New analysis of 2022 midterm elections: implications for Democrats

When you work on an election, pretty much everything you do is determined by the data. The data used to be called "the voter lists" despite living in a computer file, but perhaps became envisioned as the data when we moved away from paper and onto smart phones. The data is used to send campaigners to interact with a selection of voters. Which voters the campaign expends resources to interact with is the most fundamental choice made in designing a strategy. From the point of view of the canvasser or phoner, the reasons for any particular list can be opaque, though good campaigns teach their workers as much as is known about their target voters.

(Reuters published a nice visual about political data flow if you want a picture.)

The data is compiled from public sources and past campaigns by list brokers -- at the top end, TargetSmart for the Democrats and Data Trust for Republicans. Various organizations further massage the data, attaching additional information and speculation about individual voters. Think of this part of the process as marketing for politics; like all the businesses that create profiles of us to sell stuff to us, political actors use public information to decide who to pitch with what message and how to reach them.

On the Democratic side, the best of these enhanced data files come through a nonprofit outfit called Catalist. Here's how that entity describes itself:

Catalist compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ... Our commitment is to strengthen the progressive community year after year by growing and maturing this community asset and related technology and services.

When an election cycle is over, Catalist refines its data, using it now, not for targeting, but to discern what trends and changes are happening among the voters. Every two years, Catalists publishes a What Happened. Findings about the midterm elections of 2022 are encouraging :

Gen Z and Millennials played a remarkable role in the 2022 election, voting heavily for Democratic candidates and exceeding their turnout from 2018. That makes this the second midterm cycle in a row where young voters have not only defied conventional wisdom about their willingness to turn out, but delivered decisive victories for Democrats....

From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, young Democratic support was routinely between 50% and 60% and even dropped below 50% in some cycles, according to exit polls. While support rose dramatically in the 2006 midterms amidst opposition to the Iraq War and in 2008 during President Obama’s first election, the midterm years of 2010 and 2014 saw a substantial drop in support among young voters, in part due to young Democrats sitting out those elections but also due to across-the-board declines in support for Democrats in a Republican wave year.

Support has remained incredibly strong since 2016, however, notably including the past two midterms: peaking at 68% in the wave year of 2018, and remaining high in 2022. This marks the first time that young people's Democratic support has been greater than 60% for two consecutive midterm elections, and now includes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent president.

Democratic support among young voters is partly due to the diversity of this group, as America becomes more diverse over time. But that is not the whole story. Democratic support was higher among young voters of color, both nationally (78%) and in highly contested races (also 78%). But support among young white voters rose between 2018 (53% national, 52% highly contested races) and 2022 (58% nationally, 57% highly contested races). This 5-6 point support change is notable, indicating a broad base of Democratic support among young voters across the country.

What Does This Mean for Turnout in 2024? For practitioners, high turnout cycles mean that more voters have registered, cast ballots and engaged with campaigns, meaning there is more opportunity to re-engage these voters over time because they are visible to voter files and campaigns. Voting itself is also habitual and people who vote once are more likely to vote again than people who have never voted at all. We may remain in a high turnout era, but voters’ perceptions of how competitive and salient an election is can change dramatically. Higher turnout does not automatically confer advantages to Democrats and parties have been able to fight to near-parity in the past several general elections.

Campaigns are about winning the immediate election -- and also about encouraging habits of participation among your target population. That's what we do out there. It's called citizenship and underlies functioning democracy.

Here's an historical artifact from the days when we used paper to teach about voter files. In Nevada, by the way.