Why Should Democrats Win? A Survey of the U.S. Voting Research Reveals a Change in the First Half of the 20th Century

When it comes to choosing if the Republican policies would move the country in the right direction or the wrong one should they win control of Congress, a majority of voters across the nation think the GOP policies would be the wrong one. About equal share of voters in competitive districts and nationally feel strongly in either direction about the likely effect of a GOP victory

45% of people who are Republican in a competitive congressional districts say that they are very motivated to vote while only 42% of people who are Democrats say the same.

The poll shows that the core Democratic groups like young voters, Black and Latino voters and women are not showing as much support for candidates than they have done in previous elections. According to a CNN Poll in early October of last year, 59% of women supported Democratic candidates in their district, but that has gone down to 53%. More than 70 percent of voters of color supported Democrats in the past, but only 59 percent do now. Latino voters support the Democrats, Republicans and neither candidate. Black voters split 81% for the Democrat to 11% for the Republican. Democrats held a 15-point advantage over Republicans in the age group of 45 and over in the prior year. While likely voters in these groups tilt a bit more Democratic than registered voters, motivation to vote is lower among younger voters and voters of color.

The economy and inflation remain a central focus for nearly all voters, with broad majorities saying each of those is extremely or very important in deciding their vote for who to send to Congress (90% economy, 84% inflation). Voting rights and election integrity (85% important) and gun policy (83% important) are similarly important. Climate change is important to many, but fewer say immigration or abortion are more important.

Above all, the midterm campaign turned on the cost of living crisis, with polls showing the economy by far the most important issue for voters, who are still waiting for the restoration of normality after a once-in-a-century pandemic that Biden had promised in 2020.

Former President Donald Trump – though also not a factor for about half of voters (50%) – prompts a more even partisan reaction, and may work in Democrats’ favor in the competitive districts. All told, 28% of voters nationwide say they are voting to send a message of opposition to Trump while 20% say they’ll be sending a message of support. In competitive areas, Democrats will vote to express their opposition to the former President while Republicans will vote to support him.

The new CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS on September 3 through October 5 among a random national sample of 1,982 adults initially reached by mail, including 1,577 registered voters and 1,198 likely voters. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points; it is 3.5 points among registered voters and 4.0 among likely voters. The survey includes an oversample of adults living in 50 competitive congressional districts, with districts chosen based on publicly available race ratings at the time the sample was chosen. Results among the 540 registered voters in that sample have an error margin of plus or minus 5.4 points; it is 5.6 points among the 484 likely voters. That subset was weighted to reflect its proper share of the overall adult population of the United States.

A Democrat objected to Mr. Liggett’s insistence that the 2020 election was not free from Donald J. Trump. But the second one — a friend with whom Mr. Liggett, a 73-year-old retired gemstone dealer in North Carolina, had traveled to jewelry shows for 20 years — came as a shock.

“I thought he was a good conservative Republican,” said Mr. Liggett, a Republican himself. “One day he says, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘Because I don’t believe in this Republican G.O.P. MAGA’” stuff, using a far sharper expletive.

According to the poll, the ideological divides of American politics have personal consequences. Nearly one in five voters — 19 percent — said that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships, according to a poll conducted last week by The New York Times and Siena College.

For all the concern over violent political rhetoric and outright political conflict in the United States, the ruptures that people described were typically quiet ones made more in sorrow than anger, as people with years of common experience came to the conclusion that they no longer even agreed on enough facts to have coherent arguments.

Slade: Those seeking power certainly want people to feel like the stakes are too high not to go along with their demands. There are people on both sides who don’t like me not being with them 100 percent. There is a distinction between where the average Republican or Democratic voter is and where party activists are. Americans are not so tied to their red-blue identities.

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Leibovitz: He represents a kind of energy that doesn’t necessarily gravitate toward the orthodoxies of giving huge corporations the freedom to do as they please. He’s rooted in an understanding of America that balks at the notion that we now have a blob of government-corporate interests dictating every aspect of our lives and that everything — from our medical system to our entertainment — is uniform.

Douthat: This is a good example of the gap between how political professionals see things and how individuals see things. There’s no place for the Bernie-Cruz sympathizer in normal political typologies! You can see in polls that not only are people from Georgia who might back Brian Kemp for governor, but also people from Arizona who might vote for Mark Kelly and Kari Lake, a strange combination.

Democrats are behind on the generic congressional ballot test. That’s when pollsters ask who a respondent would vote for if the election were held today, a Republican or Democrat.

With only days to go before the election, the cross currents are making for uncertainty and volatility. Referenda are done on the sitting president, the party in power, and any other pertinent topics. Biden’s approval rating is slipping once again, and with voters saying that they trust Republicans more over inflation, Democrats are losing ground on who they want to control Congress.

A huge shift away from people thinking divided government is a good thing, according to the poll, which also shows that Republican voters are largely OK with voting for an election denier if they agree on policy positions.

At the same time, older voters, Trump voters, white evangelical Christians and rural voters — all key GOP groups — are fired up to vote. Those without college degrees are less enthusiastic about the election, but that’s driven by voters of color without degrees.

Democrats were not enthusiastic before the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the abortion law. Democratic interest and activism went up a lot. Democrats were on level with GOP voters over the summer and into September.

In this survey, it’s tied 46%-46% — and that tends to be bad news for Democrats. They need a large lead on that question to do well in the House because of how districts are drawn.

The GOP has focused most on immigration, crime and inflation in these elections and they’re trusted by wide margins.

A majority of Republicans (53%) said they would “very likely” vote for someone who thought (incorrectly) that the election was stolen, as compared to one-in-five Democrats and a third of independents.

A majority of Americans think their local and state governments can conduct a fair and accurate election. Even though Republicans are less likely to say so they still have a lot of confidence in themselves, despite the rhetoric from people like Trump.

Now by a 53%-to-38% margin, they say it’s better for the government to be controlled by the same party. Democrats, who are seeing their majorities threatened this year, are driving that with 73% saying so, but a slim majority of independents and about half of Republicans feel the same way.

27% of people say they have already voted and another 28% are going to vote before the election. Forty-three percent say they will vote in person on Election Day.

A dispirited nation worn down by crises and economic anxieties votes Tuesday in an election that is more likely to cement its divides than promote unity.

In elections, the country is set on a new path because people freely choosing their leaders and those in power accept the results.

Democrats will have to regroup and work again in two years if they lose on Tuesday, because they will have to convince the nation that their policies chart the way out of crises. Republicans will be able to argue voters have given them a mandate to fix things if they take control of Congress. After repeated elections in which disgruntled voters punished the party with the most power, the GOP could find itself on the ballot in two years.

A gusher of news on job losses just before polls opened, including in the tech industry, worsened jitters about a slowdown that could destroy one of the bright spots of the Biden economy – historically low unemployment. Americans are already struggling with higher prices for food and gasoline and now have to cope with higher interest rates that could make credit card debt more expensive and possibly cause the economy to go into a recession.

The economic situation threatens to set up a classic midterm election rebuke for a first-term president – and in some ways, this would be a sign that democracy is working. Elections have for generations been a safety valve for the public to express dissent with the country’s direction.

The run-up to the mid-terms have underscored the nation’s self-estrangement in a political era in which both sides seem to think victory for the other is a sign of losing their country.

The day before an election in which he is not on the ballot, Trump made himself the focus and claimed he didn’t want to overshadow Republican candidates. Trump gave a speech in Ohio that was self-indulgent, grandiose, and full of false rumors about America’s future. If he is indicted in several criminal probes into his conduct, he will proclaim he is the victim of a totalitarian state-style persecution.

It appears that Tuesday will be a difficult day for Biden. The president did not spend the final hours of the campaign battling to get vulnerable Democrats over the line in a critical swing state. Maryland is a liberal state where Democrats running for office likely won’t hurt him with his low approval ratings. While he was stumping for Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman over the weekend, the venue of his last event summed up his drained political juice.

“I think it’s going to be tough,” Biden told reporters. If the GOP takes control of Congress, life would become more difficult for him, he admitted, but he still believes that we will win the Senate.

Trump also vowed to make “a very big announcement” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on November 15, which appears to be the worst kept secret in politics – that he will seek another term in the White House. The fact that a twice-impeached president, who left office in disgrace after legitimizing violence as a form of political expression, has a good chance of winning underscores the turbulence of our time.

The false reality that Trump spun over his baseless claims about a stolen election and the scores of election deniers carrying the Republican flag only validated Biden’s warnings in the midterm campaign that democracy is on the ballot – even if most voters appear more concerned with the high cost of feeding their families than the somewhat esoteric debates about the state of the nation’s founding values.

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The shadow of violence that has hung over American policies since Trump incited the Capitol insurrection was exacerbated as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled the moment of trauma when she was told by police that her husband Paul had been attacked with a hammer. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she also condemned certain Republicans for joking about it.

In democracy, there is a party that doubts the outcome of the election and ridicules violence that happens. That has to stop,” Pelosi said.

Kevin McCarthy, the likely next Speaker of the House if Republicans win five seats in the upcoming elections, blamed Democrats for their rhetoric as he laid out an aggressive agenda against border security in an interview with CNN. He did not rule out impeaching Biden, a step radical members of his conference are already demanding.

McCarthy said that they will not use impeachment for political purposes. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”

Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, said he would use the power granted to him if he wins reelection, and that he would use it to help Republicans win the Senate.

There’s something magical about democratic elections, when differences are exposed in debates and fierce campaigns. But there’s mostly, until now, been an expectation that both sides would then abide by the verdict of the people.

The first two factors — the sameness within parties and the differences between them — are the result of decades of changes. The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s probably started the slow ideological reshuffling of voters into parties, resulting in fewer liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats today than there were in the 1950s. There has been less common ground between the two parties over the decades due to differing opinions on issues like tax cuts, regulation and abortion. As these issues drove a wedge between politicians, voters followed.

These trends are significant on their own, but they take on added importance because they coincide with how people feel about Democrats and Republicans. A large percentage of both parties say that members in the other party are unpatriotic, immoral and close- minded, and the gap between how much they like the other party and dislike it is larger than it has ever been. Add to this mix the importance of identity-based issues, and you have an extremely divisive politics. We are not fighting over tax cuts or deregulation, instead we are fighting over who should call themselves Americans.

A decades- long drift toward calcification helped, but politicians and their voters made it happen. It is important for the candidates who lose in elections to remain in office, but it is equally important for the candidates who win.

What made the aftermath of 2020 stand out from previous elections was the interaction of calcification with political action. Specifically, Mr. Trump did the opposite of Nixon, Mr. Gore and Ms. Clinton: He claimed that he won. Voters appreciated that outcomes were turning on very few votes after the election, despite his claims, and that other partisan leaders also echoed his claims.