No one can say with certainty what will happen in tomorrow’s midterm elections. Polls suggest Republicans are likely to take control of the House and the Senate, and modern historical patterns clearly lean in the GOP’s favor, but if the polls are off a bit, and Democratic turnout exceeds expectations, the political world may soon be surprised.
Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.
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But let’s say for the sake of conversation that the polls aren’t off, and a flood of Democratic voters doesn’t materialize. Let’s say the forecasts and assorted models are right and there’s a clean sweep for Republicans. What should Americans expect? What exactly are the stakes for the nation and its future?
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently had a terrific A block on this, summarizing one of the core questions facing voters.
“Ultimately, the thing we are all deciding as a democratic society is who will wield power and what they will do with that power? … With Republicans within striking distance retaking the House — probably favored to retake the House — you’ve got to ask yourself, what would that actually mean? Not just on the campaign trail, what would Republican governance, a Republican majority in the House actually look like? What would they do?”
These should not be rhetorical questions. Fortunately, we don’t need a crystal ball to know the answers.
I suspect many voters haven’t considered this in much detail, and even those who’ve imagined the prospect of a Democratic White House working alongside a Republican majority on Capitol Hill have probably made some modest assumptions about legislative gridlock, a handful of culture war disputes, and more frequent use of the presidential veto pen.
But this dramatically understates matters. The next two years will be vastly worse if voters rally behind GOP candidates tomorrow.
The New York Times’ Ezra Klein had a great column along these lines yesterday, explaining, “What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 elections, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming.”
Some may see this as speculative, if not alarmist. We know those assumptions are wrong — because a great many GOP officials have been unsubtle about how they intend to use their power if the electorate hands it to them. As Ezra concluded, “[Republicans] have not hidden their intentions or their tactics. They have made clear what they intend to do if they win. Biden ran — and won — in 2020 promising a return to normalcy. Republicans are running in 2022 promising a return to calamity.”
Consider some of the specifics, likely to be seen at the federal level:
Debt ceiling: Republican leaders have freely admitted that they intend to hold the nation hostage next year, threatening to crash the economy on purpose unless their demands are met. We don’t yet have a sense of what would appear on their ransom note, but according to some GOP officials, cuts to Social Security and Medicare are likely to be part of the plan.
Sabotage: The last time there was a Republican majority on the Hill, there was a Republican president in the White House. This gave the GOP an incentive to keep the nation as stable as possible. With President Joe Biden in office, the opposite incentives kick in: Republicans will want to destabilize the United States with the expectation that such volatility will necessarily help the GOP and its likely presidential nominee in 2024.
There is some modern precedent for this: Republicans pursued a sabotage campaign after making gains in the 2010 midterms, and the result was a slower and unsteady recovery after the Great Recession.
Ugly, divisive legislation: A national abortion ban. A national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” policy. A bill to make permanent the GOP’s ineffective tax breaks from 2017. Republicans will have proposals they’ll be eager to push; those proposals will be regressive and unpopular; and they’ll be intensively divisive. The odds of these bills becoming law while Biden is in the Oval Office, of course, are poor.
But if rewarded by the electorate, Republicans would waste time on them anyway, in part to scratch an ideological itch, in part to satisfy the demands of conservative media, in part to generate fundraising opportunities, and in part because they have no intention of doing real legislative work.
Donald Trump, the House Speaker in absentia: If you think the former president is calling the shots for much of his party now, just wait until after he’s launched his 2024 bid and his most sycophantic allies are in positions of congressional power, desperate to both follow his orders and position him for success.








