Republicans look to the abyss of losing majority in the US Senate

Senator Mitch McConnell, after casting his vote this Thursday in Louisville, Kentucky.Timothy D. Easley / AP

The bottleneck of all US politics has its own name.

Mitch McConnell, a senator from Kentucky and leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, has been the true arbiter of power in Washington for six years.

He made the last two years of Barack Obama hell.

And Donald Trump, in reality, has only been able to approve what McConnell has left him, a tax cut.

On November 3, that immense power, which perhaps the US was not fully aware of until it has seen its consequences in the Supreme Court, is submitted to the polls.

And he's in serious danger.

In addition to the president, in the US elections the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are renewed.

A total of 35 of the 100 senators are elected.

In American political jargon, the party with the most seats at stake is said

.

In this election, 23 of those seats are Republican, including McConnell's own.

Based on surveys and the political environment of each state, at least 12 are in danger.

For the Democrats it is enough to win four to regain the majority.

Only one Democratic senator is in serious danger of losing his seat, Doug Jones of Alabama.

"I am the firewall against disaster," warned Mitch McConnell in an interview last month, in a tone that is becoming increasingly dramatic.

Republican senators' campaign speech has long been no longer about defending Trump, but about defending themselves.

Joe Biden's victory is beginning to be taken for granted.

The "disaster" McConnell talks about is a Senate in Democratic hands that collaborates with the president and, among other things, undoes Trump's tax reform, appoints Democratic "activist" judges in the federal judicial system (McConnell's obsession, who deprived Obama of dozens of appointments and gifted them to Trump, including one to the Supreme Court.)

That majority could even change the law to expand the number of members of the Supreme Court and deactivate the artificial majority created by McConnell.

This possibility, which Biden has not ruled out but which would set a very serious precedent (yet another), is the new rallying cry of the Republican campaign to ask for the vote.

In 2018, the vote against Trump propelled Democratic candidates to the biggest victory in a legislative election since the Republican debacle after the

scandal

in 1974. Republicans lost 40 seats in the House of Representatives, some in places considered as strong as Orange County, California.

Polls indicate that enthusiasm is still alive, even intensified by the presidential election, turned into a plebiscite on the Trump years.

In these elections there is no possibility that the Democrats will lose that majority that has allowed the Democrats, among other things, to initiate the investigation that led to the

and to force the Senate to negotiate any economic measure.

This is the occasion to see the effect of that trend, that is, the effect of Trump, in the Senate.

Two years ago it was not time to renew

Republican seats

, and the Conservatives managed to maintain their majority, with dramatic consequences for the balance of power in Washington.

It is being seen with the express confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is going to consolidate a conservative majority in the Supreme Court.

The blocking of Obama's vacancy was one of the factors in the mobilization of the conservative vote that brought Trump to the White House.

Once there, thanks to McConnell (he himself has claimed success in public), he has been able to appoint three Supreme Court justices, including Obama's, and almost 200 federal judges, 25% of all federal judges in the country.

This situation seems to have made Democrats aware that power in Washington is not only in the Oval Office.

The closest Republican seats are drawing interest from across the country.

The collection figures for some Democratic candidates are typical of a presidential primary.

In South Carolina, for example, candidate Jaime Harrison had raised $ 57 million as of this week, an absolute record for a Senate candidate.

He faces Republican Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Justice Committee and one of the most detested figures by Democrats across the country.

Graham has a one to six point lead in the polls.

This is the tightest reelection of his career.

Two seats that are practically lost are those of Colorado and Arizona.

Colorado is a purple state par excellence, that is, it usually distributes power between Republicans and Democrats.

This time around, Senator Cory Gardner has fully embraced Trumpism.

The polls give former Gov. John Hickenlooper a sizable lead.

Democrats have high hopes for Arizona, where polls indicate a mobilization of the Latino and urban vote since 2016 (Trump won by just four points), as well as a palpable disaffection of local Republicans with Trump.

The combination could give Joe Biden the State of Arizona, which has not won a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996. For the Senate, the Democrats present former astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who suffered an attack.

As of this week, Kelly had raised $ 38 million.

Among the races that are less clear, up to six Republican senators are tied in the polls with Democratic hopefuls, according to the average of polls compiled by

.

They are from Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Carolina and the aforementioned Graham, in South Carolina.

The weakest seat is Main, held by Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who, whenever there is a controversial vote, the entire country expects her to speak out against Trump.

It has not.

The latest polls give her Democratic rival, Sara Gideon, between four and seven points ahead.

If the downfall of Trump is confirmed, he will drag with him many of those whom the Americans see as his accomplices in Washington.

The "disaster" that McConnell talks about is at hand.

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