Midterm Forecast: More of the Same in Congress

For all the prognostications about how the midterm elections may alter the balance power in the House and Senate, the American public can be assured of one thing: We will have another do-nothing Congress says political science professor Robert Y. Shapiro. That's because, whatever the outcome on Nov. 4, both parties will be far too busy positioning themselves for the presidential election in two years. The election is a warm-up for 2016, says Shapiro, who specializes in partisan polarization and ideological politics in the U.S. “It could determine how aggressive Republicans can be in attacking liberal policies such as abortion rights or environmental regulation. But even if they don’t win big, Republicans will emphasize the failures of the Obama administration and, at a minimum, try to make the Democrats look bad.

No one expects Republicans to lose seats in the House, and most forecasts give Republicans the likely edge in taking control of the Senate, although it’s unclear by what margin. Even winning by a big margin could be a risk for the GOP. “If that happens, Republicans run the risk that they overreach and start proposing things that the public doesn’t want,” Shapiro said. “There could be a backlash.” If the economy continues to recover, “that’s good news for Democrats,” he adds. “But if Obama looks weak and indecisive on other issues, that isn’t good for the party in the next election.”

Whatever the outcome, “we still won’t have a functioning Congress,” Shapiro says. “The current level of partisanship is extraordinary. The temperature level, the decibel level, is strikingly high.”

Shapiro points out that the political temperature has been higher, such as during the presidency of John Adams, who won the nation’s first contested election after serving as George Washington’s vice president for eight years and then wound up in the nation’s first party war in a bitter and unsuccessful battle against Thomas Jefferson for the presidency. And, of course, there was the costly and deadly partisanship during the Civil War years followed by more than a decade of political turmoil during Reconstruction.

In the context of the modern era, Shapiro’s research demonstrates that ideological and party partisanship has grown stronger in recent years. Clinton’s impeachment, the contested 2000 election and every election since have become charged. “This is a relatively new thing,” Shapiro says. “It’s very interesting for a political scientist to have such an identifiable left and right.”

Today’s political temperature is a far cry from the situation in 1950, when the American Political Science Association put out a widely read report titled “Toward a Responsible Two-Party System,” which lamented the lack of difference between the political parties and said voters weren’t being given clear choices.

Not anymore. The parties today are ideologically divided on virtually everything, Shapiro notes, and just as Congress is divided, so is the nation.

“What’s become apparent is that this partisan and ideological conflict has fully penetrated to the level of public opinion,” said Shapiro. “The parties are competitive, the stakes are higher, and it’s made politics heated and vicious.”