well, i went back to look at something i wrote in september 2018 about the then-upcoming midterm election. and while i may have overestimated the degree that the senior partner in the current bipartisan fascist regime had its shit together then, and thus gotten some details wrong, it holds up well enough as a description of this year’s midterm election for me to post it here unedited:
this is basically just a future ‘i told you so’. spoilers for 2018 u.s. federal legislative elections below; if you don’t want them, don’t read this till november.
so: every congressional race this year is the democratic party’s to lose. and they’re doing their flat-out best to make sure they do. [addendum: here’s an insidery take on exactly how: http://idlewords.com/2018/10/portrait_of_a_campaign.htm]
if they ran on wildly popular positions like universal free healthcare, a student loan debt jubilee, a national living wage or universal basic income, less immigration restriction, aggressive prosecution of banks and investment firms, and so on, they’d throw almost any republican they wanted out of office (and still be well to the right of richard nixon’s 1972 platform).
but they aren’t and won’t. the ‘blue wave’ – always a fantasy of some mystical arc tending towards lukewarm liberalism without a need for anything as perspiration-inducing as action – is going to be at best a trickle.
the democrats have a reasonable chance, nonetheless, of winning enough new seats to shift the majority in either the house or the senate or possibly both. and here’s what’ll happen if that’s what the initial results show is happening:
in states with republican officials in charge of elections (election commissioners, secretaries of state, board of elections, whatever they may be), especially ones with republican legislatures and republican-controlled state supreme courts, where there are close (or close-ish) races that preliminary tallies give to democrats, the election results will not be certified.
(this won’t happen everywhere that meets those criteria, just in enough of the closest races to keep the congressional majorities republican.)
those results will be officially declared tainted and in need of investigation to ensure the integrity of the electoral system.
if the state officials are foolish, they’ll give voter fraud as the reason. in that case, the investigations will be done by kobach-style commissions appointed by the state legislatures. the state democratic parties will participate in the commission, lending the legitimacy that kobach couldn’t achieve, though they will have no influence over how it operates.
if the state officials are wise, they’ll give russian interference as the reason (either through voting machine hacking or social media influence, or both in different instances). in that case, the investigations will be kicked up to the federal level, most likely by jeff sessions’ justice department. the national democratic party will embrace the investigation wholeheartedly – they don’t really have any other choice.
either way, the newly elected congressmembers will not be seated. either incumbents will remain in office, or state governors will appoint ‘caretaker’ officeholders, who the republican majority of the current congress will seat (possibly over some degree of resistance from a few democrats, but not a consequential number of them).
new elections will be announced, but not with a definite date – the investigations will need to be concluded first, and that won’t happen until deep into 2019, or even early 2020, even with the full supportive participation of congressional democrats and the DNC.
what happens next is harder to predict, so i won’t try. but what happens in 2020 will depend on how this year’s test run goes. will the election proceed, after a massive round of bipartisan ‘election integrity’ action that disenfranchises huge numbers of black & brown folks and women? will the election be postponed at the last minute because of a ‘security breach’? will the election be run, and the results anulled as ‘compromised’ after the fact if they don’t return trump to office? any of these are possible, but 2018 will be the strategic try-out.
how do i know? i read history. this is how it goes.
i’m basically just applying the atwood rule here: nothing is made up; everything has precedent. the u.s. 1870s, when the bipartisan white supremacists in congress re-disenfranchised black folks in the south. the various fascist regimes in 20th century europe. the “one person, one vote, one time” dictatorships all across the global south after the coups (and autogolpes) against decolonization movements. the erdogan and putin regimes of this century.
and, above all, i’m assuming that the republicans have learned from their unprecedented success at stealing the 2000, 2004, and 2016 u.s. presidential elections without any significant opposition from the democratic party. i see their focus on state goverments over the past few decades as one of the ways they’ve built on what they learned in florida, ohio, michigan, and elsewhere – a focus that very clearly defines a federal-level strategy.