In November, voters in the United States will cast their ballots in the midterm elections. Held halfway through a president’s four-year term in office, the midterms are a chance for the American people to show how they feel about the way the country is being run: while the president himself is not up for re-election, swathes of other politicians are, including all members of the US House of Representatives, a third of senators, 36 governors and many state legislature officials.

Traditionally, midterm elections don’t get a huge deal of attention outside the US. Voter turnout tends to be significantly lower than at presidential elections, and they generally lack the gladiatorial, easily-digestible drama of the race for the White House (plus, trying to keep track of all the different competitions for different offices in different states would give anyone a headache). But this year, things are different. If Democrats do well and regain control of Congress, they could gain new powers to investigate corruption in the Trump administration, block Republican laws they don’t agree with and pass new liberal state laws around the country. Some political commentators have even speculated that a Democrat-majority Congress could impeach President Trump. In other words, the midterms have never felt more important.

This sense of urgency has inspired a wave of American women to run for office for the first time. On 5 April, the Associated Press reported that 309 women have filed to run for United States House of Representatives seats in the midterm elections, beating the previous record of 298; earlier this year, Time magazine announced “an unprecedented surge of first-time female candidates, overwhelmingly Democratic, running for offices big and small, from the US Senate and state legislatures to local school boards”. Overall, there are three times as many Democratic women running in the 2018 election cycle than Republican women, supporting the notion that much of this is about taking down the misogynist-in-chief.

“I always thought this was for other people, and I was not qualified,” Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran currently running to represent Pennsylvania’s Sixth Congressional District, told Time. Seeing Trump beat Hillary Clinton, she said, prompted “this wake-up call of, ‘Why not me?’”

“British women should be inspired by our US sisters – and stand for election”