What the US midterm race in two key states can teach us about British politics

The US is steadily becoming less white. There is, within its borders, a diverse, youthful, progressive and tolerant culture that embodies what makes America great – and the UK isn't far behind

In Texas the hard right former presidential candidate Ted Cruz is taking on Beto O’Rourke, an insurgent Democrat (Getty)

So is the blue wave going to sweep across America next week and bring a little sanity to its politics while the UK languishes in idiotsville?

Polls suggest that the Democrats will grab control of the House of Representatives and increase their representation in governors’ mansions, but fail to take control of the Senate.

They should be doing better still, but two races I’ve been keeping a close eye on help to explain why they’re not. They have implications here too.

In Georgia, gun-totin’ “politically incorrect” conservative Trumpkin Brian Kemp faces Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is bidding to become the first African American female governor of a US state.

In Texas the hard right former presidential candidate Ted Cruz is taking on Beto O’Rourke, an insurgent Democrat who has criss-crossed the state speaking at town halls and who refuses to take corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) funding.

These are notionally conservative southern states, Republican citadels. Losing the governorship of Georgia would represent a severe blow, losing Cruz’s seat in Texas would be shattering.

The polls suggest that it’s a toss up in Georgia between Kemp and Abrams, who has had the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Will Ferrell knocking on doors for her.

No less than vice president Mike Pence was moved to declare that he’d “like to remind Stacey, and Oprah and Will Ferrell, that I’m kind of a big deal too”. Hey, look at me! Look at me! Please sir, look at me!

Sigh. There’s nothing quite like watching an unpleasant senior politician making themselves look like an idiot to ease the way into the weekend. The video of him saying that gave me a nice chuckle.

Kemp’s cringeworthy ads have featured him showing off his “big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself”. He’s also to be seen pointing a gun at “Jake, a young man who’s interested in one of my daughters”, to make sure he’s in tune with Republican orthodoxy.

The presence of a third party candidate, Libertarian Ted Metz, means it may ultimately end up with a run-off between the big two.

O’Rourke’s chances of unseating Cruz are much longer. He’s young, charismatic, and seems possessed of boundless energy. He’s certainly given the Republicans a scare.

Cruz, meanwhile, is widely disliked, even by members of his own party. He’s a slimeball who manned the phones for Trump even after the latter had moved beyond the expected tit-for-tat name calling among candidates by venomously attacking both Cruz’s wife and his father when they were duking it out for the Republican ticket.

But, based on an amalgamation of polling data, stats guru Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight puts his chance of winning at just under 80 per cent.

Both Abrams and O’Rourke should, and probably would, be doing much better were it not for voter suppression, a tool used by a Republican party increasingly dominated by angry and embittered old white nationalists (sound familiar, UK readers?), to keep young, black and hispanic voters out of the polling booth.

Demands for photo ID, matching signatures, notice periods before joining electoral rolls, the purging of voters from them, the closure of polling stations, all those and more have been used to keep these two states coloured Republican red.

In Texas, Crystal Mason, an African-American woman who has become a poster child for voter suppression, was sent to prison for trying to cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential election. Mason hadn’t completed a five-year sentence for tax fraud when she tried to vote while out on parole. Mason hadn't read the small print that said her full sentence had to be up for her to vote. As a result she was torn from her three children in a case that received national attention.

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of that state, has been charging a record number of people with voter fraud. According to NPR, there are 33 defendants facing allegations of 97 election violations. There were just 97 prosecutions in total during the 12-year period from 2005 to 2017.

Critics charge that this is nothing more than an intimidation campaign.

The non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, at the New York University School of Law, has described claims about widespread voter fraud (mostly perpetuated by Republicans) as “a myth”.

“The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, ‘The Truth About Voter Fraud’, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data-matching practices,” it said.

In Georgia it’s no better. In fact, Kemp is not just a candidate for governor, as Georgia’s secretary of state he gets to control who votes for governor.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he allowed 214 voting locations to be closed in six years and a report by the Associated Press said that there are more than 53,000 voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office. Its analysis of the list found that, surprise, surprise, it was predominantly made up of African-American voters.

The US is steadily becoming less white. There is, within its borders, a diverse, youthful, progressive and tolerant culture that embodies what makes America great.

Building up within it is a wave that could ultimately sweep a narrowly focussed and nasty Republican Party away, at least in its current form.

In the meantime, that party is cynically using every possible dirty trick to keep it behind a dam.

If you’re wondering, now, why I mentioned the relevance of all this to the UK?

Theresa May’s Tories face a similar challenge here. In 1987 there were no constituencies in the UK with 30 per cent or more ethnic minority populations. It has been estimated that there could be as many as 120 by the next general election, in theory slated for 2022. That could make life very difficult for the Conservatives given that the British Election Study estimated 76 per cent of non-white voters backed Labour, with just 17 per cent supporting them.

You can deal with the challenge this poses by either changing your message, or by following the American lead, gerrymandering constituencies and making it harder for people to vote within them, all the while claiming it’s an attempt to cut down on fraud that barely exists. Except, funnily enough, when it comes to the behaviour of big money Tory donors.

No prizes for guessing which is the preferred option of Britain’s Conservatives.