Young voters may be Democrats’ midterm lifeline
A poll indicates the ‘new wave’ of activism that showed itself in 2018 has continued.
WASHINGTON — With the midterm election just slightly more than a week away, history suggests Democrats face long odds.
In a normal year — one that simply followed the average of the 19 midterms since the end of World War II — the party in the White House would be expected to lose about 45 House seats, based on a widely used formula developed by UC San Diego political scientist Gary Jacobson, which takes into account the president’s popularity, the number of seats his party starts with and changes in average incomes.
Several other political science models predict a similar House outcome — along with Senate losses of about one to three seats — as Vanderbilt University professor John Sides recently noted.
Since Democrats control the House by just eight seats and run the Senate with a 5050 tie, history would strongly predict Republican control starting in January.
But this hasn’t been a normal year.
Most recent midterm elections have had a theme that clearly emerged during the summer and dominated the fall.
In 2006, deep disaffection with the war in Iraq and a split in Republican attitudes toward President George W. Bush forecast that Democrats would have a strong midterm election. Four years later, the tea party backlash against President Obama built up long before the election swept Republicans back into the House majority. And in 2018, a similar backlash against President Trump made Democratic gains easy to forecast.
This year started on a similar track: President Biden’s public standing plummeted as gasoline prices rose, his party’s legislative program stalled in the Senate and foreign crises worsened. Democrats seemed set to lose control of both the House and Senate.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that overturned the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights, along with Trump’s continued high visibility and Democrats’ success over the summer in passing big parts of their legislative program, scrambled that forecast and continue to keep the outcome difficult to predict.
Democrats almost surely will lose control of the House: With just a five-seat gain needed, Republicans have multiple paths to a majority, and Democrats have too much territory to reasonably defend.
But as the campaign nears its close, several confounding factors — including the size of the youth vote and the degree of voter concern over abortion rights — continue to keep analysts guessing about who will control the Senate as well as the breadth of Democratic losses in the House.
Republicans appear to have bright spots in House races in two unlikely places — New York and California.
California Democrats had high hopes this year for expanding their 42-11 edge in the state’s congressional delegation. They aimed to defeat Republicans who represent districts Biden carried in 2020, including Reps. Mike Garcia in northern Los Angeles County’s 27th Congressional District, Michelle Steel in the 45th District, which straddles Orange and L.A. counties, and David Valadao in the Central Valley’s 22nd District.
Now, those hopes have receded, with Garcia and Steel, in particular, appearing more secure.
Instead, Republicans are pouring money into districts that Democrats captured in 2018, hoping to defeat incumbents such as Reps. Katie Porter in Orange County’s 47th District and Mike Levin in the 49th District, which straddles Orange and San Diego counties.
A similar dynamic has taken hold in New York. Last week, the Democrats’ main congressional campaign committee had to rush to spend money to defend its chairman, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who represents a Democratic-leaning swing district in the Hudson Valley.
One factor in both states, ironically, could be their strong support for abortion rights. Some Democratic strategists say voter enthusiasm on their side has lagged in the two big blue states because Californians and New Yorkers don’t fear for their rights as much as voters in many other parts of the country.
By contrast, in Michigan, where a state law from the 1930s threatens to ban abortions in nearly all cases, Democrats appear poised for a major victory. Combined with a new legislative map produced by an independent redistricting commission, the strong voter enthusiasm on their side has Democrats hoping to gain control of both houses of the Michigan Legislature for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president.
Another big uncertainty is how many young voters will cast ballots.
“We live in a divided country, and it’s divided by generations,” said John Della Volpe, who for the last two decades has directed a twice-a-year survey of young Americans produced by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. That generation gap did not exist when the poll started in 2000 but has grown steadily ever since as the split between the parties has increasingly centered on questions of race, identity and culture — subjects on which Republicans are strongly out of step with the majority of young people, Della Volpe notes.
During the Obama years, young voters turned out in large numbers for presidential elections but didn’t show up for the midterms, a pattern that contributed heavily to Democratic losses.
Della Volpe maintains that millennial and Gen Z voters are more consistently engaged in politics, and the institute’s latest survey, conducted Sept. 29 through Oct. 14 and released Thursday, appears to support that.
Young people are poised to repeat the high rate of voting that drove Democratic victories in 2018, the poll of 2,123 Americans younger than 30 found, with 40% saying they definitely would vote. That’s almost certainly an exaggeration by at least a few percentage points since people of all ages overstate their likelihood to cast a ballot. But it matches the level the survey found four years ago when it correctly forecast record youth turnout, and it exceeds the level that many national polls have shown, suggesting they could be underestimating a crucial vote.
Likely voters younger than 30 preferred Democratic control of Congress 57% to 31%, the poll found — a sharp contrast to the average for all voters, which is nearly even, Republicans 45.7% and Democrats 45.1%, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.
The poll indicates that the “new wave of youth activism” that showed itself in 2018 has continued, said Alan Zhang, a Harvard junior who chaired the student group that produced the survey. “Young people are poised to match their turnout record” from the last midterm, he said.
Notably, the preference for Democrats has grown by 5 percentage points since the previous Harvard survey in the spring, said Kate Gundersen, a senior who also took a lead role in producing the survey. The jump was even larger among young women, she noted. They now prefer Democratic control of Congress by 2 to 1, the poll found.
And that support comes despite low approval of Biden. The poll found that only 39% of young people approved of Biden’s handling of his job, noted another of the students who led the polling effort, Tommy Barone, a sophomore.
Especially in the handful of states that will decide control of the Senate — Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania being the closest races — Biden remains unpopular. To win, Democratic candidates need to be able to rise above the president’s standing by a wide margin, something that has become increasingly difficult in this era of polarized politics.
The Harvard poll does not prove that Democrats in those states will be able to keep defying political gravity through election day, but if they do succeed, it points to the most likely reason why.
‘We live in a divided country, and it’s divided by generations.’
— JOHN DELLA VOLPE, who directs a survey of young Americans produced by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics