The midterm elections are over. The results were approximately as expected; the Democrats rode a strong advantage in turnout to gain 35-40 seats and control of the House of Representatives, but lost 1-3 Senate seats on the back of an extremely difficult map of seats up for reelection this year and some timely interventions by the president in Trump-friendly states. Democrats made significant gains in state legislatures and took an impressive 7-9 governorships from Republicans, pending a recount in Florida and a potential runoff in Georgia. Democrats have also developed some promising young talent in these elections, particularly Andrew Gillum, who may yet become the first black Governor of Florida, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a likely future Speaker of the House on her way to becoming the youngest woman ever sent to congress.
What do those results mean? Or, more specifically, what do they tell us to expect in the next 2-4 years? The most obvious place to start is in Congress, particularly the recently flipped House of Representatives. Democratic control of committees tasked with executive oversight will become a recurring headache for the Trump administration over the next two years, assisted by an unusually large quantity of blatantly unethical behavior on the part of several administration figures (Scott Pruitt comes to mind). Subpoena power is no small thing.
Knowing that the Democrats are likely to spend a great deal of time on the Mueller investigation, Trump has moved to fight it. Immediately after the midterms he removed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from involvement in the investigation, and replaced him with Matt Whitaker - a loyalist who immediately took control of the investigation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Whitaker had previously given a public roadmap for how the Mueller investigation could be stifled, particularly by sharply reducing its budget. The President knows that the investigation represents a political threat, and having questioned its legitimacy since it began he is now beginning to take active steps to impede or end it. The fate of the investigation and its conclusions will be very high profile issues in the first year of the new Congress.
Given the obvious determination of the incoming Democratic majority in the House to bog Trump down in investigations of sundry kinds, he has already signalled his intention to follow his usual instinct and hit back. He explicitly threatened House Democrats, saying that if they chose to investigate him he would use his Senate majority to investigate them. With his own increasing control over his party and the benefit of Fox News faithfully delivering the party line to his loyalists, we should not discount the disruptive potential of such a strategy.
More broadly, the Republican agenda at the federal level will find itself altered or frustrated at most points, because major policy changes as well as federal budgets will now have to go through the Democratic Party in some capacity. There are few things that the Senate can accomplish without the House. The notable exception is judiciary appointments, where an increased Senate majority for Republicans will give the president free rein to appoint whomever he likes.
Speaking of the president, his decision to campaign for Senate candidates and ignore the House was an astute one. Knowing the House was likely lost, he focused on shoring up GOP majorities in the Senate, which gives him more long term influence through judicial appointments. Moreover, a partisan split in Congress more or less guarantees gridlock, which creates a policy vacuum. The Presidency generally fills much of the space Congress leaves open by using executive orders or regulatory changes. President Obama took that path after losing the House in 2010. Provided Trump maintains Republican support in the Senate for executive orders staking out policy positions, Congress will not reach agreement to overturn whatever he does. Challenging executive action in the courts could prove difficult with the success of the Kavanaugh appointment, which gives the right a friendly majority on the Supreme Court. While the Republican Party lost influence as a result of the midterms, Trump will find himself even more powerful within it.
For the same reasons, congressional gridlock tends to empower state governments, which are full of ambitious politicians looking upward and have the opportunity to make enormous political statements in the face of federal inaction. Remarkably, while the national Congress has a partisan split, after the 2018 elections every single state will have one party control of the state legislature. Thirty-six states will have the same party controlling the legislature as well as the governorship. As the Congress devolves into ever more intense political maneuvering, expect dueling state legislatures to take dramatic stands on contentious policy issues, particularly voting rights, immigration, and healthcare.
Finally, there is a very high likelihood of a recession beginning in the next 2 years, and certainly in the next 4. Aside from the fact that it's been almost 11 years since the last one started, there are a number of good reasons to see one coming. For one, extended trade disruptions with China and Mexico are likely to have cost of living implications for the poor and lower middle classes in particular. After the massive tax cuts the GOP recently passed, the federal budget is a ruin and gridlock will likely prevent either party from closing the deficit in its preferred manner. Financial markets will eventually get spooked by the large long term debt and absence of any plan to address it. Add to these immediate pressures the long term structural issues of stagnating real wages, crippling student debt, and scandalous inequality, and there is every reason to question the sustainability of the current economic expansion. The establishment figures in both parties are in increasingly precarious positions relative to their voters, and a new recession would make them less secure still.
Overall, while the Democrats certainly have a much stronger hand than they did before election day, the next two years stand to be every bit as chaotic and contentious as the last two have been. Probably the instabilities of congressional inaction and the inevitable next recession will make them even more so. There isn't even space here to discuss the 2020 presidential race, which promises to be in full swing in the next 6-8 months. A President Trump fighting for his political life is bound to be even more aggressive than normal. Even after his presidency is over, be in in 6 years or before then, the rot in our society that permitted his rise to begin with needs to be addressed. The check on Trump's power that this election provided gives an opening for his opponents to put him on the defensive. Whether they take it, and how well they use it, will determine the next chapter of our political history.
