David Shor’s Analysis of the 2020 Midterm-Election Results

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The Democratic Party entered the 2022 midterms saddled with a historically unpopular president and an inflationary economy. And yet the party is exiting them as the election’s clear winner. In fact, Democrats put up one of the best midterm performances for an in-power party ever.

David Shor believes that he knows why. The founder of the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Shor has gained prominence in recent years by evangelizing for “popularism,” a theory of electoral politics that emphasizes the importance of adopting poll-tested issue positions and exercising message discipline, among other things.

The debate over how to interpret the 2022 midterm is just beginning. Votes are still being tallied. But Shor believes that the completed results tell a coherent story. I spoke with him about the role that abortion played in Democrats’ success, the burdens that Donald Trump imposed on the GOP, and why he believes his party owes its success to persuasion rather than base mobilization.

What’s your nutshell summary of what happened in this midterm and why?
I want to preface by noting that it’s extremely early. But I’d say that the No. 1 most salient fact about this election is that Republican turnout was very strong relative to Democratic turnout. You can see this in a host of different data sources. Whether you’re looking at administrative data on early voting, or the AP VoteCast exit poll, or ecological regressions off of the county level results, it’s just really clear. It’s hard to get an exact number. But, back of the envelope, it looks like the electorate was about 2 percent more Republican than it was in 2020. Republicans literally outnumbered Democrats, according to the AP’s VoteCast. And yet Democrats still won.

And they won for a few reasons. First, Democrats won independent voters, which may be the first time that a party that controlled the presidency has won independents in a midterm since 2002. Second, they got a lot of self-identified Republicans to vote for them. And third, they did those things especially well in close races. The party’s overall share of the national vote is actually going to look fairly bad. It looks like we got roughly 48 percent of the vote. But that’s because Democratic incumbents in safe seats did much worse than those in close races.

In districts that the Cook Political Report rated as “likely” or “solid” or “safe” for the Democratic incumbent, Democrats’ share of the vote declined by 2.5 percent relative to 2020. In districts that were rated as “toss ups” or “lean Democratic,” however, our party’s vote share went down by only 0.4 percent compared to 2020.

I think that tells us a couple of things. It suggests that Democrats did a good job with resource allocation; we spent in the right races. But it also illustrates the power of message discipline. Democrats in competitive districts aired more ads than Democrats in safe ones. And they also were much more careful about which messages they amplified with those ads and which issues they chose to embrace.

Relatedly, before this year, ticket splitting had been steadily declining cycle after cycle …

By “ticket splitting,” you mean voters backing one party for president or governor and then the other party for lower offices?
Yeah. So 2018 had much less ticket splitting than 2014, which itself had much less ticket splitting than 2006. That decline is one of the most robust trends in American politics. It’s been going on since the 1980s at least. It’s a little early to say, but looking at governors’ races, it seems like ticket-splitting rates increased relative to 2018. It’ll take some time before we can really say that for sure when it comes to the House or Senate. But given the historical trend, it would actually be remarkable if ticket splitting didn’t decline, let alone if it went up.

The fact that Republican turnout outpaced Democratic turnout means that Democrats couldn’t have won without persuading swing voters. But that doesn’t mean that base mobilization was unimportant, right? Keeping your party’s turnout in a midterm only 2 percent lower than in the previous general election is actually pretty impressive, isn’t it? 
It’s definitely true that the drop-off from 2012 to 2014 was a lot larger than what we saw from 2020 to 2022. I think the bulk of that shift probably derives from the changing nature of our coalition, though. We do much better with college-educated whites than we used to, and much worse with non-college-educated whites. Even though that causes an enormous amount of structural problems, when it comes to midterms, it does have some turnout benefits, since college-educated white voters turn out for midterms more reliably.

Again, it’s still really early, but right now it looks like there was a lot more drop-off in turnout among Black Democrats than among white ones. If you look at turnout by county in New York, for example, you see that turnout rates in predominantly white counties outside New York City vary within a pretty narrow band. But then in predominantly nonwhite counties in Brooklyn and the Bronx, you see turnout fall off the chart completely.

But I think the key thing is the overall turnout environment in 2022 was actually quite similar to the turnout environment in Virginia last year. Yet we lost then and won this year. And I think that the difference between those two cycles is that this time we won independents by quite a large margin.

Some pundits have suggested that a large increase in youth turnout propelled the Democrats to victory. I take it you disagree?
If you look at county-level data, the single strongest predictor of how much turnout dropped from 2018 to 2020 was the proportion of voters that were under the age of 35. In other words, turnout in America’s oldest counties surged while turnout in America’s youngest counties declined. It’s just hard to square the idea of a surge in youth turnout with administrative early-vote data, county-level data, and exit polling all showing that the electorate was substantially more Republican than in 2020.

If the turnout environment was broadly similar to Virginia’s last year, what explains Democrats’ success? Inflation has only gotten worse since November 2021. And Joe Biden is even less popular now than he was then. 
I think that the No. 1 answer is Dobbs.

The Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Yeah. Years ago, in our first interview, I talked a lot about this concept of issue ownership or party trust: There are some issues that voters reliably trust Democrats on, and some they trust Republicans on, across election cycles. So, if you ask people, “Which party do you trust more on abortion or health care or crime?” you see a pretty common pattern that’s stable, both over time and really throughout the Western world. Center-right parties reliably get higher marks on immigration and crime, the center-left on health care, etc.

Looking at those sorts of metrics, abortion used to be a relatively neutral issue for Democrats. We track party ownership of 33 different issues. And in 2020, abortion was middle of the pack. It wasn’t an issue that Democrats dominated. But the Dobbs decision changed that. Abortion suddenly became our second-best issue basically overnight.

At the same time, its salience massively increased. Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs leaked, voters in our data ranked abortion as the 30th-most-important issue out of 33. After the leak, it jumped to 12.

Doesn’t that development challenge your model of politics a bit? In the past, you’ve argued that it’s largely futile to try to change swing voters’ policy preferences, at least within the time frame of a campaign. Your critics on the left argue that your view is unduly fatalistic: Rather than changing their policy positions to appeal to the median voter, Democrats should try to reframe the policy debate in a manner that gives them an advantage. 

In this case, Democrats did not change their position on abortion. Indeed, to the frustration of many pragmatists, they declined to hold an “up or down” vote on codifying Roe, but instead pushed a maximalist bill that would leave fewer restrictions on abortion than the pre-Dobbs status quo. And yet, despite this absence of moderation, the politics of abortion changed overnight. Which might suggest that Democrats can rapidly remake popular opinion on an issue if they only find the right way to politicize it. 
I think it’s important to emphasize that what happened with abortion is extremely rare. It’s very rare for party ownership of an issue to shift this rapidly. And I think it really boils down to this…