Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
A woman votes at the Anthem Center in Henderson, Nevada, during early voting, October 24, 2022.
You have probably been reading the same depressing stories that I have. They say that the election is trending away from the Democrats. People don’t want to talk about Trump’s lunacy, or the Republican assault on democracy or on reproductive rights. They want to talk about inflation. And despite Joe Biden’s very real achievements, the economy as a prime issue is helping Republicans.
It’s possible to challenge each of these assertions, which are based on marginal evidence of shifting voter preferences and a media herd instinct. But what’s missing from nearly all of them is the variable that matters most: turnout.
Mike Podhorzer, who was the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, likes to point out that in a deeply polarized country, there are few swing voters, but lots of swing districts. How can that be? Which way the districts swing reflects whose voters turn out. According to Podhorzer, “House Democrats’ fortunes depend most on how many of their 2020 voters sit this one out relative to Trump voters, and not how many more voters defect from Biden to House Republicans than from Trump to House Democrats.”
Granted, gerrymandering has reduced the number of swing seats in 2022, as the politicians pick their voters. But if turnout is like it was in 2018, when Democrats made a net gain of 41 House seats, then it will be a much better election for them a week from today than most of the pundits are forecasting. And much of the high turnout will be among women, who also led the 2018 Democratic wave.
Here again, the conventional view is that abortion rights have faded as a galvanizing issue. But while they have faded from the headlines, they may not have faded from the consciousness of women voters. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll, emphasizing economic issues, mentions in passing that 61 percent of voters favor abortion rights.
But other than gut instinct, how can we accurately forecast turnout, among women or generally? I put that question to Anna Greenberg, a leading Democratic pollster who also follows women’s voting behavior as astutely as anyone on the scene.
Greenberg tells me that while obviously nobody has a crystal ball, there are some useful harbingers. One is early voting, where Democrats have turned out more than Republicans. This has to be qualified by the fact that early voting has become a Democratic habit; Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day.
Even so, the signs are heartening. As of October 30, Democratic early voting for 2022 was exceeding early voting in the Democratic wave election of 2018, while Republican early voting was lagging it.
Now, early voting is so much easier than in 2018 in most of the country, and the pandemic upended so many voting habits, that it’s hard to extrapolate very much from those statistics. But Greenberg says her polls and other proprietary polls suggest that women intend to vote in large numbers next week. In the five states that report early voting by gender (Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and North Carolina), 54.4 percent of the early voters have been women, while 44.3 percent have been men.
There was a huge surge in women’s registration after the Dobbs decision.
Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, who has been vocal about women’s turnout since Dobbs, points out that women’s requests for vote-by-mail ballots have far exceed those by men, and that the statistics probably understate the energy of younger women.
There was a huge surge in women’s registration after the Dobbs decision. And Greenberg adds this subtle insight: “From what I’ve seen from my polls,” she says, “it isn’t that the impact of Dobbs has faded. It’s that there are diminishing returns.” By that, Greenberg means that women who have been motivated to vote because of abortion rights are already pretty locked in. Other voters, such as college-educated men (who tend to be anti-MAGA but not primarily moved by reproductive rights) need to be motivated to turn out based on other issues.
Women have turned out to a greater degree than men in every off-year election since 1966, and women’s participation was especially strong in 2018. Greenberg believes that 2022 could well be more like 2018 in terms of turnout, especially women’s turnout, than like other off-year elections. Higher turnout could offset the slight Republican trends based on issue preferences cited in article after article.
One other factor cuts against the gloom: Trump’s endorsements have delivered Republican nominations to badly blemished candidates who are personally more vulnerable than their districts.
Turnout will also influence the very close Senate races that will determine which party keeps control. And there are more Democratic paths than Republican ones for the Democrats to remain the Senate majority.
To flip the Senate, Republicans would need to knock off Democratic incumbents in Georgia and/or Nevada, and Democrats would need to blow all of their pickup opportunities, in Pennsylvania and Ohio as well as Wisconsin. Republican incumbent Mike Lee in Utah would need to fend off a surprisingly strong challenge from independent Evan McMullin, and in Iowa, 89-year-old incumbent Chuck Grassley would need to stop sinking in the polls against Democrat Mike Franken.
Conversely, Democrats need only one hold (Warnock in Georgia or Cortez Masto in Nevada), and one pickup (most likely Fetterman in Pennsylvania), and they keep the Senate; Arizona and New Hampshire look out of reach for Republicans. If Democrats hold both Georgia and Nevada and win Pennsylvania, they make a net gain of one.
All of these elections will likely be very close, so the post-election story will either be good or bad for Democrats based on one- or two-point differences. If the news is better than the gloomy stories of the past two weeks, turnout could well make the difference.
