What can the 2018 U.S. Midterms tell us about 2020? Part 1: Turnout
With the 2020 presidential election right around the corner, I thought I’d reflect on what the 2018 midterms might be able to reveal about this week’s contest.
The 2018 midterms were important as the first national-level electoral barometer of the Trump era (setting aside the various gubernatorial and special elections of 2017 in Alabama, Georgia, New Jersey, and Virginia, which — while memorable to pundits — went largely unnoticed by the average voter). Most U.S. voters saw the 2018 midterms as their first chance to react to the fact of a Trump administration and, perhaps more broadly, to the ideas, sensibilities, and unconventional mental atmosphere attaching to such an administration; to both Trump and Trumpismo, if you like.
While no bold arrow can lead from 2018 directly into 2020, especially with a global pandemic languishing astride the timeline, I will attempt in a series of short articles to dive into various aspects of 2018 that might still give us insights about what to expect on November 3rd.
Our first and foremost subject must be turnout. This was the big story of the 2018 midterms, with direct and large implications for 2020. In the modern era, midterm elections have been mostly ignored by U.S. voters. Only about 40% of eligible voters usually participate in them, compared to about 60% in presidential elections (way back in the day, more people actually voted in midterms, but that’s a story for another time).
The 2018 midterms smashed all modern turnout records. Voting spiked to almost 50%, rivaling even some presidential elections and exceeding turnout rates for U.S. midterm elections going back over a century. In Georgia, 55% of eligible voters participated, a whopping 21 points higher than the state’s 1982–2014 average.
This remarkable trend looks set to continue in 2020; some states have already received so many early mail-in ballots that they exceed total votes cast in 2016.
Will increased turnout benefit one party over the other? In 2018, this effect occurred among voters in both parties — but not evenly. In midterms, Republicans almost always have a turnout advantage because of their demographics — older, whiter people tend to vote in midterms more (though less so in years when a Republican president is in office). However, Democrats were unusually energized in 2018. For the first time ever, Dems told pollsters leading up to Nov 9 that they were thinking about a midterm election more than Republicans did. On election day, Dem turnout surged, exceeding Republican participation in many races. This “blue wave” led to a gain of 41 House seats (Republicans’ biggest loss in the House since Watergate), exceeding 538’s median forecast, and leading to Democratic control of the House. In the Senate, Dems were on the defensive in many red-state seats they had narrowly won during Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election year. However, they outperformed their state’s partisan lean in nearly every race, though this still resulted in losses due to some states’ swings to the right since 2012. North Dakota is a good example: Heidi Heitkamp, who’d won by a hair in 2012, performed an impressive 22 points better than her state’s partisan baseline, but in 2018, North Dakota was an R+33 state, so she lost the race despite that overperformance.
While such a high level of Dem turnout was unusual for a midterm, perhaps even more surprising was that in 2018, Republican voters also appeared unusually energized — very uncommon for the party with a sitting president in a midterm year. Over 7 million more Republicans turned out than in 2014, when anti-Obama sentiment was raging. In my view this additional Republican enthusiasm is the untold story of the 2018 midterms. While the “blue wave” got plenty of (deserved) press before and after the election, high Republican turnout seemed something of a media orphan. So it’s still unclear to me exactly what was motivating the surge in turnout among Republican voters.
On both sides, it’s likely that polarization and fear are partly responsible for high “voter enthusiasm.” Pew reports that large and increasing numbers of voters now regard the other party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being.” Democrats fear nativism and authoritarian populism, and no doubt deeply resent Trump’s sustained flaying of upper-middle class sensibilities. Many Republicans are anxious about the coming loss of racial and cultural status at some point in the middle future, and perceive widespread social and moral decay that they fear will soon be irreversible (after all, 2016 was supposedly the “Flight 93 election”). If this kind of atmosphere is what it takes to motivate voters, that seems to cast doubt on the article of faith handed down to us by our civics teachers that “high turnout is good for democracy.” It is enough to make one nostalgic for the good old days of voter apathy.
But back to the point at hand. If Republican turnout in 2018 exceeded usual levels, their surge in the end was not as big as the Dems’. But it was increasing from a higher base, so, while the Blue Wave did indeed meet a Red Wall, it overflowed that wall to a significant extent, and 2018 was still a very good year for the Dems.
However, the Dems’ success in 2018 does not guarantee victory in 2020. One can easily imagine in reverse a scenario much like 1994/1996 or 2010/2012, where the party of the sitting president (in these cases Clinton and Obama) was trounced in its first mid-term, but still came back for the win two years later. It appears the trend of increased voter enthusiasm is maintaining itself into 2020 in both parties. But the Democrats’ advantage will probably persist. The unusually high midterm enthusiasm among Democrats in 2018 does look indicative of a longer-term national trend of greater Dem mobilization in reaction to Trump. Moreover, the turnout fundamentals of a presidential election (i.e., more turnout overall) favor Democrats more than during a mid-term. In fact, since exit polling began, Republicans have never outnumbered democrats among voters in a presidential election year. High Dem engagement in 2018 led to an overall D+8 national environment that year. So far, a similar effect seems to be taking place in 2020, with a roughly D+8 advantage showing in polls (as of Nov 1st).
It seems, then, that both trends from 2018 are likely to be maintained into 2020: higher voter turnout generally, and Democrat advantage in voter turnout. This means that Biden will almost certainly win the popular vote, but does not mean that Trump will lose. 2016 should remind us that an unlikely thing can still happen. 538 currently assigns a 10% chance of victory to Trump. As Nate Silver himself famously says in The Signal and the Noise, people interpret “10% chance of rain” as “it won’t rain.” Don’t be that person.
But are the polls that say Trump has a 10% chance accurate? In 2016, they didn’t seem to be. Were the problems fixed for 2018? If not, are they fixed now? Stay tuned for my next segment on polling.
