The US congressional elections are an important issue.
In these elections, every parliamentary seat in the House of Representatives, a third of the seats in the Senate and thousands of state legislative and executive offices are up for grabs.
These "mid-term elections," as the name suggests, are held halfway through a presidential term, and while Joseph Biden's name is not on the ballot, the vote will largely determine what he can do in the final two years of his term.
A hostile Congress makes it seriously difficult for the president to pass legislation or make important nominations, such as those for Supreme Court justices.
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But these elections also have ramifications that reach far beyond the US, and in 2022 they are drawing even more attention than before.
"People from all over the world follow US politics because it matters to what America is doing outside its own borders," Lesley Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas Program at London's Chatham House Institute of Politics, told the BBC.
"This election is more important than most because the Democratic and Republican candidates have diametrically opposed views on many fundamental issues," she says.
Here's what will be at stake on November 8:
Abortion
"This is the most important election for American women since time immemorial," says Jasmin Radji, an Iranian-American activist with the progressive political organization Swing Left.
Radji, the former director of Planned Parenthood, a non-governmental organization that advocates for a number of issues such as access to abortion, warns that the electoral list will be a battle "against extremists who work to roll back our reproductive rights."
In June, the US Supreme Court overturned a 1973 decision known as Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion for pregnant women in the first three months of pregnancy.
The Supreme Court's decision opened the door for individual states to ban or greatly restrict access to abortion — 13 of them have since done so.
That made abortion a key issue in the midterm election campaigns of state governors.
Polls consistently show that Republican voters are much more likely to vote in favor of restricting or eliminating access to abortion than Democrats.
On November 36, there will be a vote for XNUMX governor positions.
Americans in four states (California, Kentucky, Montana and Vermont) will actually vote in the midterm elections on abortion bills that either limit or guarantee the procedure.
"Freedom is specifically threatened as far as reproductive freedoms are concerned. If Democrats lose gubernatorial races in states like Michigan, Arizona or Wisconsin, abortion could literally become illegal overnight," says Radji.
"And if Democrats lose Congress, House Republicans are already planning to propose a nationwide abortion ban."
On abortion, as on many other issues, what happens in the US can be indicative of or even influence global trends.
"The US is one of the largest democracies in the world, so the decisions made there affect the rest of the world," Louise Chetcuti, a political analyst at the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne, explains to the BBC.
Ukraine
American aid to Ukraine after the Russian invasion is an issue that has united Democrats and Republicans, especially in Congress, where aid packages have received overwhelming support from both parties.
Dr. Vinjamuri believes that foreign policy is a rare area where Democrats and Republicans are more on the same page than divided on key issues.
However, there are signs that this united stance may soon change.
President Biden has publicly expressed concern about what will happen to future aid to Ukraine if Republicans gain control of Congress.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy earlier told the political website Punchbowl News that Congress would not write "blank checks to Ukraine" if his party triumphs.
"We will have to see what will happen with the policy towards Ukraine, especially beyond military aid," said Dr. Peter Finn, a political scientist from London's Kingston University, for the BBC.
Foreign policy is an area where the executive branch has significant control, but if Republicans beat Democrats with a slim eight-seat majority in the lower house, Biden's support for Kiev could face resistance.
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Climate changes
The presidential term of Joseph Biden could not be more different in relation to the term of Donald Trump when it comes to the approach to climate change.
While his predecessor canceled international agreements to mitigate the consequences of climate change such as the Paris Agreement, the current resident of the White House passed a revolutionary law to solve the climate crisis.
"There is no doubt that the Republicans have a large number of climate change deniers in their ranks," says Dr. Vinjamuri.
"They are very likely to block climate change legislation, especially if it costs a lot."
The US is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind only China.
Immigration
One of the most polarizing issues for Americans is immigration, especially along party lines.
Two out of three Republican voters, twice as many as Democrats, rate the issue of immigration as "very important," according to the latest Pew Research Institute results.
The stark difference in views between supporters of the two major political parties is likely to result in a push for much tougher immigration policies if Republicans win on November 8.
"Certainly there will be a lot more debate about immigration if the Republicans win more votes," says Dr. Finn.
Trump's return
The 2022 election is taking place at a particularly polarizing moment in American political history, marked by Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen."
The former head of state is still an extremely influential figure among Republicans.
"Trump has ambitions to run for president again in 2024, so the performance of the candidates he supports is quite important to that plan," says Dr. Finn.
"This election is about him too."
American Democracy Exam
This will be the first election since the riots at the Capitol in January 2021, when Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to prevent the confirmation of Joseph Biden's election victory.
"When all is said and done, these elections are actually about democracy in the US, about whether it will continue to function, whether the elections can be held freely and fairly," claims Dr. Vinjamuri.
Louise Chetkuti points out that most of the hundreds of candidates supported by Trump repeated the debunked argument that the former president won the 2020 election, not Biden.
"In recent years, we have experienced the rise of anti-democratic candidates around the world, and it will be significant if a large number of deniers of the election results come to power," she adds.
Punishing the president
Since 1946, the party of the current president has without exception fared poorly in mid-term elections, especially if the percentage of support for the president in power has been declining.
In Biden's case, a wide range of polls show that only 40 percent of Americans positively evaluate his performance so far.
American website FiveThirtyEight, specialized in tracking polls, projected that the Republican Party would take the majority from the Democrats in the House of Representatives, but also predicted a victory for the Democrats in the Senate.
Retaining the Senate is really important to the president because, for example, the upper house approves nominations for cabinet positions and Supreme Court justices.
Also, senators have six-year mandates, as opposed to two-year terms for deputies in the House of Representatives.
But control of the House of Representatives would allow Republicans to make it much more difficult for a Democratic president to pass major bills.
It would also give Republicans the power to disband the committee currently investigating the Capitol attacks and could even launch their own investigations into Biden or other Democrats.
So, if the dominance in the House of Representatives changes, it could fundamentally change the balance of power in Washington and greatly affect the relationship the US will have with the rest of the world.
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