Last updated Nov. 7, 2022.
Daily Kos Elections is pleased to present the 2022 edition of our comprehensive guide to every major-party candidate running for Senate, House, and governor in this November's elections, along with key statistics for the constituencies they're seeking to represent.
Our guide includes demographic data on candidates' age, gender, race or ethnicity, religious affiliation, LGBTQ status, and even name pronunciation for many candidates, including all incumbents and those running in the most competitive contests. We have also included Daily Kos Elections' calculation of the 2020 presidential election results for all of the new congressional districts following 2020’s redistricting, along with additional election results and statistics on racial demographics from Dave Leip's Atlas and Dave's Redistricting App, plus educational attainment rates via the census.
We’ll be continually updating this guide as we come across new information, and it will form the basis for our comprehensive guide to the 118th Congress following the election. You can find similar data for the 117th Congress here, which includes all of the above data for every member of Congress, as well as additional electoral and demographic data for their states or districts.
This year’s House candidates (excluding those running Louisiana, where a unique all-party primary won’t take place until Nov. 8) are slightly less diverse and representative than the record-setting candidate class of 2020, and there’s still a long way to go until we reach equality, but this group is still well ahead of nearly all previous years. Among Democratic candidates, 43% are women, down from 48% in 2020, while one candidate identifies as nonbinary. The distribution of these candidates for the House is visualized in the map below (click here for a larger version).
Furthermore, 40% of Democrats for whom we have data are people of color, up from 38% in 2020, at least 40 are members of religious minorities, including 32 Jews, four Muslims, three Hindus, and one Buddhist. At least 17 are LGBTQ.
While Republicans are still overwhelmingly white, male, Christian, and non-LGBTQ, they, too, have slowly seen the diversity of their recruits increase over the past decade, though they still badly lag Democrats. Just 19% of their candidates are women and 16% of those for whom we have data are people of color, figures that are both slightly behind where they were in 2020. At least nine Republicans are Jewish and one is Hindu, while only two for whom we have data are LGBTQ.
We’ve also summarized demographic statistics for House candidates in both parties in the table below.
This guide was compiled by Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf and Daniel Donner. We owe a special thanks to Bernard Fraga, Hunter Rendleman, FiveThirtyEight, the Hindu American PAC, Indian Country Today, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Justice Education Technology Political Advocacy Center, the LGBTQ Victory Fund, OpenSecrets, and Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics for sharing a host of demographic data with us, as well as to the Pew Research Center for its biennial survey of every Congress member's religious affiliation.
And again, you can find our guide and bookmark it right here. You can also check out this link for the ultimate guide to all of Daily Kos Elections' various data sets.
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