America seems to always be at a crossroads.
This election is no different, I guess.
{mosads}Faust met Mephistopheles at a crossroads.
Robert Johnson, the famous blues singer, sang about his own deal with the devil in his iconic song “Cross Road Blues.”
Politicians love to talk about every election being the most important one ever, about how we are at a crossroads as a nation.
But as Led Zeppelin reminds us, while there might be two paths you can go down, in the long run, there is still time to change the road you are on.
Midterm elections provide opportunities to either change the road we are going down or keep moving forward in the same direction.
We hit these crossroads every two years.
In 1934, Democrats picked up nine seats in the House and nine seats in the Senate, the first time that a political party had such success in a midterm election since the Civil War. Voters liked that Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to do something, anything, to get us out of the Depression and Republican opposition wasn’t a winning message.
In 1998, Bill Clinton’s party picked up five seats in the House, thanks to the booming economy, and no change in numbers in the Senate. No matter how angry Republicans were at Clinton’s perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the bulk of the voters cared more about their pocketbooks. Deal with the devil? Maybe, but the voters opted to keep the good times rolling.
In 1966, Lyndon Johnson’s party lost 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate, as the making of a new coalition of blue collar and southern voters started to migrate to the Republican Party.
The election today will be another inflection point in America’s progress.
Will the voters reward Republicans for the booming economy or will they punish the GOP because they don’t like the president’s rhetoric?
Pundits and prognosticators have looked at history and already decided that the House will be taken by the Democrats and the Senate control will be maintained by the Republicans. That would be a historically unique result.
In 1914, Republicans won seats in the House and lost seats in the Senate, and in 1962 and 1970, the reverse happened, but none of those elections changed control of either chamber.
So, when Nate Silver — the man who said Hillary Clinton was a lock to be president — now projects with 86 percent certainty that the House will flip to the Democrats, take that prediction with a grain of salt.
It is much more likely that while Republicans will lose some seats in the House, they will pick up some seats in the Senate and both chambers will continue to be controlled by the GOP.
If that’s the kind of split decision we are looking at, look to the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media to have the mental meltdowns of all mental meltdowns.
Having the American people ratify, once again, Trump’s leadership, is every progressive’s worst nightmare.
Of course, it also possible that both the House and the Senate flip to the Democrats. That kind of check-on-the-president election happened in 1994 and 2006. With so many races in the margin of error, it is hard to discount any possibility.
Should that happen, the election will be seen as a classic midcourse correction, a time when the American people zigged instead of zagged.
American history is replete with crossroad decisions that amount to midcourse corrections.
Somehow, we have survived every one of them.
And the fact is, no matter what happens later today, the nation’s attention will turn to the next election.
We already have new polls showing the matchups for the 2020 elections, and predictably, those polls spell trouble for President Trump.
But most Americans will privately tell you that they think the president will get reelected.
It’s hard to know how this will all work out.
But we know for sure that it will be another crossroad decision.
They always are.
Feehery is partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip and as a speech writer to former Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).