It remains to be seen if the president’s worst excesses still appeal to voters’ primal instinct – fear
America’s midterm elections are principally for the House of Representatives and the Senate, but they are usually regarded as a national referendum on the performance of the sitting president – and an important indicator of how the next presidential election may turn out. That’s especially true of polls held, as with Donald Trump on Tuesday, held during a president’s first term.
Historically speaking, the party of a first-term president has lost seats on all but two occasions since 1789 – sometimes disastrously, as happened to the Democrats in 1994 during Bill Clinton’s first term. In 1858, President James Buchanan’s Democrats were crushed by Abraham Lincoln’s newly formed Republicans, a fracture that opened the way for the American civil war.
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