IT WAS the US Midterm Elections recently. Many, including myself, expected the Republicans to win big.
We were wrong. Republican gains were at best a “red trickle”. The reason is two-fold. First are the Republican leaders themselves. They wanted MAGA/Trump endorsed candidates to fail, and so deprived them of support.
One pollster on Twitter, Rich Baris “The People’s Pundit”, tweeted: “The cold, hard truth is that McCarthy and McConnell (Republican leaders) thought they had seats to spare. Arrogance and overconfidence.”
Now, there is something of a civil war in the Republican Party, with MAGA and those angered by the weak GOP performance on one side and the old Republican Party on the other. Time will tell how this conflict will turn out, especially now that Trump has announced his reelection campaign.
The second reason is that the vote counting process had been messy. Some of the elections – coincidentally those involving MAGA candidates – was marred by delays, technical glitches and certain irregularities.
For example, I was monitoring the Senate race in Arizona, and it took them five days to finish the whole thing.
There were also issues with mail-in ballots as well as reports of technical problems. Now, imagine if this had happened in the Philippines or any other country considered “authoritarian”.
It’s worth noting that these irregularities had happened before, during the 2020 election. For it to happen again implies something is rotten in US democratic institutions, and many Americans are taking note of it.
A decline in institutional trust can harm the US in the long term, but it’s unlikely that the rulers will change anything. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they are likely to double down, which in turn will lead to more distrust and resentment.
So with the way things are going now, I think America’s social and democratic institutions are eroding. In this scenario, when the self-proclaimed leader of democracy and human rights has elections where around half of its own populace don’t trust the process, democracy, as we know it, will die./PN
