Bristol, Pennsylvania
CNN
—
A white knuckle midterm election is racing into its last four weeks with the Senate on a knife-edge and with a strong prospect of a Donald Trump-aligned Republican majority in the House.
Democrats are fighting to stave off the first term-curse that usually punishes a president in congressional elections. They are highlighting issues like abortion and the GOP’s extreme turn while on defense over the raging inflation and rising gas prices that are haunting Joe Biden’s administration.
But this is a midterm election like no other it since it’s taking place under the shadow of a former President falsely insisting he won the 2020 election and as Washington still reels from the insurrection he incited to try to stay in power.
Many Republican candidates are running on the false premise that Trump was cheated out of office. Some, in statewide races for governor or secretary of state posts, could end up controlling future elections. And the ex-President himself is using the campaign as a testing ground for a likely 2024 bid to reclaim the White House.
The destiny of the 50-50 Senate could hinge on whether issues like abortion rights and accomplishments in Congress that caused Biden’s popularity to tick up over the summer will preoccupy voters more than the high cost of living and searing Republican attacks over violent crime. But candidates – their strengths, flaws and respective coffers – will also play a role.
Elections for all 435 House seats, which tend to be more nationalized races, are more likely to turn on the prevailing environmental winds, which is why the GOP is still strongly favored to flip that chamber.
• History is weighing on Democrats. Presidents almost always take a beating two years after winning election and near 40-year-high inflation and high gas prices are delivering a daily gut punch to millions of voters.
• Besides having history on their side, Republicans have an opening since a majority of voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, with fears of a recession growing and the country still trudging through the aftermath of a once-in-100-year pandemic. They are pounding Democrats as soft on crime and fans of open borders as migrants stream across, while leaping on Biden’s low approval ratings at a time of global turmoil to frame the election as referendum on a failing presidency.
• Yet despite post-Labor Day tightening of some of the major races in the GOP’s favor, the fight is still closer than many Democrats dared hope. The tone of the campaign changed in June after the Supreme Court electrified the Democratic base by overturning the right to an abortion. Trump, meanwhile, who scares many voters outside his fervent supporters, roared back into the news with his refusal to hand over classified documents he hoarded at his Florida resort. He also foisted a battery of unskilled election-denying GOP nominees on his party – risking its hopes in key races.
Often, the two parties seem to be fighting in different elections, given their choice of different issues to run on.
For instance, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman on Sunday beseeched around 1,200 supporters in Bucks County, northeast of Philadelphia, where Democrats must run up their margins, to send him to Washington to restore abortion rights, raise the minimum wage and expand access to the health care he says saved his life.
“Send me to D.C., and I will be the 51st vote,” said the stroke survivor, whose blue collar campaign brands his Trump-endorsed opponent, TV surgeon Mehmet Oz, as an elitist peddler of quack cures and a carpetbagger from New Jersey.
Fetterman represents Democrats’ best chance to flip a…
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