towards migrants has come under fire from some of the public, said Julia Azari.
In the second camp, polls do not show excessive enthusiasm for the opposition.
“Americans are dissatisfied with the general direction and with both parties,” Azari emphasized. “Still, someone has to win” in November, and “we could see people who are not happy with the Democrats, but they’re going in that direction anyway,” the political scientist added.
Among the other main topics of the campaign is the battle that Donald Trump has launched over the redrawing of electoral districts.
In 2025, the US president asked several Republican-led states to redraw their electoral districts in order to dilute the Democratic vote in the hope of winning additional seats in Congress.
The practice of redrawing electoral districts (eng. gerrymandering), a form of electoral engineering, is not new in the USA, but Donald Trump has brought it back into vogue, especially in Texas or North Carolina.
For their part, the Democrats retaliated by redrawing the maps in the states they govern, such as in California or Virginia.
Constituency boundaries are traditionally drawn once every ten years, after the census, as required by the US Constitution, but it is possible more often.
A decision by the conservative-majority Supreme Court this week to limit redistricting that favors minorities has shuffled the cards even more.
Several Republican governors in the southern US, such as in Louisiana or Alabama, have already announced their intention to redraw their constituencies to eliminate Democratic seats.
The impact of all these reshuffles remains to be seen, but it is contributing to a worrying “electoral chaos,” she told Julia Azari.
For Mindy Romero, the uncertainty that dominates six months before the election can be compared to “a moving chessboard, on the back of a truck, on a bumpy country road.”
(Vijesti.ba)
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