Americans Vote In Midterm Elections To Determine Control Of Congress
Voters in the United States are casting their ballots in key midterm elections, which will determine the makeup of the next congress and set the tone for the remainder of President Joe Biden’s term in the White House.
The vote yesterday came as Americans grapple with sky-high inflation and living costs, and the economy has emerged as the top concern among supporters of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Democrats currently retain a slim majority in congress, and they have focused much of the campaign on defending reproductive rights and strengthening democratic institutions, which they argue are under threat in the country.
But as the party in power, Democrats are expected to lose ground to Republicans, who have seized on immigration and economic issues in a bid to garner support at the ballot box.
“There are some countervailing pressures on the economy: unemployment remains relatively low at 3.5 percent, consumer confidence is still fairly high,” Thomas Gift, the director of the Centre on US Politics at University College London, told Al Jazeera, “but inflation hits everyone, and the majority [party] – fair or not – is going to get scapegoated.”
All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for grabs, along with 34 in the Senate. Governorships, state legislatures, local councils and school boards are also being contested.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett said that President Joe Biden acknowledged hours before polls opened that it was going to be “tough” for Democrats to hold the House.