The US holds legislative elections between economic discontent and political tension

Biden assures that the country is risking its freedoms at the polls but the rise in inflation puts the victory on a platter for the Republicans

MADRID, 7 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The United States votes this Tuesday for legislative elections in an atmosphere of political tension, economic difficulties and confrontations over individual freedoms; elections that will decide the composition of Congress during the last two years of this Joe Biden term, the future room for maneuver of his administration and, already between the lines, will become a referendum on the figure of the president and his first 24 months in office. position.

Inflation has dominated much of the previous campaign debate and has become the great instrument of the Republicans to grow in polls where they are, at the very least, favorites to wrest control of the Democratic Party over the House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, where its 435 seats are at stake.

The battle for the Senate, where 35 seats are decided this Tuesday, a third of the total in the hemicycle, seems more favorable to the Democrats but it cannot be said that they have victory in hand either, because both parties are two seats away from each other. get the most from the camera, according to CNN estimates. The Republicans are by no means ruled out for a total victory in the US Legislature.

To this must be added the deep local character of elections where state governors and secretaries will also be decided, as well as additional votes on issues as important in recent months as the right to abortion or voting freedoms.

Inflation in the United States is approaching maximums never seen in 40 years and 77 percent of Americans consider it a primary issue when deciding their vote, according to the latest poll published this Sunday by ABC News / 'The Washington Post'.

The Republican party, according to this survey, is twelve points or more ahead of the Democrats in the indexes of confidence when it comes to managing the economic situation in the United States.

However, the Democrats respond with a significant advantage in the confidence of the population for an issue as sensitive as abortion. In the survey, 66 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, the highest percentage in ABC/Post polls since 1995.

It is also an 8-point rise since April, two months before the conservative majority of the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

These issues ended up coming together in the last moments of the campaign last Saturday, in which Joe Biden asked for the vote to "protect democracy" while the former US president and still a great figure of the Republican Party, Donald Trump -- who threatens to return to run for the White House in 2024 -- ended up calling for a "Republican tidal wave" to "save the American dream."

Despite measures as applauded as those that have facilitated the decline in unemployment (3.7 percent in October, close to lows never seen in decades) or the partial cancellation of university debt, Biden arrives at these elections with an index approval rating of 38 percent, according to a poll released in late October by Pew Research, identical to Donald Trump's approval rating at a similar point in his presidency.

Biden's approval is lower than that of other recent presidents in the run-up to their first legislative election, such as Ronald Reagan (42 percent) and Bill Clinton (41 percent) or Barack Obama (46 percent). Those three presidents, like Biden, lost ground during their first two years in office.

Trump's dominance in the Republican Party, impervious to accusations of instigating the assault on Capitol Hill in January 2021 or the investigation opened by the FBI, including a raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion, on the possible appropriation of classified documents , are one more example put by the experts about the political tension that continues to dominate the country.

This tension translated at the end of last month into the attack on the husband of the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who was attacked at his home by the extremist David DePape, known for rejecting the result of the 2020 presidential elections that gave the victory over Biden, triggering last year's assault on Congress.

This attack completed the warning formulated in mid-October by the group of experts Soufan Group, which warned in a report about the possibility of a new outbreak of political violence during the legislative elections while the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) returned to to reveal in a study the connections between the radicals of the Republican Party, extremist movements and disinformation platforms.

Thanks to false articles published in tabloids such as the 'Santa Monica Observer' or 'The Gateway Pundit', which even linked Paul Pelosi to his aggressor without any proof, added to statements by Republican extremists such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Green, who blamed indirectly to Biden of the attack by criticizing his inability to control the violence in the cities, the discourse around the attack ended up completely muddled.

"By the time the attack week ended, hardly anyone on the American right, whether an outspoken extremist or an ostensibly respectable conservative commentator, acknowledged that the attack was an act of political violence," according to the SPLC's findings.

Little or nothing has changed in the political environment and "hyperpartisanship" since Biden's arrival in power, and each event only exacerbates this friction, whether it be the decisions of the conservative Supreme Court against abortion, the fight against the pandemic, the economic crisis derived from the war in Ukraine, the judicial processes against the participants in the insurrection in the Capitol, the attacks with firearms against the country's schools or the investigation against former President Trump.

According to a survey by 'The New York Times', 68 percent of the candidates to occupy a place in Congress or in local governments believe that there were irregularities in those presidential elections, while Trump has begun in many ways to present his aspirations in these mid-term elections.

In fact, sources from the Axios portal, close to the former president, believe that he could announce his new bid for the White House on November 14, at the earliest, less than a week after the end of the elections.

Adding all these circumstances, plus the amplification that social networks provide to the aforementioned narratives, the Soufan group conveys the "concern" about the possibility that the United States ends up falling prey to a "self-fulfilling prophecy"; one in which the "most serious predictions end up being fulfilled", with the immediate effect of an increase in violence "before, during and after the elections".