The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/midterm/)
Democrats were projected to seize the majority in the House with 33 new seats, while the Republicans were predicted to pick up three more seats to fortify their Senate majority according to polling site FiveThirtyEight.
The first election I ever voted in was a down-ballot wipeout, at least with respect to the people I was voting for. My introduction to the democratic process was coupled with my introduction to large-scale electoral loss, and like many others, it was a loss that I didn’t see coming. I remember exactly how I felt on the morning of November 9, 2016: dejected, blind-sided, stupid. (Also cold, because the weather that day in Ithaca was rainy and dramatic.) Before election day, I had listened to one too many episodes of the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast, interpreting their analysis to mean that there wasn’t much to worry about, so I didn’t. The lead up to the 2016 election, at least for myself, was a lot of preemptive, unearned celebration of a victory that never came to fruition.
This week’s midterm elections will be among the most consequential in recent memory. At stake is nothing less than the direction of our democracy and our nation. The past two years have not been easy for many Americans — the Trump administration has embarked on a substantial rollback of rights and protections for women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and more. Congress tried repeatedly (though unsuccessfully) to repeal the lifesaving Affordable Care Act, and succeeded in passing in passing a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of working people. And a growing but still fragile economy finds itself at the mercy of a capricious administration’s trade policy.
This Tuesday, voters across the country will cast ballots for candidates running for a broad number of federal, state and local offices in the United States government, including 435 U.S. House and 35 U.S. Senate seats. This is an important opportunity for Americans to take stock and to evaluate, based on the merits, where the country stands since the last election. At a university like Cornell, most already have their minds made up. The faculty have contributed overwhelmingly to liberal Democrats, and 2018 has proven no different. The student body, if Sun polls and surveys are any indication, largely subscribe to the same ideology.