Photo courtesy of Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons. The Nov. 8 2022 midterm elections in the United States highlight the stark political polarization and dissolution of democracy threatening America.
By Silas Gemma ’26
Staff Writer
With the midterm elections held on Nov. 8, 2022, there is a rising concern about how the results will forecast or even determine the future of democracy in the United States. According to an article by the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Italy, the midterm elections decide the future of all members of the federal House of Representatives since each of them only hold two-year terms. Meanwhile, only around a third of federal Senate seats are on the ballot. Additionally, the article points out that some state and local elections are playing out concurrently.
Although neither Biden nor Trump was on the ballot on Nov. 8, the outcomes of the midterms are crucial for gauging their influence as well as the future party dynamics of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. The dissemination of conspiracy theories — particularly those related to unfounded 2020 election fraud claims — as well as an overall mistrust in the electoral system augur a dim future for democracy.
According to a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, after the November 2020 election, former President Donald Trump claimed that the election results were not valid and pursued various lawsuits to no avail. The article firmly states that there is no data to substantiate Trump’s claims that Biden was not the rightful winner of the election.
The current claims that voting practices such as absentee ballots or early voting are fraudulent further represent an attack on democracy. According to The Brookings Institution, the surge in COVID-19 cases during the 2020 presidential election led to a record reception of mail-in or absentee ballots. The Brookings Institution article reports that since the majority of in-person voters were republicans and the majority of mail-in voters were democrats, some of the claims of fraud promoted by GOP figures such as Trump were fueled by the way in which the ballots were counted. That is, in-person ballots were counted first, making it seem deceptive whendemocratic votes suddenly began to be counted, flipping the results. The same article lays out some of the objectives of “election deniers,” which include abolishing absentee voting, early voting, which is voting prior to election day and “drop-boxes,” or the place where many mail-in ballots are placed.
It must be acknowledged that the spread of these theories did not mark the beginning of democracy’s decline. A University of Rochester article, which details interviews conducted with three political science professors at the university, demonstrates that political “hyperpolarization” has brought about the dissolution of democracy. One of the professors, Gerald Gamm, traced the beginning of the stark partisanism we see today to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Gamm stated that polarization has increased as topics such as women’s rights, gay rights and abortion rights have become more discretely divided along party lines. The Pew Research Center exemplifies this solidifying partisan division through a recent study indicating that Congress members of both primary parties, Republican and Democrat, have shifted further away from the center of the political spectrum in the past 50 years. This demonstrates why Congress often votes strictly along party lines, stalling legislation and determining the success of a presidential administration’s objectives.
It is important to remember that democracy has never been egalitarian. Instead, more overt and publicized contradictions to core values of democracy, such as trust in the electoral process, peaceful transitions of power and peaceful protest have materialized. The recent outcry against the United States government demonstrates that more people feel that the system is dysfunctional, which only serves to show that critical concern and consolidated efforts to restore democracy only occur when more people, such as white, cisgender, heterosexual or able-bodied people who have historically not been oppressed, feel threatened.
Per a CNN Politics article, prominent political figures, most notably President Joe Biden and former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama, traveled to critical battleground states ahead of the 2022 midterms to galvanize support for their respective candidates. As the article reports, these three figures all made appearances in Pennsylvania at the beginning of November due to the momentous weight that the state senate race there holds. Candidate John Fetterman, championed largely by democrats, confronted the Trump-backed GOP candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz. According to a Nov. 9 article by NBC, Fetterman is the projected winner of the state senate race, flipping the seat from Republican to Democrat. Fetterman has since been named senator-elect, The New York Times reported.
The distribution of the Senate is also contingent on the midterm results in Georgia, a battleground state. As Politico reports, on Nov. 9, it was announced that the Senate race between Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock and Republican candidate Herschel Walker would enter a run-off. This article explains that this will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 6, and is the procedure when neither of the candidates garners more than 50 percent of the vote.
Another NBC article reports that when speaking publicly about pursuing re-election, Biden has generally demurred, although he more definitively expressed a desire to run during an interview with Reverend Al Sharpton in September 2022. This comes as many are anticipating Trump’s official announcement as to whether he will seek a second term. The previously mentioned CNN article reports that Trump’s decision will be an incentivizing factor as to whether Biden will run for another term, although officials of the Biden administration are already preparing for a re-election campaign under the assumption that it will be pursued. A British Broadcasting Corporation article reports that Trump announced at a recent Iowa rally that he will “very, very, very probably [run for the presidency] again.” Considering the GOP reaction to the 2020 election — largely fueled by Trump’s exhortation and groundless claims — his re-election would pose a significant threat to the future of American democracy.
Ahead of the midterm elections, reporters surveyed the activity of voters. Jordan Klepper, a left-leaning reporter who uses satirical means to expose GOP hypocrisy, conveyed the continued influence of Trump on the GOP through recent interviews with Trump’s supporters. Klepper’s most recent installment of “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse,” titled “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Midterms — America Unfollows Democracy,” was posted on Youtube by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah channel at the beginning of November 2022. In it, he travels to Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan to talk to GOP voters about their ideas concerning the electoral process, transition of power and state of democracy.
Klepper explains the danger of election denialism when he states, “It’s not that MAGA [Make America Great Again] supporters are the majority. It’s that they refuse to believe they may not be.” He highlights the delusion that election deniers have fallen into due to the demagoguery of Trump and his way of fabricating election fraud evidence to persuade his audience. In an interview with a supporter of Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate, Klepper discusses the possibility of Mastriano’s defeat, to which the supporter replies that he will not believe the results if they are not in Mastriano’s favor. A core tenet of democracy is election security, but there can be no security without belief in the validity of results. Americans, particularly GOP voters, will now only believe in the credibility of an election result if their preferred candidate wins.
With the arrival of the midterms, questions about the future of democracy are topical and valid. Democracy has never been guaranteed for all. Its erosion began long before the current battles over voting rights or peaceful transitions of power. However, the core foundation of American democracy, even if it has not been much more than a mirage since its establishment, is crumbling. The midterms are a turning point for the future of the American political landscape.