What is at stake in the upcoming midterm election? How does our current moment fit within American history? What are the factors that will determine the election’s outcome? And what does it mean for the future of the US? We have four experts on American history and politics with us.

* Henry Brady is Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age, and The Unheavenly Chorus: Political Voice and the Promise of American Democracy. He is also the co-editor of Capturing Campaign Effects. And the monograph, Counting All The Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States.

* David P. Redlawsk is the James R. Soles Professor and Chair of Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. He is the co-author of the book The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning. He is also co-author of the publications Donald Trump, Contempt, and the 2016 GOP Iowa Caucuses and Donald Trump and right-wing populists in comparative perspective.

* Jennifer Frost is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism

* Paul Taillon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Good, Reliable, White Men, Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917 and the research paper A syndicalist moment? Democracy, insurgent unionism, and the ‘Outlaw Strike’ of 1920.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.