On November 15, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Under the U.S. Constitution, the next election will be in November 2024. The victor will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025. The mid-term election held on November 8, 2022, did not go Trump’s way. There was no landslide for the Democrats either. There was little change in the composition of Congress. The Democrats managed to maintain a tiny majority in the Senate (1) while suffering small losses in the House of Representatives. The losses were sufficient to shift to a thin Republican majority. Republican control gives Democrats the excuse they need not pass any remotely progressive legislation. During the first two years of the Biden administration, party leaders blamed conservative Democrat Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joseph Manchin for failure to pass promised legislation. Now they’ll blame the Republican House of Representatives.
At the state level, Republicans suffered losses. Trump-associated Republicans did poorly, while Trump enemies — increasing in number — fared better. For example, those pro-Trump were defeated in races for Pennsylvania, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Maryland governorships. In Georgia, reactionary Governor Brian Kemp considered a Trump enemy since the 2020 election, won reelection. Kemp isn’t a liberal or moderate, but he refused Trump’s demand to find the few thousand votes to put him over the top in the race for Georgia’s electoral votes. In Florida, reactionary Ronald DeSantis sailed to victory over his Democrat opponent. DeSantis is widely considered Trump’s chief rival for the presidential nomination in 2024, more than enough to make him a Trump enemy.
On their face, the election results don’t seem particularly startling. They weren’t what pre-election polls indicated would happen — sweeping victories for Republicans with solid GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. This happened in the 1994 mid-term elections during the first term of President Bill Clinton, and the pattern was repeated in the 2014 mid-terms during Barack Obama’s first term. In the wake of these elections, Republicans dominated Congress and an increasing number of state governments throughout the remainder of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 