US Midterms: Noisy, Consequential, Normal

Elections offer voters a chance to change direction, renew representation, and correct course. They also generate enough noise to make an ordinary political process appear extraordinary. The coming US midterms are no exception, but making sense of that noise requires looking beyond the daily political fight. The approaching vote is consequential and contentious, but the tone is squarely within the normal range of American politics.

History Rhymes and Occasionally Shouts

The United States has never conducted politics quietly. New York disputed excluded returns in its 1792 gubernatorial election. The John Adams administration used the Sedition Act against opposition journalists. The electoral tie of 1800 that removed Adams required 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before Thomas Jefferson was named the winner. In Kansas Territory in the 1850s, Missourians crossed the state line to cast illegal votes. The appearance of voting machines in the 1890s brought promises of greater accuracy alongside lawsuits and suspicions about who controlled the technology.

Modern elections have been no less contentious. A two-vote dispute in New Hampshire’s 1974 Senate race required a new election, proven absentee-ballot irregularities forced North Carolina to rerun a 2018 House contest, and Bush v. Gore sent the 2000 presidential election to the Supreme Court before that race could be decided.

History places 2020, arguably the most important example in living memory, in context without diminishing its severity. The effort to overturn the presidential result and the attack on the Capitol were extraordinary in purpose and scale. Yet Congress reconvened and completed its constitutional work. In the longer march of American history, 2020 remains a defining event and another severe test that the constitutional system passed. The historical record matters because today’s political conflicts often reach us faster than the facts needed to explain them. 

Partisan newspapers and deceptive advertisements are as old as the republic itself. In 1800, Jefferson’s allies branded Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character” while the incumbent’s supporters warned that electing Jefferson would unleash “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest”. Telegraph, radio, television, cable, and the internet have steadily increased reach. Social media allows a local dispute to become an international story before local officials establish the facts.

The Constitution, Not the Campaign, Sets the Process

These examples also reflect a basic feature of American government. The separation of powers and a decentralized electoral system can make close contests slow and confusing, especially when they are governed by different state laws. Yet that same structure prevents any president or federal institution from easily controlling the process nationwide.

The Constitution also defines what the midterms can change. Article I establishes Congress, and Article II establishes the presidency. The midterms are elections for Congress. Voters will choose among candidates for the entire House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate, but the president defined in Article II will remain in office. The result may change who writes legislation, controls spending, and conducts oversight, but it will not replace the executive. Presidential announcements, legal authority, court decisions, and implementation of laws and executive orders must be considered separately. The latter are not legislation and cannot create powers the president does not possess.

A National Mood but Local Elections

Midterms are often described as a referendum on the president, but it is important to remind allies and partners what Americans are actually deciding. They are choosing individual representatives, senators, governors, and state officials. The president helps shape the political environment. He is not on the ballot, though he may want people to vote as if he were.

The political weather is national, but the contests and margins remain state by state and district by district. Candidate quality matters. So do regional economies, local industries, demographic changes, and the particular Senate seats being contested. A voter can disapprove of the president while still supporting a governor, senator, or representative of the same party. Those individual decisions eventually aggregate into national power.

Europeans and Americans can consequently appear to be watching different elections. European attention understandably centers on Donald Trump, NATO, Ukraine, and the durability of US leadership. American voters are focused on the price of food, housing, energy, and healthcare. Recent polling shows the cost of living influences substantially more voters than concerns about democratic norms or foreign affairs. Americans have not stopped caring about threats from Russia, China, or relations with allies. But those concerns compete with the pressures voters encounter every day. All politics is still local and, as the old campaign line warns, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

What Europe Should Expect

Many national polls show that Democrats are likely to regain the majority in the House of Representatives and win back governorships. Control of the Senate remains too close to call, but the outcome should strengthen congressional oversight and give Europe more partners in Washington. It would not reset American foreign policy.

Pressure for Europe to carry more of its defense burden will continue, as will trade disputes. Congressional support may make assistance to Ukraine more durable, although appropriations must still overcome production, approval, and delivery hurdles before they become military capability.

A Democratic House of Representatives would bring stronger oversight and investigations. That could constrain the administration in some areas while pushing it toward greater reliance on executive authority in others. Europe should expect additional points of positive engagement alongside more political friction.

US politics may focus inward after the election, but the challenges facing the country will not. Russia and China will remain, as will the conflicts affecting energy, shipping, industrial production, and European security. The United States cannot put those great-power problems, or the self-inflicted issue of the Strait of Hormuz, back in the bottle.

Europe should use the next two years to strengthen ties with mayors, governors, companies, military partnerships, universities, and communities that turn policy into tangible results. The most durable relationships will likely remain outside the White House and Washington, DC. Pursuing those can reinforce transatlantic ties while laying the groundwork for engagement with whichever presidential administration takes office in January 2029.

The 2026 midterm election will change Europe’s interlocutors more than it will change American policy. It will be noisy, consequential, and—by the standards of political history–normal.

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.