Midterm elections votes are in, and the democratic party now has control
STARKVILLE, Miss. – The votes have been cast, and political ads have run their course on our TVs.
Just a few hours after ballots closed, results came in and pointed to the democratic party taking control of the house of representatives and the senate. This highlighted a night of many things some found surprising. MSU Department of Political Science & Public Administration Brian Shoup weighed in on the election.
“In the past, we’ve been able to make projections about kind of where things were going. I think the house would be called relatively early,” said Shoup. “Even going into the election, a lot of the kind of initial projections kind of looked like the Democrats were going to beat 218., so that was quick to call. Senate, however, was pretty shocking because there’s obviously still a couple of races. Ours here in our state of Mississippi, and in the state of Alaska that were waiting to get the final tallies on.”
Other surprises throughout election night included South Carolina flipping blue, and Texas flipping blue by a convincing margin. How close the race here in Mississippi caught some off guards as well, as the difference down the stretch has been as close as 40 votes. There seems to be a few key issues driving the call for change.
“I don’t think it was necessarily any one singular issue,” said Shoup. “When we look at what was really affecting a lot of voters across the country regardless of their political affiliation, whether they were conservative, liberal, or just independents, the economy is obviously kind of an important one. I think certainly the war in Iran has impacts on that. Certainly, the cost of gas is related to a lot of that, but it’s one out of several issues that I think probably had a lot of an effect.”
Shoup said that following the results, he still sees a future of an unfortunate extreme level of political discourse.
“I think what President Trump found out is the same thing that Biden found out,” said Shoup. “Which is a lot of times the ability to impact really critical issues, like inflation is not always that simple, and there are policy choices that both President Biden and President Trump made that might have negatively impacted inflation. But that’s a very difficult thing for policymakers to directly control in an immediate and actionable way.”
The new congress will take office in January, but republicans will be picking new congressional leadership in the coming weeks.
