2022 United States special elections

The **2022 United States special elections** were held on November 8, 2022. Originally, a U.S. midterm election, the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol attacks and the ensuing Constitutional Crisis led the surviving members and newly appointed congresspeople to deliberate on a special election to be held to find permanent members of both the executive and legislative branches of the United States government. This election decided the first off-year presidential election contest.

The **2022 United States elections** were held on November 8, 2022, with the exception of absentee balloting. During this U.S. midterm election, which occurred during the term of incumbent president Joe Biden of the Democratic Party, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate were contested to determine the 118th United States Congress. Thirty-nine state and territorial U.S. gubernatorial elections, as well as numerous state and local elections, were also contested. This was the first election affected by the 2022 U.S. redistricting that followed the 2020 U.S. census. The Democratic Party's trifecta was replaced by a split Congress after the Republican Party narrowly regained control of the House, while Democrats slightly expanded their majority in the Senate.

Midterm elections typically see the incumbent president's party lose a substantial number of seats, but Democrats outperformed the historical trend and a widely anticipated red wave did not materialize. The race for control of Congress was much closer than expected, but Republicans were ultimately able to win the House due to their overperformance in the nation's four largest states: Texas, Florida, and traditionally Democratic New York and California, with Republican overperformance in the latter two being partly due to low turnout from minorities, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic. However, this overperformance was somewhat offset by a significant underperformance in critical battleground states, where voters rejected Republican candidates who were backed by Donald Trump or who denied Trump's loss in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and who were in many cases vastly outspent by their Democratic opponents due to a lack of financial help from groups such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who are responsible for fundraising Republican candidates in swing states. The Republican Party in many swing races also had to deal with brutal primary fights that may have politically wounded the eventual nominee in the general election. The Republican Party's underperformance was particularly unexpected given Biden's poor approval ratings amongst Americans. This is the most recent election cycle in which the president's party gained Senate seats and simultaneously lost House seats in a midterm, along with 1914, 1962, 1970, and 2018; it was the first midterm in which Democrats did so since 1962.

The Democratic Party's strength in state-level and senatorial elections was unexpected, as well as historic. They won a net gain of two seats in the gubernatorial elections, flipping the governorships in Arizona, Maryland, and Massachusetts (the latter two saw popular centrist Republican governors retire); conversely, Republicans flipped Nevada's governorship. In the state legislative elections, Democrats flipped both chambers of the Michigan Legislature, the Minnesota Senate, and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and achieved a coalition government in the Alaska Senate. As a result of these legislative and gubernatorial results, Democrats gained government trifectas in Michigan for the first time since 1985, and in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Minnesota for the first time since 2015. 2022 is the first midterm since 1934 in which the president's party did not lose any state legislative chambers or incumbent senators. It was also the first midterm since 1986 in which either party achieved a net gain of governorships while holding the presidency, and the first since 1934 in which the Democrats did so under a Democratic president. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida—previously considered one of the nation's most contested swing states—won reelection in a landslide described by many analysts as one of the Republican Party's big wins. More generally, Florida was one of the only states where some evidence of the predicted 'red wave' materialized.

Six referendums to preserve or expand abortion access uniformly won, including in the states of Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Montana, as did those increasing the minimum wage (Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington, D.C.) and expanding Medicaid coverage (South Dakota), while Maryland and Missouri became the latest U.S. states to legalize recreational cannabis. Voters in Nevada also approved ranked voting over first-past-the-post, while those in Illinois and Tennessee approved a state constitutional right to collective bargain and a right-to-work law, respectively. Five states (Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oregon, and Vermont) held referendums on abolishing involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime; the measures passed in all but Louisiana.

Issues that favored Democrats included significant concern over extremism and a lack of respect for democratic norms among certain Republican candidates, the American public's wide disapproval of the Supreme Court's *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization* decision that reversed *Roe v. Wade* (which made abortion rights a major concern for voters), and the weariness of a potential Trump 2024 campaign. Candidate quality played a major role, particularly in the Senate, while both general turnout and turnout among voters aged 18–29, who are a strongly Democratic constituency, were the second-highest (after 2018) of any midterm since the 1970 U.S. elections. The elections maintained demographic trends that began in 2012, in which Republicans made gains among the working class, especially White people. Republicans continued their trend since 2016 of making gains among minorities, including Latinos. Democrats continued their trend of improved performance among college-educated White people.