class="postmedia-article-topper__headline"> J.D. Tuccille: Americans are about to tell us who they hate more, Republicans or Democrats

COTTONWOOD, A.Z. — Plenty of issues are at stake in this year’s U.S. midterm election, web page from the prices of groceries to the sort-of war in the Persian Gulf. As I’ve written before, most voters are motivated less by thoughts of which candidates they think will do a good job than by who they currently hate the most. With Republicans in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, that will likely result in a mass rejection of the GOP, just as Democrats got their clocks cleaned in 2024.

Complicating the matter are the deep ongoing transformations of the major parties, making it harder to anticipate what they’ll do when empowered. More than anything else, the results of this year’s elections will likely help clarify the directions the parties will take in the future, for better or worse.

According to Gallup polling released last week, “(h)alf of registered voters say the economy and healthcare are extremely important to their vote, and 47 per cent say the same about Iran. Roughly four in 10 rate income and wealth distribution (44 per cent), gas prices (42 per cent), immigration (40 per cent) and abortion (38 per cent) as extremely important.”

That offers us a glimpse of the likely outcome of congressional races, in particular. A Navigator Research survey published Oct. 27 gives the Democrats an edge over Republicans when it comes to handling jobs and the economy (42 per cent vs. 32 per cent), healthcare (46 percent vs. 27 percent), the conflict with Iran (40 percent vs. 31 percent), gas prices (42 percent vs. 26 percent), and immigration (41 percent vs. 38 percent). Democrats also have a sizeable advantage on inflation, in a big turnaround from 2024.

Sure enough, the DDHQ forecast now gives Democrats an 82 per cent chance of gaining a majority in the House of Representatives and a 62 per cent chance of taking the Senate.

To be clear, the numbers represent a negative reaction to the state of the world and the dominant GOP’s performance in office, just as Democrats faced similar disappointment just two years ago. Going into that election, The Independent reported in August 2024 that “(v)oters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle almost all major policy issues.”

Trapped in a seemingly immutable two-party system, Americans are punishing each of the parties in turn by evicting them from power and replacing them with their traditional opponents.

By no means does this represent enthusiasm for either of the major political parties. Early last month, the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that “(r)egistered voters express broad dissatisfaction with political leadership in the United States” and that “(m)any say neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is able to solve important problems.”

In fact, both major parties are distrusted by majorities of Americans. CNBC reports that Democrats inspire fears of a left-wing takeover and socialism, while Republicans evoke concerns about an unfettered President Trump. Many Americans aren’t voting for alternatives; they’re voting against incumbents.

That’s not an unreasonable approach to U.S. elections, given that transformations in the two major parties (which almost entirely exclude upstart competitors from the political system) make it difficult to be sure what they’ll do once in power.

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Once a conservative business-oriented political party with a generally free-market, hands-off approach to economics and a traditional take on social issues, the GOP has morphed into more state-friendly nationalist-populist vehicle that also serves as a cult of personality around Donald Trump. The Democratic Party, which spent decades advocating a heavily government-regulated capitalist economy with a welfare state and somewhat tolerant social mores, is morphing into a platform for well-credentialed but underemployed urban socialists who meld their disappointment with their stations in life with trendy antisemitism.

“The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labor but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working class social conservatives represents a major, perhaps the major, American political development of the twenty-first century,” according to a 2023 paper by Tufts University’s Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah of the University of California at Berkeley.

Majorities of Democrats now favor socialism, which resulted in a surge of victories by radical candidates. The growing ranks of leftists bring in extreme baggage unrelated to their innumerate economics.

“(T)oo many Democrats are noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left,” Josh Gottheimer, a member of Congress from New Jersey, warned in May about his own party.

While it’s not yet as well-established, Republicans face a similar rise of bigotry on their own far-right flank, which was called out in March by GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

For their part, while nominally more pro-market than their opponents, Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to oppose the government taking equity stakes in American companies — a policy pursued by the Trump administration. At the same time, three-quarters of GOP supporters have become highly supportive of trade barriers, abandoning the party’s old free-trade positions. “Republicans embrace Trump’s penchant for smashing established norms and the widespread use of tariffs,” the Chicago Council on Global Affairs noted last December.

The two parties’ shifting identities make it a much safer bet to vote against incumbents who’ve created circumstances such as rising prices and international conflict that displease the public than to vote for opponents who promise to do something “different.” The catch is that “different” now has an uncertain meaning for Republicans and Democrats alike as their parties adopt once-alien policies and embrace new constituencies while abandoning old ones. Even candidates who claim to be at odds with their co-partisans may succumb to pressure to get with the program, whatever it may ultimately be.

But when the temporarily victorious party wins by default rather than through popularity, it is likely to take its ballot-box win as an endorsement of its evolving direction. That’s especially true if the heralds of socialism among Democrats or nationalism-populism for Republicans are disproportionate winners.

When we tally the results, the midterms will show us what the major parties will look like in the future.

J.D. Tuccille

J.D. Tuccille is an Arizona-based writer who has worked for ZDNet and the New York Daily News, among other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to Reason magazine and often comments on current events via radio, TV, and podcasts. His National Post columns appear weekly.

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class=”postmedia-article-topper__headline”> J.D. Tuccille: Americans are about to tell us who they hate more, Republicans or Democrats

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