Young voters powered Democrats’ wins in 2022. Will they show up for Biden?

WASHINGTON —  The more we get data about who voted in 2022, the stronger the evidence that young voters played a crucial role in Democrats’ midterm victories.

Those millennial and Gen Z voters will also be critical to who wins next year’s presidential election, which is why strategists in both parties are carefully scrutinizing last year’s vote.

The latest analysis comes from Catalist, a large data firm that serves Democrats, unions and other progressive organizations. Its report, released Thursday, is part of a “What Happened” series the firm has done after each of the last several elections.

As with other examinations of who voted, Catalist bases its analysis primarily on the voter files each state maintains — public records that show who voted, although not whom they voted for, along with basic information on each voter’s age, gender and, in some states, race or ethnicity. The firm supplements that with polling and its own large-scale voter model, which its clients use to guide where to focus attention during campaigns.

This year’s report highlighted two major factors in the midterm outcome — young voters and white, working-class women.

Youth-vote surged in contested races

As I’ve written before, the 2022 election didn’t have a singular pattern. Instead, two emerged — one in heavily contested states where abortion was a major issue, the other in less contested places.

“In 2022, there was no national wave in either direction. Instead, Republicans enjoyed an overall advantage nationally, but Democrats outperformed them in highly contested races,” the Catalist report said.

In some heavily contested states, the number of people voting rose significantly, even compared with 2018, which broke century-old records for turnout in a midterm election. In Arizona and New Hampshire, for example, the number of people voting rose 8 percentage points compared with 2018. Pennsylvania was 6 points higher, and Nevada was 4. Each of those states featured a hot race for the Senate, and all but New Hampshire also had high-profile races for governor.

By contrast, in less contested states, turnout fell. Nationwide, just over 111 million people voted, down from 118 million in 2018, but more than any other previous midterm, continuing the string of high-turnout elections that began with Donald Trump’s 2016 win.

“When we think about 2024, the battleground states are going to be hotly contested,” said Michael Frias, chief executive of Catalist. The 2022 numbers suggest that in those battleground states, 2024 has potential to once again feature very high turnout, he said.

In the contested 2022 states, the turnout increase was especially strong among younger voters — those in the millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation Z (born in 1997 or later).

“That speaks to what motivates young people,” said John Della Volpe, who directs the annual poll of American young people conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics and whose book, “Fight,” focuses on the politics of Gen Z voters. Unlike some older people who vote habitually, “they vote when they believe their vote makes a difference.”

Nationwide, the millennial and Gen Z age groups grew to 26% of voters in 2022, up 3 points from 2020, Catalist found. Meanwhile, the oldest generations in the electorate, those born in 1945 and earlier, declined. The baby boom generation remained the largest age cohort, making up 38% of voters.

Those trends favor Democrats: Just under two-thirds of voters 18 to 29 (Gen Z plus the youngest of the millennials) cast ballots for Democrats, Catalist estimates. Voters 65 and older, by contrast, have been a mainstay of the GOP in recent years.

The 2022 midterm marked the fourth major election in a row — 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 — in which Democrats got more than 60% of the ballots of young voters — a consistent hallmark of the Trump era, the report noted.

“Donald Trump’s unpopularity may be politicizing a generation of voters away from the Republican Party and toward Democrats,” the firm said.

That, Della Volpe said, may turn out to be the most lasting part of Trump’s legacy.

“Presidential cycles are a time when a generation of young people are thinking about who they are, their role in society,” he said. During Trump’s presidency, “tens of millions of American voters were shaped through the lens of MAGA,” Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, he said. Among young Americans, more than 6 in 10 have “values that aren’t aligned with MAGA and Trump.”

White working-class women shift toward Democrats

The rise in the youth vote doesn’t mean Republicans are doomed to future defeat. But the growing political clout of millennial and Gen Z voters does pose a challenge to the way the GOP has defined itself — as the voice of white, mostly rural, older conservative voters whose values sharply diverge from those of the more diverse, urban-oriented younger generations.

For Republicans, one way out of that box would be to increase their appeal to Black, Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, especially to those who did not graduate from college. Several Republican strategists and writers have urged the party to head in that direction, building on its base of non-college-educated white voters to become a working-class party with support across racial and ethnic lines.

The 2022 numbers provide some evidence of movement in that direction: Black voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, for example, but their support for Democratic candidates dropped several points in 2022. Their turnout was also down, especially among the youngest voters, as previous studies of the 2022 vote have shown.

But Latino voters, among whom the Republicans made inroads in 2020, showed no significant change in 2022.

And overall, the GOP has a long way to go if it’s going to become a truly multiracial party: In 2022, 86% of Republican voters were white — 55% white voters without a college degree and 31% white voters with college degrees. Voters of color made up only one-seventh of the coalition.

By contrast, voters of color made up one-third of the Democratic coalition. The other two-thirds were split roughly equally between college-educated and non-college-educated white voters.

Trump’s four years in office accelerated a long-term shift of white college-educated voters toward the Democrats. In 2018, their support was key to Nancy Pelosi’s ability to regain a majority of the House.

This time around, the story was different: The Catalist numbers suggest the college-educated shift toward the Democrats may have topped off. College-educated white men, in fact, shifted a few points toward the GOP nationally in 2022.

Instead, it was non-college-educated white women who shifted most. Support for Democratic candidates among working-class white women grew by 4 points in the highly contested states, Catalist estimates.

That’s important because non-college-educated white women are “a core part of the GOP strategy” for winning in the future, Frias said.

Democrats’ ability to gain ground with that group owed heavily to the “seismic impact” of the Supreme Court’s decision last summer to overturn Roe vs. Wade and end a half-century-old guarantee of nationwide abortion rights, Frias said. “It was a real, palpable example of going too far.”

That appears to still be the view of most voters, judging by local and statewide elections this year. In Wisconsin, a liberal judge last month won election to the state Supreme Court. In Florida and Colorado, Democrats on Tuesday won elections as mayors of cities Republicans had dominated. And in Pennsylvania, Democrats broke the Republican hold on the state Legislature.

The GOP doesn’t seem ready to shift course; voters seem ready to keep punishing them.

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