Oct 18th 2016

A Wave Election in America?

WASHINGTON, DC – With the world mesmerized by the United States’ presidential race this year, the race for control of the US House of Representatives and the Senate has been largely overlooked. But the outcome of the congressional elections could make or break the next president’s agenda.

For all the power a president has, the 100-member Senate determines the fate of international treaties as well as the president’s nominations and legislative proposals. The 435-member House does not have as much power as the Senate, but control of the White House, the Senate, and the House by the same party could overcome much of the gridlock that has debilitated US governance in recent years.

The US does not have party-line elections, so voters can either punish a party (usually the one that has been in charge) by voting against all of its candidates; fully support a particular party; or split their tickets by voting for one party’s presidential candidate and another party’s congressional candidates.

Events have moved quickly since the Washington Post came upon an 11-year-old tape showing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump bragging about his sexual aggressiveness. Not only have the Democrats’ chances to retake the Senate improved; so, too, have their prospects for retaking the House.

Previously, almost no one considered the House to be in play. Trump’s drop in the polls since the tape’s release has changed that, and the candidate has made matters worse for his party by denying that he has groped or assaulted women – a claim that impelled numerous women to come forward and say otherwise.

Still, winning the House won’t be easy for the Democrats, because congressional districts have been heavily gerrymandered, and Republicans control more of the governorships and state legislatures that oversee that process.

The Democrats must net at least 30 House seats and four Senate seats to retake control of each chamber, respectively. A net Democratic gain of four Senate seats would produce a 50-50 split, in which case, if Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wins, her vice president, Tim Kaine, would be on hand to break tie votes.

Senate candidates who have stood apart from Trump have been faring better than those who have not. For example, Trump was ahead in Ohio before the tape’s release; recent polling indicates that now he is trailing Clinton there. When the tape came out, Ohio Senator Rob Portman (along with nine other senators) rescinded his endorsement of Trump, and he still seems to have a solid hold on his seat. Nonetheless, when Trump supporters attacked Republicans who had broken with him, a few re-endorsed him.

It is widely agreed that the top of a ballot influences races further down. Though the extent to which this happens isn’t clear, when it happens overwhelmingly, it is known as a “wave election,” as occurred in 1980 when Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter and helped the Republicans reclaim the Senate and 34 House seats. The Republicans didn’t have formal control of the House, but Reagan effectively had a working majority, because numerous Democrats from the South voted with them. While a lot may happen in the campaign’s remaining three weeks, the US could be heading toward another wave election.

Certain Senate races have long been considered in the bag for the Democrats. In Wisconsin, former Senator Russ Feingold is decisively ahead of incumbent Senator Ron Johnson, after having narrowly lost to him six years ago; and in Illinois, the GOP has effectively written off gaffe-prone Republican Senator Mark Kirk.

Senate seats in New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere that were considered toss-ups before the tape’s release have come closer to being within the Democrats’ reach. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries, was considered likely to win reelection; now, he’s seen as vulnerable. If the US has a wave election, even Republican Senators whose seats are still considered safe, such as Arizona Senator John McCain, could be toppled.

But the Republicans could run interference against Clinton, even if they do lose in a wave. A Republican minority in the Senate can still effectively limit her agenda by using the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to end a floor debate and bring a bill to a vote. If Republicans keep control of the House, Speaker Paul Ryan, who may be eyeing the 2020 Republican presidential nomination, might try to cooperate with the president on some issues to show that he can get things done; but highly conservative House Republicans would likely rebel.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has only eight members, instead of the usual nine, creating the possibility of split votes on key decisions. Republicans are anxious to keep the Court’s ideological complexion intact after the death of the reliably conservative Antonin Scalia in February. That is why they have been blocking Obama’s more liberal nominee, Merrick Garland, since March.

So, even if the Democrats control the Senate starting in January, Republicans could still block a President Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations and policy program. And, because the Democrats are unlikely to win the House, the prospect for paralysis in Washington remains.

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Putin's Brezhnev Moment 
by Aryeh Neier
Feb 6th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Brezhnev, in power from 1964 to 1982, signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords, together with the United States, Canada, and most of Europe. Eager for formal recognition of its borders at the time, the USSR under Brezhnev, together with its satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe, underestimated the potential impact of the Accords. That is probably why it agreed to include commitments to respect human rights, including freedom of information and movement, in the agreement’s Final Act." --- "Putin’s regime is turning its back on the legacy of Soviet dissent. Worse, it is replicating the despotic practices of Brezhnev and Soviet totalitarianism. If it continues on this path, it risks ending up in the same place."
The Necessity of Morality in Foreign Policy
by Chris Patten
Feb 5th 2023
EXTRACT: "....when countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and, above all, China flagrantly violate their citizens’ human rights, liberal democracies must unite to constrain their behavior. Ultimately, it is up to those of us who believe in the universality of human rights to expose crimes against humanity and to uphold liberal-democratic values in the face of authoritarian threats" --- "....liberal democracies have a shared responsibility to support the Ukrainians fighting to defend their homeland and to protect their rights to self-determination and statehood in the face of Russian aggression."
Ukraine war: the bloody battle for Soledar and what it tells us about the future of the conflict
by Stefan Wolff
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "On balance, then, the events in and around Soledar over the past week illustrate that no matter the outcome of the current fighting, this is not a turning point. It’s another strong indication that the war is likely going to be long and costly."
Through the Russian Looking Glass 
by Michael Marder
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Russian President Vladimir Putin has long regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” The invasion of Ukraine, now approaching its one-year anniversary, could be seen as the culmination of his years-long quest to restore the Soviet empire. ..... "With Russia’s economy straining under Western sanctions, some of the country’s leading economists and mathematicians are advocating a return to the days of five-year plans and quantitative production targets." .... "The logical endpoint of a planned economy today is the same as it was then: mass expropriation. Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to millions of deaths, and the post-communist 'shock therapy' of privatization resulted in the proliferation of 'raiders' and the creation of a new class of oligarchs. Now, enthralled by imperial nostalgia, Russia may be about to embark on a new violent wave of expropriation and redistribution."
China's Autocracy in Crisis 
by Ian Buruma
Jan 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "These developments suggest that Indian economist Amartya Sen was correct when he famously argued in 1983 that famines are caused not only by a shortage of food but also by a lack of information and political accountability. For example, the Bengal famine of 1943, India’s worst, happened under imperial British rule. After India gained independence, the country’s free press and democratic government, while flawed, prevented similar catastrophes. Sen’s thesis has since been hailed as a ringing endorsement of democracy. While some critics have noted that elected governments can also cause considerable harm, including widespread hunger, Sen points out that no famine has 'ever taken place in a functioning democracy.' --- China’s system of one-party, and increasingly one-man, rule is couched in Communist or nationalist jargon, but is rooted in fascist theory. The German jurist Carl Schmitt, who justified Adolf Hitler’s right to wield total power, coined the term “decisionism” to describe a system in which the validity of policies and laws is not determined by their content but by an omnipotent leader’s will. In other words, Hitler’s will was the law."
No More "Chicken Kiev" for Ukraine
by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Anastassia Fedyk, and Ilona Sologoub 
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "On August 1, 1991, a little more than three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to discourage Ukrainians from doing it. In his notorious 'Chicken Kiev' speech in the Ukrainian parliament, Bush lectured the stunned MPs that independence was a recipe for 'suicidal nationalism', 'ethnic hatred', and 'Local despotism.' ----- ....the West’s reluctance to respect Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty was a bad omen, revealing a mindset among US and European leaders that paved the way to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. ----- .... Western observers, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger, blame the West for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, or have urged Western leaders to provide Putin a diplomatic off-ramp by compelling Ukraine to give up territory. Policymakers, too, seem to view Ukraine’s self-defense as a bigger problem than Russia’s genocidal aggression. ----- ..... despite the massive material and military support the West has provided to Ukraine, the fateful logic of appeasement lingers, because many Western leaders fear the consequences of Russia’s defeat more than the prospect of a defeated Ukraine. ----- This war is about the survival of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. In the words of the Israeli leader Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, 'They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.' "
A China Optimist's Lament 
by Stephen S. Roach
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "China’s flexible, blended, increasingly dynamic private sector could do all that and more. ----- Then came Xi Jinping. "
COVID and the Chinese Social Contract 
by Joschka Fischer
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. " ---- "How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves."
Andy Warhol Comes to Kyiv
by Alexander J. Motyl
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Next time you’re in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, don’t bother looking for Dostoevsky Street. It’s been renamed: it’s now Andy Warhol Street. ..... because many Ukrainians regard Andy as Ukrainian. Was he? The evidence is mixed." ---- "Warhol remained a committed Greek Catholic all his life. He regularly prayed, both at home and in church, and frequently attended Sunday Mass. His bedside table contained a crucifix, a Christ statuette, and a prayer book. After he died on February 22, 1987, he was buried in St. John the Divine Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, some twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, in a simple grave next to his parents." ---- "When it comes to objective cultural affiliation or subjective ethnic identification, the United States—with its diverse Slavic heritages—has the greatest claim on Warhol and his art."
New food technologies could release 80% of the world’s farmland back to nature
by Chris D Thomas, Jack Hatfield and Katie Noble
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals. If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products."
Disrupting the Disruptors 
by Roger McNamee
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "After a decade of unconstrained growth – when it seemed that a new billionaire was minted every day – the tech industry has finally hit a rough patch. Elon Musk’s erratic behavior following his takeover of Twitter has left the financially leveraged platform in a precarious state. The crypto exchange FTX’s sudden implosion has vaporized a business that was recently valued at $32 billion, taking many other crypto firms with it. Meta (Facebook) is laying off 11,000 people, 13% of its workforce, and Amazon is shedding 10,000. What are we supposed to make of these setbacks? Are they isolated incidents, or signs of structural change?"
The Unavoidable Crash
by Nouriel Roubini
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200% in 1999 to 350% in 2021. The ratio is now 420% across advanced economies, and 330% in China. In the United States, it is 420%, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II."
Rishi Sunak's Daunting Challenge
by Chris Patten
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "The Conservative leadership must stand up to the party’s extremists, and it must do so sooner rather than later. If moderates cannot defeat the hardliners by the next election, and the outcome turns out to be as bad for the Tories as recent polls suggest, they will find they have the same fight on their hands in opposition. --- Conservatives must never underestimate the importance of their moderate supporters. If the Party continues to disregard centrists whenever the Brexiteer right stamps its feet, it may find itself out of power for a long time to come."
US midterms: why gen Z and millennials came out to vote and why it marks a generational shift
by Dafydd Townley
Nov 24th 2022
EXTRACT: "....young voters did reach the polls they voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates across the country. According to reports, 63% of 18- to 29- year olds voted Democrat and 35% voted Republican in the House of Representatives elections. Voters between 30 and 44 split their vote between the two parties, while older voters tended to vote Republican."
Nouriel Roubini on stagflation, debt distress, financial innovation, and more
by Nouriel Roubini
Nov 24th 2022
Nouriel Roubini: "Central banks are in both a stagflation trap and a debt trap. Amid negative aggregate supply shocks that reduce growth and increase inflation, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they increase interest rates enough to bring inflation down to 2%, they will cause a severe economic hard landing. And if they don’t – attempting instead to protect growth and jobs – they will be left increasingly far behind the curve, leading to a de-anchoring of inflation expectations and a wage-price spiral. Very high debt ratios (both private and public) complicate the dilemma further. Raising interest rates enough to crush inflation causes not only an economic crash, but also a financial crash, with highly leveraged private and public debtors facing severe distress. The resulting financial turmoil that intensifies the recession, creating a vicious cycle of deepening recession and escalating financial pain and debt distress. In these circumstances, central banks will blink. They will wimp out in the fight against inflation, in an effort to avoid an economic and financial crash. But that will lead to a higher permanent inflation rate, while only postponing the arrival of stagflation and debt crises. In other words, central banks in the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies have only bad options."
Disquiet on the Western Front
by Sergei Guriev
Nov 13th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Today’s autocrats wear staid business suits and pretend to be democrats, and that has been sufficient to grant them access to high-level meetings in Davos or at the G20, where they actively recruit former Western politicians, lawyers, public-relations consultants, and think tanks to make their case in the West." ---- "....whatever the weaknesses of Western democracies, they still command a degree of soft power that their autocratic competitors could only dream of. Democracy remains popular around the world – among citizens of both democratic and nondemocratic countries. That is why modern dictators pretend to be democrats." ---- "....there is no shortage of criticism about how the US and Europe function. But that itself is a product of the press freedom and political opposition that one can find only in democracies. But actions speak louder than words: Immigrants from around the world are eager to come to Europe or America, whereas few are trying to get into Russia or China."
Stephen S. Roach on US monetary tightening, China's growth sacrifice, the Sino-American rivalry, and more 
by Stephen S. Roach
Nov 9th 2022
EXTRACT: "In conventional macroeconomics, an economy’s longer-term growth potential is determined by the sum of labor-force and productivity growth. If one of those factors slows, the other must accelerate. Otherwise, long-term growth suffers.  China is in serious trouble on both fronts. An unsustainable one-child family-planning policy –subsequently changed to a two- and now three-child policy – means that the working-age population is declining, and Xi’s speech at the 20th Party Congress suggested that already-strong productivity headwinds are likely to intensify. "
Could Russia collapse?
by Matthew Sussex
Nov 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "First and most obvious – it has happened before. And in an historical sense, it has happened relatively recently, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 rightly considered a seismic event in world politics. The rub is that nobody predicted the end of the USSR either. In fact, it was confidently assumed in the West that Mikhail Gorbachev would go on ruling the Soviet Union, until the hard-line coup that failed to topple him (but left him mortally wounded in a political sense) made that view obviously redundant." ---- "So is it speculative to talk about a future Russian collapse? Yes. Is there evidence it is imminent? No. But in many ways that’s the problem: when authoritarian regimes implode, they tend to do so very quickly, and with little warning."
Xi's Conflict-Prone China 
by Stephen S. Roach
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: " But in celebrating the CPC centennial, he [XI left little doubt of what those challenges might portend: “Having the courage to fight and the fortitude to win is what has made our party invincible.” A modernized and expanded military puts teeth into that threat and underscores the risks posed by Xi’s conflict-prone China."
The ECB Has Been Driving EU Inflation
by Hans-Werner Sinn
Oct 8th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Recent inflation news from the eurozone’s largest member, Germany, is particularly alarming. In August, producer prices – which measure what is happening at the preliminary stages of industrial production – were a whopping 46% higher than in the same month last year. Given the long-term correlation between the growth rate of producer and consumer prices, this suggests that the latter could soar to 14% in November. Price stability – which is supposed to be the ECB’s uncompromising goal, per the Maastricht Treaty – is no longer perceptible" ----- "Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the ECB has allowed the central-bank money supply to increase twice as fast, relative to economic output, as the US Federal Reserve has. Of that growth, 83% was the result of the ECB’s purchases of government bonds from eurozone countries. With those purchases – which totaled an estimated €4.4 trillion – the ECB pushed interest rates on government bonds to around zero. This spurred countries to disregard European debt rules and accumulate debt at a breakneck pace."