The Roads to Congress 2014

Book excerpt: The 2014 midterm congressional elections provided a view of the attitude of American voters in the sixth year of Barack Obama’s presidency. This book provides insight about the formative aspects of the 2014 campaign season as well as in depth coverage of key races for Congress. The first section has four chapters that cover the substance of topics that impacted this campaign cycle: the popularity and productivity of the 113th Congress, voter suppression laws passed in many states, the role of Super PACs and independent expenditures in the campaigns, and the use of social media by members of Congress running for reelection. Case studies follow the path of ten House and seven Senate races from inception to election postmortem. The chapters are narrative and provide analysis of an array of interesting and diverse contests from throughout the country. The authors provide succinct and highly readable chapters meant to illustrate the distinctive nature of the campaigns they are examining. Individual campaigns and elections are shown “up close” and be ready to compare and contrast because of the common format employed throughout the book. Taken together, the chapters reveal that the roads to Congress, while similar in so many ways, each follow a unique route to Capitol Hill.