Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on the 2022 Midterm Congressional Election

We are pleased to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of the Journal of Political Marketing on the 2022 United States congressional midterm elections. The story of the 2022 midterms is complicated. Between President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and inflation at levels not seen since the 1980s, the conditions entering 2022 clearly favored congressional Republicans. Many academics and pundits expected that, consistent with past elections, Republicans were well positioned to take over the U.S. House by a large margin and potentially regain control of the U.S. Senate. The final election results were therefore largely unanticipated: Republicans won control of the House by a narrow margin and lost a seat in the Senate. In the days after the election, the national media was filled with accounts of why the “Red Wave” that many Republicans and conservative media personalities predicted never materialized (Milligan 2022; Reid and Singh 2022).

Understanding what happened with the 2022 midterm election is an important task for the scholarly community in political science. To assist us with developing this understanding, we have brought together in this special issue a superb group of scholars whose works offer important insights into how and why the 2022 election turned out as it did.

Background

For the last 150 years, the outcome of the congressional midterm elections has been highly predictable, with the president’s party typically losing seats in the US House. During this period, only four of the 38 midterm elections—1904, 1934, 1998, and 2002—deviated from this pattern. The magnitude of these seat losses covaries with a number of “fundamental” factors. Most notably, presidential approval and economic conditions help set our expectations for the size of a midterm referendum, as a popular president or strong economy will only minimize the number of electoral defeats (Tufte 1975). A party’s electoral fortunes can also depend on the extent to which it is “overexposed” and holds competitive districts that will be difficult to defend (Oppenheimer, Stimson, and Waterman 1986).

At the start of the 2022 midterm election year, these long-term predictors of midterm election outcomes indicated that it would be a very good year for Republican congressional candidates. For instance, Tien and Lewis-Beck (2023) based their forecast of House election results on presidential approval and change in real disposable income, and they predicted a Democratic seat loss of 37 seats, while Campbell’s (2022) “seats in trouble” model predicted a Democratic seat loss of between 36 and 42 seats. Just before the election, FiveThirtyEight (2022a) forecast that the Republicans had an 84% chance of controlling the House, and the latest model projections had the Republicans winning 230 seats and the Democrats winning 205 seats; indeed, earlier in the campaign FiveThirtyEight projected that the Republicans would win 238 seats. Most forecasters were less sanguine about the Republicans prospects in the U.S. Senate, where they were defending 21 of 35 seats (including a special election in Oklahoma). FiveThirtyEight (2022b) categorized the Republicans as being “slightly favored” to win the Senate, suggesting that the Republicans had a 59% of controlling the Senate and forecasting that the Republicans would win the 51 seats necessary for the majority. Going into the election, there was reason for optimism among Republicans that they would hold the majority in both the House and the Senate following the midterm election.

When the election was completed, Republican hopes for a big win were dashed. While the Republicans regained control of the U.S. House, they underperformed expectations considerably and took majority control by a margin of 222 to 213. Moreover, the small potential gains that were expected in the Senate did not materialize, and the Democrats gained a seat thanks to a victory in the open seat contest in Pennsylvania. These results left the Senate in Democratic hands with 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans, but three Independents who aligned themselves with the Democrats. Both chambers were controlled by majority parties that found themselves in a precarious situation.

What happened to generate this result? Certainly, the elephant in the room during the midterm election cycle was former president Donald Trump, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and the events of January 6. Republican congressional candidates were therefore put into a (for some, awkward) position of having to stake out a position on Trump and the 2020 presidential election. Unlike other modern one-term presidents, Trump also remained engaged in electoral politics and endorsed candidates in both the Republican primaries and general elections (Moore and Chu 2022; Solender 2022). A Trump endorsement tends to, on average, lower the public’s assessments of congressional candidates (Carson, Sievert, and Williamson 2023), which likely put candidates at a disadvantage in some House districts and states. Indeed, a case can be made that Trump’s endorsement of weak Senate candidates in key states—particularly in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona—cost the Republicans control of the Senate.

Besides the influence of Donald Trump, the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022)—which returned control of abortion policy to the states—appears to have played a key role in muting Republican gains in the midterm. Following the leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision on May 2, 2022 and the subsequent announcement of the decision on June 24, 2022, there was considerable public backlash, and the issue of abortion was a major issue during the campaign. There is survey evidence that the Dobbs decision likely moved some potential Republican voters to vote for Democrats, and Dobbs likely became an anchor around Republican candidates in some winnable districts (Kirzinger et al. 2022).

There were some countervailing forces that gave Republicans reason for optimism. President Biden’s low popularity and the relatively weak state of the economy should have resulted in big Republican gains, particularly in the House, in a “normal” election year. While unemployment in the months leading up to the election was low, inflation was high (particularly in consumer-visible goods like groceries and gasoline), interest rates were up, and there was quite a bit of economic disruption due to unfilled jobs in the labor force. Despite these economic disruptions, the expected Republican gains did not materialize. It seems clear that other factors intervened to move the needle from what should have been a big Republican year to the mixed bag of results that were observed.

Other factors may have influenced election outcomes. The 2022 midterm election was the first after the decennial Census that required states with more than one congressional district to redraw district lines. There was quite a bit of jockeying back and forth, with some states drawing lines to benefit Republican candidates and other states drawing lines to benefit Democratic candidates. It is also the case that the quality of House and Senate candidates has a major effect on election outcomes, and the aggregate quality of candidates for each party could have had a major effect on final aggregate election outcomes.

Special issue: the 2022 midterm elections

We have gathered together in this special issue a set of six articles by respected scholars of congressional elections to explore many of the issues relating to the 2022 midterm election that are outlined above. Specifically:

• Jamie Carson and Stuart Ulrich provide an important general overview of the 2022 midterm elections, focusing attention on the role played by former president Donald Trump and on how the Dobbs decision may have shifted some voters away from supporting Republican candidates. They not only show how the 2022 midterm election fits into previous scholarly work on congressional elections, but using both aggregate- and individual-level data they make explicit comparisons between the 2022 midterm elections and midterm elections in other years, finding some similarities but also some key differences.

• Ryan Williamson provides an excellent overview of redistricting and its effects on a range of outcomes relating to the 2022 midterm election. He considers how different redistricting regimes for drawing district lines—state legislatures, courts, or independent commissions—generate different results in 2022 for district compactness, emergence of quality candidates, share of open seats, uncontested states, and electoral competitiveness. Further, he explores how different redistricting regimes affect Americans’ satisfaction with redistricting in their home states, finding that respondents who reside in states with district lines drawn by state legislatures are systematically less satisfied with redistricting.

• Carlos Algara and Byengseon Bae explore the impact of candidate experience on election outcomes in the 2022 midterms. Their study is especially timely as the subject of candidate quality was salient in the several US Senate contests where inexperienced, Trump-backed candidates—such as Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia—secured the GOP nomination. Indeed, Algara and Bae’s results from a counterfactual simulation suggest that the nomination of a politically experienced Republican candidate would have helped them to win in three key states—Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

• Colin Case and Sarah Treul offer a different and innovative take on the question of candidate quality. They use biographies from candidate websites to systematically chronicle how politically experienced candidates “sell” their own previous experience. Case and Truel find that Democrats and Republicans candidates in the 2022 midterms emphasized different types of experience and occupational backgrounds. Most notably, Republicans were more likely to downplay their prior political experience, which may reflect partisan differences in attitudes toward anti-establishment outsiders.

• Costas Panagopoulos and Nunzio Lore present the results of a fascinating study in which they explore the effects of Republican social media networks on voting in the 2022 U.S. Senate elections. Using data extracted from Twitter, they build a measure of Republicans’ network “embeddedness” with other Republicans and find that the effect of this variable on county major-party voting for the Republican senate candidate is dependent on whether Donald Trump endorsed the Republican senate candidate. In states without a Trump endorsement, there is a strong positive effect of Republican network embeddedness, but in states with a Trump endorsement the relationship shifts to the negative, suggesting a possible demobilizing effect of network-carried information about Trump’s assertion of election fraud.

• Heather Evans and Katelynn Parton offer new insights about the use of social media in congressional campaigns by studying the use of Twitter in both the 2022 congressional primary and general election in Virginia. During the 2022 primary, congressional candidates were less like to send attack-style messages and if they did, it was still focused on the other party. The use of negative tweets, however, went up considerably in the general election. Lastly, the authors find that “women’s” issues, such as abortion, were more commonly referenced than were typically “men’s” issues, such as taxes or foreign affairs.