2022 United States elections

Elections were held in the United States on November 8, 2022, with the exception of absentee balloting. During this U.S. midterm election, which occurred during the term of president Joe Biden, 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 redistricting that followed the 2020 census. The Republican Party ended unified Democratic control of Congress and the presidency by winning a majority in the House of Representatives while Democrats expanded their Senate majority.

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. Republicans narrowly won the House due to their overperformance in the nation's four largest states: Texas, Florida, New York and California. Democrats increased their seats in the Senate by one, as they won races in critical battleground states, where voters rejected Donald Trump-aligned Republican candidates. This was the fifth election cycle in history in which the president's party gained Senate seats and simultaneously lost House seats in a midterm, along with 1914, 1962, 1970, and 2018.

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; 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, 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, as did Senator Marco Rubio. 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 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 collectively bargain and a right-to-work law, respectively.

Issues that favored Democrats included significant concern over perceived extremism and threats to democracy among many Trump-endorsed Republican candidates, the unpopularity of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion that reversed Roe v. Wade, the weariness of a potential Trump 2024 campaign, and backlash over the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Candidate quality played a major role, particularly in the Senate, as many Republican candidates became embroiled in scandals during the campaign that led to underperformances in key races. 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 White college-educated voters.

After the 2020 elections, Democrats had a federal trifecta for the first time since the 111th United States Congress in 2011. This gave them a relatively straightforward path to enacting legislation, but the presence of more centrist or conservative Democrats, namely Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, meant that most of the more expansive and often more progressive legislation was blocked. In the White House, Joe Biden started his term out with positive approval ratings, particularly for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, although at about 54 percent it was the lowest approval rating (other than Donald Trump) of a president's first 100 days since 1953, reflecting the country's growing partisanship.

By mid-2021, as the year progressed with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant and the Fall of Kabul, and as key legislation stalled, Biden and Democrats lost popularity and suffered electoral losses, including an upset loss in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, which were widely characterized as a red wave election and as a prelude to the 2022 midterms. In addition, the incumbent president almost always loses seats in Congress and often at least one chamber or overall control, in particular since the post-war period.

Going into 2022, Republicans capitalized on high inflation, crime, and gas prices, and gained a substantial lead in the election climate towards 2022 results similar to the red wave of 2010. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision led to a spike in Democratic voters' fervor, which narrowed the gap despite Biden's underwater approval ratings, amid better-than-expected election results during this period; this led some observers to wonder whether the 2022 midterms could break the incumbent president's losses and reflect the 1998 United States elections, as well as the 2002 United States elections, both of which showed increased support for the incumbent president, amid the impeachment of Bill Clinton (1998) and the aftermath of the September 11 attacks (2002). By October, Republicans regained a substantial margin in pre-election polls, which led to widespread predictions for a red wave election in favor of Republicans, including the possibility of flipping some blue seats in Southern California under those circumstances, though polls remained within the margin of error.