What are the mid-term elections?
Mid-term elections take place halfway into a president’s four-year term. While presidents serve four-year terms, the law-makers in Congress do not. Members of the House of Representatives must seek re-election every two years. Senators serve six-year terms. The Constitution divided the body of 100 senators into three equally sized ‘classes’; the terms of the classes are staggered so that every two years one-third of the Senate faces its electorate. Therefore, in mid-term elections all 435 Representatives and roughly one-third of Senators will face election. Additionally, leading political officials in the States may also be up for re-election.
How does the president’s party normally fare?
When a president’s party has held control of Congress in the years preceding the mid-term elections, these elections are generally interpreted as a referendum on the dominant party’s performance and the leadership of the incumbent president. Commentators in Washington will draw heavily on the mid-term results as they assess Obama’s first two years and prospects for re-election. If we look at historical patterns, one consistent trend is that the president’s party tends to lose seats in Congress at mid-term elections. Another consistent finding is that the state of the national economy, and in particular the level of unemployment, is a strong predictor of the number of seats that a president’s party loses.
What does this mean for Obama?
The Obama administration presides over stubbornly high unemployment rates. If the trends from previous mid-term elections continue in 2010, then it is likely that the Democratic Party will lose a significant number of seats in Congress. Expert predictions of Democratic losses in the House range from around 20 seats to as high as 50; the higher estimates would mean that the Democrats would lose control of the House. In the Senate the Dems could realistically lose up to 9 seats. So, overall, it is quite possible that President Obama could be forced to deal with a Republican Congress until the next presidential election in 2012.
What about the Tea Party movement?i>
The Tea Party movement has received a large amount of attention because it has backed a number of competitive Republican candidates. It is difficult to characterise the movement because it does not have a central organisational apparatus and its diverse membership emphasises a range of themes and even sometimes endorses different candidates. But one recurring theme is disillusionment about what it perceives to be excessive government spending and involvement in the economy and society. In some states the Tea Party candidate is highly competitive, but in other cases the Tea Party candidate can be easily portrayed as an ‘extremist’ (e.g. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware), which could hinder the Republicans.
