Donald Trump was right when he said that America’s midterm elections will be about him. Midterm elections are always to some degree a referendum on the incumbent president, and Trump is the most polarizing president in the modern history of the United States. He has inspired a fervent following and an equally passionate opposition. The midterm results will depend on what drives more turnout this year – love or hate of Trump.

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For Trump’s backers, he is a true populist who has toppled a crooked political establishment that pursued its own interests at the expense of ordinary Americans. He created a booming economy, cut taxes, unshackled enterprise from stifling regulations, and renegotiated the job-killing North American Trade Agreement (Nafta). He has protected the nation from Islamic terrorists and traditional American culture from corrupting foreign influences. He has exposed the bias of the mainstream media and backed religious freedom for Christians. Trump has appointed reliable conservatives to the supreme court and stood against the baby-killing abortion industry.

For detractors, Trump is a phony populist whose policies have benefited the rich and imposed a crushing burden of debt on the American people. By rolling back environmental regulations and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, he has exposed Americans to the ravages of catastrophic climate change. He has diminished America’s international standing, and instead of championing democracy and human rights, he has cultivated some of world’s most brutal dictators.

Trump has lied repeatedly to the American people, demeaned women and minorities, undermined the free press, condoned violence against his enemies, and attacked migrants and refugees as murderers and rapists. For his most ardent critics, Trump has destroyed civility and created a toxic environment that contributed to Robert Bowers’ massacre of congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue and Cesar Sayoc’s dispatching of bombs to CNN and critics of Trump.

Two-thirds of respondents to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken in late October said that Trump will be a factor in their midterm votes; 23% said that he will be a minor factor; 44% said he will be a major factor. A similar poll taken before the midterm elections of 2014 found that then president Barack Obama would be either a minor or a major factor in voting for only 47% of respondents.

“This is definitively a national election,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said. “With a referendum on Trump.”

Voter turnout is typically low in midterm elections, falling well below participation in parliamentary elections in other advanced democracies. Only about 38% of US citizens voted in the 2014 midterms, leaving some 140m votes on the table.

But Trump will likely inspire higher turnout this year. He “has attracted passionate loyalty, and passionate antagonism, and hatred and love tend to drive people to the polls”, Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, said. “We’ll probably see a much higher than normal turnout for the midterms.”

Unlike the past two midterms, polls indicate Democrats have equaled or gained the edge on Republicans in voter enthusiasm

Unlike the past two midterm elections, polls indicate that this year Democrats have equaled or gained the edge on Republicans in voter enthusiasm. A Gallup Poll conducted from mid- to late-October found that “Democrats match or exceed Republicans on turnout indicators.”. Republicans have countered with voter suppression efforts.

Republicans know that their base of older white Christians is the most rapidly shrinking part of the electorate. They cannot manufacture more of these voters, but they can restrict turnout by the rising Democratic base of minorities and young people through purges of registration rolls, stringent voter ID laws, poll closings and exact-match laws that suspend voters’ registration for the smallest mismatch between information on the registration forms and driver’s licenses or social security records.

In Georgia, relying on a 2017 exact-match law passed by the Republican legislature, Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state who is also running for governor, suspended some 53,000 registrations. Minorities accounted for some 80% of suspended registrations.

In North Dakota, after Democrat Heidi Heitkamp was elected senator by 3,000 votes in 2012, the Republican legislature required proof of a street address as a prerequisite for voting. The law placed a disparate burden on the Democratic base of Native American voters, who often live on unnamed roads and depend upon post office boxes for the delivery of mail.

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Yet, voting restrictions may backfire on Republicans by motivating opposition voters. In North Dakota, Mark Trahant, editor of Indian Country Today, said that in the past “the Native vote has not necessarily turned out … but with tribes working overtime to help members obtain valid addresses and ID, she [Heitkamp] actually could get a turnout of Native voters she wouldn’t have gotten any other way”.

In Georgia, Kemp’s Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, an African American woman, has urged supporters to flood the polls to fight “voter suppression”. In a leaked audio recording, Kemp confidentially warned supporters about “the literally tens of millions of dollars that they” – his opponents – “are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base”.

Kemp was especially concerned about absentee ballots, and what would happen “if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in”.