Book Review: Envisioning America and the American self: Republican and democratic platforms

Abstract

presidency. As much as anything, the volume’s approach embracing the uniqueness of Presidents, parties, and events in dictating midterm outcomes is validated by the most recent 2022 contests, in which Democrats managed something of a stalemate in a year when President Joe Biden’s approval should have dictated a bloodbath by the standards of conventional wisdom. The authors of both the initial analyses in Part 1, and of the case studies in Parts 2 and 3, offer a well-balanced acknowledgement of the power of thermostatic politics and voters’ tendency to rebel against the President’s party on the one hand, and the exigencies and complications of intervening events on the other. In total, the effort put forth inMidterms and Mandates is a worthy analytical response to the navel-gazing tendencies of modern political media and popular commentary, who with each passing election cycle seem increasingly desperate to tell a unifying, oversimplified, and often-biased “story” about midterm elections. Instead, by diving mindfully into past midterms, the analyses and case studies offered byMidterms and Mandates give us a clear roadmap for how to consider midterms of the future.