US, reeling from fatal racial attacks, goes to midterm polls
Americans will vote on November 6 in a momentous mid-term elections. Polls suggest that the total Republican grip on federal power is about to be shattered as Democrats regain the House.
It comes at a particularly fraught time. The past few days provided horrifying proof that ugly words have uglier consequences. As US President Donald Trump has raised the temperature with overt race-baiting, a flurry of racial attacks has stunned the nation.
Twelve Jews have been slain in Pittsburgh by a white racist. Two elderly African Americans have been shot dead by another white racist in Kentucky. Pipe bombs have been mailed to a host of Democratic politicians by another racist.
Trump's latest gambit is an awful web video advertisement that attacks Democrats for welcoming Mexican criminals that even has some Republicans recoiling. As is usual with many things Trumpian, the racist ad plays fast and loose with the facts. It shows an undocumented Mexican cop-killing criminal who repeatedly enters the US and warns viewers this will happen if Democrats are elected. Yet the undocumented criminal left the US during Republican President George W Bush's time, and was let go by a reviled racist figure, Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff and a dear Trump ally.
"President Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign's final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty," the Washington Post reported.
"Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic … But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday's midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a new level—demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments."
As the race for the midterms have heated up, Trump is crisscrossing the country addressing rallies in friendly territory to gin up support for the Republican Party.
Yet there's a huge trade-off for his party. While Trump helps Republicans in the Senate elections, it's likely fatal for Republicans in the House.
Let me explain. The Senate has 100 members, two elected from each state. About a third are elected every two years for six-year terms. It just happens that this year's slate of candidates runs through deep Trump territory, and Trump's gleeful spree helps Republicans.
The House is an entirely different story. These Congressional members run every two years from across the country. Here Trump is facing stiff resistance, especially from suburban women who have deserted the Republican party en masse out of their disgust for Trump.
Democrats so fired up by their antipathy to Trump. Most political handicappers say a huge number of Republican seats are in danger, and Democrats will likely win back the House, where they need to flip 23 seats. This terrifies Republicans, because the House has the power to investigate the White House, and Democrats have a long list of alleged shenanigans they are keen to look into.
Trump's rallies put House Republicans in peril. "Two days out from an expected Democratic takeover of the House, Republicans focused on the chamber are profoundly worried that Trump's obsession with all things immigration will exacerbate their losses," the newspaper Politico noted. "Trump has hijacked the election. This is not what we expected the final weeks of the election to focus on," a senior Republican aide lamented to Politico.
A simultaneous profound, poignant battle is going on, primarily in the American South, which has a savage history of racist voter suppression. A slew of Southern states is bringing back memories of the bad old days as they try to restrict minority voting under the ruse of "voter fraud" of which there is virtually no evidence.
Allan J Lichtman, an American University historian, draws the attention of Rosanell Eaton, who grew up in North Carolina, in his book The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present.
"In 1942, Eaton rode for two miles on a mule-drawn wagon to register to vote at the Franklin County courthouse. Three white male officials confronted her. They ordered her to stand up straight, keep her arms at her side, and recite from memory the preamble to the Constitution. She did so word for word and then passed a written literacy test, becoming one of the few African Americans of her era to vote in North Carolina," according to a review of the book in The New York Review of Books.
"Seven decades later, Lichtman writes, Eaton had a much harder time. She had a driver's license, but the names on her license and her voter-registration card did not match exactly. She made eleven trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles, two different Social Security offices, and three banks before everything was rectified. 'I was hoping I would be dead before I'd have to see all this again,' she said."
Democrats are fighting back. Here in Atlanta, where I live, TV celebrity Oprah Winfrey and former President Barack Obama were in town to nudge voters to go out make history in electing Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for office, to be the first ever female African American governor in the US.
Atlanta, once the centre of Rev Martin Luther King, Jr's civil rights movement, is ground zero for the battle for voting rights all over again. Republican candidate for governor Brian Kempis also in charge of elections as secretary of state. (Only in the US would you have such a nonsensical system ripe for abuse.) He has suspended voting rights under an "exact match" law where voter information does not exactly match other government records. Around 53,000 voters, the vast majority of them African Americans (no surprise), have their voting rights up in the air. A US federal judge has eased those restrictions, saying the law would case "irreparable harm if they lose the right to vote."
As Yogi Berra once said: "It's déjà vu all over again."
As we go to press, the governor's race in Georgia is too close to call. Georgians will decide who will have the last laugh.
Ashfaque Swapan is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians in the United States.