Here for the Party: Consistent Republican turnout drove 2022 midterm election

(CN) — When it comes to elections, a trickle can be just as effective as a tsunami.

Data published by Pew on Wednesday indicates people who planned to sail on the big red wave predicted by pundits ahead of the 2022 midterms actually turned the tide in favor of the GOP. More people who voted for Republicans in previous elections also turned out to support Republicans in the last midterm, while fewer people who supported Democrats in previous years showed up in 2022.

About 6% of people changed parties between elections, and both groups gained roughly the same number of people they lost.

On a polarized political field, elections continue to be driven by people with strong party ties who turn out to vote rather than by the people persuaded to join a new party.

“By and large, what we saw as the national story in the broad pattern is that mobilization, getting your people to turn out at the polls, is a very important factor given this intense polarization that we see in the electorate," explained Hannah Hartig, a senior researcher at Pew who contributed to the study.

In the 2022 midterm election, Republican House candidates received a collective 51% of the total popular vote, compared to Democrats who received 48%. As a result, Democrats held onto the Senate while Republicans won a slim majority in the House.

Speaking to roughly 7,000 people recruited through Pew’s American Trends Panel, researchers compared individual voters’ habits in 2022 with the last presidential election and the 2018 midterm.

This panel data allowed researchers to parse out trends among different groups of people, like those who showed strong party loyalty or folks who only vote in the presidential election. In fact, only 37% of people polled voted in all three elections and 30% voted in none.

Slightly more of the people who voted in all three elections voted Republican.

While 67% of people who voted for Biden in 2020 turned out to vote in 2022, 71% of the people who voted for Trump in 2020 also turned out for the midterm. Of those, 97% of the people who voted for Trump in 2020 supported a Republican House candidate in the midterms, compared to 93% of Biden voters who backed a Democratic House candidate.

“By and large, the main differences that we see are differences in turnout,” Hartig said. “Across the board for a variety of demographic groups, we see turnout at play benefiting Republicans. We also see some areas where there appears to be a higher rate of defections benefiting the Republican party when you compare people who voted in 2018 and 2022.”

While the election was driven by people who consistently voted along party lines, Pew also uncovered a number of voters who changed party between elections, notably women and rural residents.

“We know that rural voters changed their vote from the Democratic candidate to a Republican candidate between 2018 and 2022 more than the reverse,” Hartig recalled. “We also see that among white voters with no college degree, you see slightly higher rates of defection that benefit Republican candidates.”

Both parties seem to have successfully flipped women voters: 6% of women who supported Democrats in 2018 flipped in 2022, compared to 5% of women who shifted from the Republican Party to support a Democrat in 2022.

In all, the Republican Party boasted more women in 2022 than 2018, shrinking the gender gap between parties by more than 10%. In 2022, women made up 51% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans, compared to 58% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans in 2018.

There is also an eight-point difference between the number of women who consistently voted Republican and those who consistently backed the Democrats: 84% of women who voted red in 2018 also turned out in 2022, while only 76% of women who voted Democrat in 2018 came back in 2022.

While 68% of people under 30 voted Democrat in 2022, the age gap between parties has also narrowed since 2018. Republicans also continue to attract white people without college degrees.

Democrats still tend to be younger and more racially diverse than Republicans, although white people, which make up a majority of the Republican Party, tend to be consistent voters. More than 40% of white voters turned out in all three elections, compared to 27% of Blacks, 21% of Asians and 19% of Hispanics.

In 2018, 55% of unaffiliated voters went Democrat and 40% went Republican, but in 2022, 49% of unaffiliated voters backed Democrats compared to 47% who went Republican. Only 1% of self-described Democrats voted Republican and vice versa.

Both 2018 and 2022 marked the nation’s most successful midterms in a century with more than 45% of eligible voters participating in each. Two-third of eligible voters turned in ballots in 2020, marking the greatest voter participation rate since 1900.

Whether parties will inspire even greater voter participation in next year’s election remains to be seen.

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