Let’s Kill the Midterms
America’s two year election cycle leads to dysfunction and frustration with democracy.
I don’t want to spoil the results of the 2024 election in case you recorded it, but Americans decided they’ve had enough of democracy, thank you very much. Much of the recent two weeks has been focused on blaming whatever segment of the Democratic Party you don’t like, and in my case, blaming the voters. Still, Trump is coming (as is Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk, and some Fox News morning show host to run the military) and so are the million of articles about what the Democrats, and lowercase-D democrats, can do to preserve democracy.
The first thing we can do is say that maybe the voters have a point. People like me will point out we have never lived in a more prosperous, free, or healthy time in history—and while all of that is true, the fact that voters, even Harris voters, don’t feel that way shows that there is a massive failure among liberal (and libertarian!) messaging and a major issue with information siloing. I’m not sure how you fix that, but they are right about one thing: the current democratic system in America is not working. Congress is ineffectual, having ceded much of their legislative responsibilities to the executive and judicial branches. Trump supporters, and Trump himself, wants the Senate to give up its constitutional duty to advise and consent to appointments. Few pieces of legislation actually pass and what does are usually one or two massive bills passed through budget reconciliation to avoid a filibuster.
I’ve had this as one of my personal pet projects for many years, and now seems like a good time to annoy everyone else with it. We should get rid of the midterm elections. Specifically, we should amend the constitution to change the House terms to four years, the Senate terms to eight years, with half of the senate up every four years. Have these congressional elections concurrent with the presidential term, so that America moves to having federal elections every four years instead of two. We are an outlier in major democracies for having legislative elections so often. Australia and New Zealand do have three year terms - but are often debating moving to a four year term. Most other major democracies have four to five year terms, at least when collapsing coalitions don’t bring early elections.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. These folks can’t legislate to save their lives and you want to give them a longer term? Well, yeah, and especially given that many of us are hoping for 2026 to restrain Trump, I get that attitude. But part of the reason Congress can’t legislate is the constant pressure to run for re-election. Tough votes are to be avoided at all costs. Party leadership knows they are only two years away from another election. In majority, that means they have to be careful this term, because then they can keep their majority and fix all the country’s problems next term. (Hint: “next term” never comes.) In minority, all they have to do is block everything the majority wants to do and they’ll have their shot next term. Rinse and repeat until we eventually default… or end up with an autocrat as president.
In many longer-term parliamentary countries, it’s common for the first year or so to be when tough, big legislation is passed. Leaders have several years to make those reforms work, alleviate public anger, or adjust course. Then they get judged on the results: either it worked, or it didn’t. And there are examples of this working out for incumbent parties. The most obvious is the UK Conservatives, who implemented a painful austerity plan in their first term coalition government in 2010-2015, faced massive protests, and terrible polling. They were eventually re-elected in a majority government in 2015.
We have an example of the opposite in the US, and that is the Affordable Care Act. Arguably the last big piece of permanent government reform (the Trump tax cuts were temporary - how cute), the ACA cost the Democrats their congressional supermajorities from the Obama landslide. If you weren’t politically active at that time, and I was on the Republican side, it’s hard to overstate just how polarizing “Obamacare” was at the time even among people who knew nothing about politics. It must therefore be an annoying irony to those that lost their seats in 2010 that eight years later, the GOP would suffer a significant House defeat in the 2018 midterms after attempting to repeal the ACA. Such was the turnaround of public opinion on Obama’s health reform that when Speaker Mike Johnson made clear in the closing weeks of the election he wanted to massively change it, there was significant blowback that the Trump campaign was unhappy with. Since then, there has been a dearth of reforms on either side of the aisle. It’s a third rail no one wants to touch, even when there are real needs to be addressed.
Now if you’re libertarian or conservative minded, you might be saying “see, why do we want to make it easier to pass legislation, inaction is better than bad legislation.” I think this is one of the biggest and most dangerous myths to pervade mainly libertarian circles. There is tons of legislation happening in this country, it’s just all coming from the White House, government agencies, and the judiciary. Congress abdicating their legislative responsibilities hurts small government libertarians as well. There is no political appetite for reforming Social Security and Medicare, the biggest contributors to the federal deficit, and there never will be if Congress will get turfed out less than a year after passing any reform. Cuts are unpopular and the public doesn’t really care about the deficit. The only way you’re going to see significant cuts is if Congress believes they can sell them to the voters, and that’s hard to do if they have no time to sink in.
That brings me to the other big criticism of this sort of thing: what about the ability for Congress to be a check on presidential power? This brings us back to 2026, after all I too want there to be an anti-Trump majority in Congress to stop Trump’s worst excesses. As it is, though, Congress doesn’t serve as an effective check on the White House anyway. Their inability to pass legislation, and worse, their continual transfer of legislative power to agencies and the executive branch, means that even in a divided government, they are not taking back power from the president because that would require making tough decisions. It’s much easier to get re-elected focusing on what the president did, and not defending what you did.
There is no guarantee that Congress and the White House will be won by the same party, either. While this has been fairly common since 2000, it was quite uncommon in the last few decades before that. The Senate would now be elected in every state every cycle, since 50% of the seats will be up every cycle, and that means no more “bad maps” excuses for each party. And while it’s unrelated, I’m not a fan of removing the filibuster or the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and that will also still require some level of bipartisan negotiation on legislation.
Now, this would require a constitutional amendment, which hasn’t happened in thirty years. Convincing the public that we should let them vote less often will not be popular. I’ve long argued we have so much democracy in the US that it leads to worse, and less democratically-representative outcomes (like electing judges, state treasurers, and even coroners in many states). I understand that’s not a popular position. Still, however Trump’s second term ends, it will likely be very chaotic and there should be an appetite at ensuring that this outcome doesn’t happen again. Fixing our current system of government to make it more effective should be on the table.