Midterms 2018

Hypatia Fitzsimons

     On November 6th, citizens voted in the midterm elections, and this has had the highest turnout ever. This year, 113 million people voted which is roughly 49% of able voters. The last time this many citizens voted was in the 1996 midterm election. For the 2014 midterm election, only 36.4% people voted, and in the past several decades only about 40% voted in the midterms. Michael McDonald, an associate from the University of Florida said, “You'd have to go all the way back to 1914 to get a turnout rate above 50 percent.” So this shows that the midterms are not very popular and it is pretty impressive that we got up 49%.
     The midterms are held every two years after the general election and people do not think they are important since it is not an election for president. However, the midterms are still quite important. The way the votes turnout is a response to how well the President is doing, because the party he is affiliated with will either do well or poorly, and this can completely change how fast things get done. Now with this election, the House majority is Democrat and the Senate is still dominantly Republican. These two parties don’t have the same goals nor ideology, so we can predicate not as much will get done versus prior to the election when both the House and the Senate were majority Republican.