Electorate Makeup Will Be Key to Midterm Outcome

With the last primary of the 2018 midterm cycle over, it’s now official: The general election has begun. With 50 days to go, who are midterm voters?

“A midterm voter is little bit older, a little bit whiter and more educated” than a presidential election voter, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Report. While this demographic is usually a positive for Republicans, he cautioned that “educated voters are becoming more Democratic with each election.”

Midterms tend to be low-turnout affairs. In presidential elections, somewhere between 60 to 70 percent of registered voters typically go to the ballot box, whereas in a midterm the number hovers around 40 percent. The drop-off is pronounced among millennials and minority voters.

Millennials are enthusiastic about issues but unreliable on Election Day, particularly in midterms. In the 2016 presidential election, 19 percent of the electorate was millennial voters, while only 13 percent of that group made it to the polls in the 2014 midterms. Similar trends are present among black and Hispanic voters.

In primaries, the top priority for candidates is to attract party loyalists, who are generally more partisan. But in a general election, candidates need to appeal to a wider audience by capturing centrist voters. Exit polling from the 2014 elections show that about 40 percent of the voters identified their ideology as moderate whereas 23 percent identified as liberal and 37 percent as conservative. In 2014, independent voters supported Republicans by 54 percent to 42 percent, and Republicans picked up 13 seats in the House. In 2016, independent voters supported Donald Trump by 46 percent to 42 percent, a margin that likely provided the difference in his victory. In tight elections, independents are often the voting bloc most crucial to victory.