Even before Justice Anthony Kennedy's blockbuster announcement that he would be retiring from the Supreme Court, it looked like the 2018 midterms would probably serve a nationalized referendum on Donald Trump. Against the backdrop of the migrant child-detention facilities controversy earlier this summer, and the contentious process to replace Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh, the “Second Civil War” has gone from a social media meme to looking more and more like a grim forecast of the future.
But as much as the current fury has changed things, the more they have remained the same. For nearly a quarter-century, the midterm elections that used to center on bread-and-butter issues like schools, crime—“the economy, stupid”—have now been little more than proxy wars to impeach Clinton, thwart Bush, or attempt, no matter how vainly, to make Obama a one-term president. Now, they are all about dumping Trump.
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