The Roads to Congress 2022

Book excerpt: This book analyzes both local and national House and Senate campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections to reveal how distinctive campaign dynamics have a collective national impact. Despite serious efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race that went mostly unopposed by Republicans, the GOP is poised to gain seats, and perhaps control of Congress less than two years later. Their efforts to accomplish this feat may be explained by the biannual pattern of surging and declining partisan electorates that political scientists have long used to explain election outcomes. But in an era where global pandemic lingers, inflation hit its highest rate in two generations, Wall Street faces its first bear market in more than a decade, war among developed nations has returned to the international stage, and efforts by a former President to maintain his grip on a party that lost the 2020 popular vote by 9 million proved largely successful, the story is clearly more complicated. The 2022 midterms thus arrive on the heels of unprecedented developments for democracy in America. The Roads to Congress 2022 provides an essential guide to understanding these developments, with thematic chapters authored by more than thirty experts in campaigns and elections that explore the evolving state of party politics, electoral governance, redistricting, participation and representation, and profile the key races of the season.