These midterm elections show that the fractures in the US Congress are here to stay

Democracy is literally on the ballot. This is a defining moment for the nation. And we all must speak with one voice, regardless of our party,” Joe Biden said at the weekend as he sought to galvanise voters ahead of the midterm elections. Marking the first nationwide vote since Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election that put Biden in the White House, and the violence that followed on 6 January 2021 – how is that plea working out?

Certainly, Trump did not do as well as he would have wanted. He likely anticipated being able to cement his place as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, with a slate of candidates he had endorsed taking seats in the Senate or the House of Representatives as well as a number of state-level positions. Many of those candidates have taken a leaf out of Trump’s political playbook, either outright denying the results of the 2020 election, or at least questioning its legitimacy.

Given the perceived power of an endorsement by Trump ahead of the midterms, a significant proportion of the Republicans up for election across the country, and across all levels, could be placed in this category. However, the actual results were a decidedly mixed bag. While JD Vance did score a Senate seat in Ohio by a wider margin than many predicted, Mehmet Oz lost to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania in what could prove a crucial flip for the Democrats.

Josh Shapiro also won the governor’s race in the state for the Democrats, against Doug Mastriano – who, as a state senator, had introduced a bill that would have rejected certification of Pennsylvania’s 2020 vote. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Fox News, traditionally a Trump ally, published a story claiming that the former president could be the night’s “biggest loser” and that he had been “blasted across [the] media spectrum”.

The much-talked-about “red wave”, with Republicans making sweeping gains in congressional elections, has not materialised. “Definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure,” senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told MSNBC as results started coming in. But the contests for overall control of the House of Representatives and the Senate have still not been decided.

As it stands, if the Republicans take control of the House (having needed a small net gain of five seats to do so), it will likely be with a tight majority and the make-up of the Senate is also expected to stay close betweeen the parties, although the Democrats are optimistic of holding the chamber. In the House particularly, this gives those nearer the fringes of the GOP more leverage to push for investigations into the conduct of the Biden administration – with the leading Republican in the House, Kevin McCarthy, having told CNN before the vote that if the GOP gained control of the chamber there would be action over inflation and border security, but also investigations into the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Covid-19 pandemic, and how the administration has dealt with the matter of parents and school board meetings.

This is the kind of combative approach that we have become used to from both parties in recent years. However, the issues of political polarisation and instability are ones that have built up over decades; in stark contrast to the first half of the 20th century, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have held both the White House and total control of Congress for more than four consecutive years since 1968. You could certainly argue, though, that these trends have accelerated in recent years, and the widening gap between the various wings within each party has certainly been exacerbated by events such as the Trump presidency. The results seen in this year's midterms suggest that this pattern will continue, with neither party seemingly able to take definitive control of all the various branches of government.

Work from the Pew Research Centre shows that the moderate elements of both parties in Congress are thinning out. In terms of pure numbers, there are now only about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-1972.

And if we look at a scaling method known as DW-Nominate, which quantifies the ideology of every member of Congress based on votes cast in a legislative session, it shows that both parties have shifted from the ideological centre. Democrats have become a little more liberal, while Republicans have (by comparison) become a lot more conservative. In the period of time between that 1971-1972 session and the present, on a scale going from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal), the Pew Centre analysis indicates that the Democrats have shifted -0.06 in the Senate and -0.07 in the House (therefore becoming more liberal), whereas Republicans have moved +0.28 in the Senate and +0.25 in the House (therefore becoming more conservative). So the parties are shifting further away from one another.

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The expectation is that Trump will announce a third tilt at the White House next week, but the ease with which Ron DeSantis cruised to victory in the governor election in Florida has certainly enhanced DeSantis’s credentials for his own presidential run in 2024. Biden recently labelled the governor “Trump incarnate”, which gives a sense of the wariness Biden’s team feels about that prospect. It is true that DeSantis would certainly not be any less hardline on the big “culture war” issues that drive a significant proportion of Republicans – a faction of the party that only grew more vociferous during Trump’s leadership. Yet he comes without the significant baggage that Trump carries in the eyes of the public, and he does not bow at the altar of the former president, as so many others in his party do.

The growing ideological gap between the two parties is certainly not about to get any smaller – not if De Santis’s victory speech is anything to go by. Touting his refusal to impose lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, he said: “Florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad. We stood as the citadel of freedom for people across this country, and indeed, across the world. We faced attacks, we took the hits, we weathered the storms but we stood our ground.” He also described the state as “where woke goes to die” and “a ray of hope that better days still lie ahead”.

Sound familiar? Despite such rhetoric, DeSantis offers centre-leaning conservatives a more palatable face of the party compared with the toxic brand of Trump, and allows them to stay under its broader tent without feeling pushed out by the vocal Trump acolytes. Which could be a danger sign for Biden in respect of a possible re-election campaign in 2024, especially given that the White House is suffering from stagnant approval ratings. However, any kind of backlash against Biden appears not to have been as strong as was expected, particularly as sitting presidents have so often faced a “tax” from voters when it comes to their first midterm elections – a trend that has only grown more pronounced in recent years as Washington has become more polarised.

Both Barack Obama in 2010 and Donald Trump in 2018 were affected by it. Yet, according to an NBC News exit poll, the 44 per cent of voters who claimed to approve of Biden overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates in the midterms. Notably, voters who said that they “somewhat” disapproved of Biden preferred Democrats to Republicans by a margin of 49 per cent to 45 per cent. Only 30 per cent of Democrats in the exit poll said that they wanted Biden to run for president in 2024, but among the 67 per cent who said they didn’t want him to run for re-election, 31 per cent backed Democratic candidates on Tuesday night. A plurality of voters said Biden was “not a factor” in their vote, and those voters picked Democrats by 60 per cent to 37 per cent.

Looking forward, the ideological gap between the two parties, and the entrenchment of the core values of both the GOP and the Democrats as they try to solidify their bases to retain control of Congress, will only grow. A survey on social networks conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life suggests that similar majorities of Democrats and Republicans (55 per cent and 53 per cent respectively) have no one in their immediate social circle with opposing political views.

Meanwhile, split-ticket districts, where voters back a presidential candidate from one party during an election cycle and a House candidate from the other, have almost entirely vanished. In the 2020 election, only 16 congressional districts backed a presidential nominee from one party and a House candidate from the other party – the lowest number in 100 years. Meanwhile, the share of competitive districts – defined by the Cook Political Report as having a partisan voting index score (a measure of the degree to which a district has voted Democratic or Republican compared with the national average) of between D+5 and R+5 – had fallen from about a third of districts in the 1990s to less than one in 10 by 2018.

Governing in America has traditionally required compromise in some form, and while this won’t disappear completely, it can be argued that its impact as a corrective force on politics is only going to be lessened in future, if partisanship continues to win out. There is a chance that this polarisation will also mean that the number of congressional districts where there is tight competition between the parties will continue to diminish, with the number of districts in which the House race was considered truly a toss-up counted this week marked at 36 by the Cook Report. That is less than 10 per cent of the 435 seats. If this trend does continue, and the votes of Americans in swathes of districts become less important as one party dominates, then there is less incentive for those voters to actually cast a ballot.

Going back to the latest midterm results, I believe that a slim majority in the House or the Senate, whichever party has control in each chamber, both increases the need for cross-party compromise and makes that prospect more difficult. Both the Republicans and the Democrats will have to keep the disparate wings of their parties together, which makes building broad legislative coalitions less likely. This also ups the jeopardy of each individual legislative battle, meaning these clashes become drawn out, and ensures that little gets done in Congress on the most urgent issues. These matters then inevitably become high-stakes battle lines in subsequent elections, where compromise would only muddy the message. And the risk of the cycle perpetuating grows.