Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether anyone in the Trump campaign worked with the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win. And the president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has told a federal court that Trump directed him to make illegal payments to silence two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
If Democrats control the House of Representatives, that body is much more likely to launch investigations into these and other matters. The House could also consider impeachment proceedings against the president, a move that many Democratic voters are calling for.
On the Senate side, Democratic control would, among other things, halt the administration’s ability to get conservative judges confirmed.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the party out of power will do well in a midterm. The key, as with any election, is voter turnout (see “Why I’m Registering Voters,” below), and whichever party convinces more people to show up at the polls will prevail.
The hard part is getting voters—whether they’re Republicans, Democrats, or Independents—to understand that Congress has a real impact on our lives by making our laws and deciding how to spend taxpayers’ money.
“People often dismiss the importance of midterms,” says Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “But the truth is they’re just as, if not more, important than presidential elections.”