American voters will soon decide who takes control of Congress. Major polls show Republicans, who only need to pick up five seats to take back the House of Representatives, gaining momentum across the country. The Senate could also be in reach too, where they only need to pick up one seat to regain a majority. This is the first midterm election since the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, and many of the Republicans on the ballots are running as 2020 election deniers.
A GOP-controlled House would mean a more extreme version of the party than Americans have seen in the past, says Robert Draper, writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind.”
“After the 2010 Tea Party wave, the dominant members of the Republican Party, the loudest voices in the room are also the most extreme ones, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and the like. They're not powerful in the sense that they have committee assignments or have a leadership position. They're powerful because they are the proximate lawyers in the House of the MAGA movement, of the Trump base, and they're loyal to Trump and vice versa,” he says.