Prisinct 3 superior township12/23/2023 ![]() And they provide some telling hints about how the slow advance of dealignment might be beaten back. But they do offer a convincing map of its topography. The 2022 midterms did not make this political order. Second, the gradual, uneven, and yet largely unabated march of class dealignment, in which downscale voters - with less education and lower incomes - move toward the Republicans, while upscale voters make a parallel and opposing journey toward the Democrats. ![]() First, an intensifying polarization between the two major parties, expressed in high turnout, apocalyptic rhetoric on all sides, and partisan labels that communicate not just voter allegiance (“Republican” or “Democrat”) but social milieu, cultural value system, and moral habitus (“red” or “blue”). ![]() That landscape, familiar enough to anyone paying attention, is dominated by two central features. In the same way, it may be that the 2022 midterms - uneven and disjointed as they were - offer a better window into our own terrain than any of the Obama or Trump elections of the last two decades. More recently, the right-wing landslide in the 1994 midterms - which effectively created the red and blue maps we use today - did more to define its political moment than either of the Clinton-Perot presidential campaigns. But the revolutionary crisis we call “the American Civil War era” really began with one midterm (1854), when a new antislavery party swept the North, and ended with another (1874), when the last live embers of Reconstruction were stamped out by Southern violence and Northern retrenchment. The Civil War, we know, was triggered by the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860. A nationwide contest to decide which Congress will crank its engine while appointees, regulators, and judges actually make the laws? It hardly seems worth the time or expense.Īnd yet often in US history, a national midterm - not a single event but thousands of simultaneous and interlinked struggles - can mark a more distinct watershed than the clamor and color of a presidential election. In a political system whose structures and symbols are rooted in executive and judicial power, purely legislative elections begin to feel like undercard events. ![]() American midterm elections are strange beasts. ![]()
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