New Data on the 2024 Election

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.

A June 30 release:

Today, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released the 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) report, the nation’s most comprehensive source of election administration data. It covers topics such as voter participation, voter registration, voter list maintenance, and election technology, as well as early and Election Day polling place operations for the general election. These results reflect a 100% response rate from all 50 states, five U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia.

Nearly 65% of the citizen voting age population participated in the general election, resulting in more than 158 million counted ballots. Over 72% of voters cast their votes in person at a voting location, either before Election Day or on Election Day. Over 98% of election jurisdictions used voting equipment that has voters mark a paper ballot or produces an auditable paper record of voters’ ballot preferences.

The 2024 EAVS Comprehensive Report and data, as well as previous EAVS reports can be found here.

Other key findings from the 2024 EAVS include:

Voter Registration

• More than 211 million citizens were active registered voters for the 2024 general election — 86.6% of the citizen voting age population.
• State motor vehicle offices and automatic voter registration were the two most used methods of voter registration. Motor vehicle offices accounted for 32.2% of transactions processed. Automatic voter registration was used for 26.4% of transactions.
• States reported sending nearly 40 million confirmation notices as part of efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls. Accurate voter list maintenance is an essential part of a well-functioning voter registration system — having accurate lists helps reduce costs, decreases wait times and ensures that only voters eligible to vote can do so. Confirmation notices help ensure that voters are not removed in error.

Voting Methods

• In-person voting continued to be the most common voting method in the 2024 general election, with over 70% of voters choosing to cast their ballots in person. And 35.2% voted in person before Election Day, while 37.4% voted in person on Election Day.
• Voting by mail decreased to about 30% of total ballots cast in the 2024 election. Despite this shift, election officials continue to implement security measures to ensure this option is secure. Mail ballots are protected by state laws that determine how they must be filled out and returned by the voter, and then verified by election officials before they are counted.
• Over 98% of election jurisdictions used voting equipment that has voters mark a paper ballot or produces an auditable paper record of voters’ ballot preferences. The percentage of jurisdictions that reported using voting systems without a verified paper trail has decreased significantly since the 2022 general election. In the 2024 EAVS, only 80 jurisdictions in three states reported using these systems, with just one jurisdiction reporting only using this type of voting system.

Voting Systems and Election Supporting Technology

• Nearly 93% of states, the territories, and DC require voting system testing and certification either by statute or through a formal administrative rule or guidance. Some of these states require full EAC certification, while others require testing to federal standards or testing by a federally accredited laboratory.
• Nearly 40% of jurisdictions used electronic poll books to assist with voting, which was the highest percentage reported to date in the EAVS. Given the rise in use, the EAC recently established a Voluntary Electronic Poll Book Certification Program to evaluate and test the security, accessibility, and usability of electronic poll books across the country.

Poll Workers

• While 47.9% of jurisdictions reported facing significant challenges in recruiting and retaining poll workers, recruitment has become easier since the last presidential election. More than 770,000 individuals served as poll workers for the 2024 general election, the majority of which were over 61 years old.

Validated Voter Survey

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics

Hannah Hartig, Scott Keeter, Andrew Daniller, and Ted Van Green at Pew:

In his third run for president in 2024, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points overall, winning 312 Electoral College votes and the national popular vote for the first time.

Trump won with a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the 2024 electorate.

• Among Hispanic voters, Trump battled to near parity in 2024 (51% Harris, 48% Trump) after losing to Joe Biden 61%-36% in 2020.
• Trump won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier.
• Trump also did better among Asian voters. While a majority of Asian voters (57%) backed Harris, 40% supported Trump. This was a narrower margin than Biden’s in 2020 (70% to 30%).

These shifts were largely the result of differences in which voters turned out in the 2020 and 2024 elections. As in the past, a relatively small share of voters switched which party’s candidate they supported.

In 2024, Trump benefited from higher turnout among those who voted for him in 2020. He also held an edge over Harris among voters who did not vote four years earlier – a group that was considerably more diverse than those who voted in both elections.

And while Trump improved his performance among several groups in 2024, many of the demographic patterns in voting preferences that have dominated American politics for the last several decades remained evident last November:

Educational divide. In each of his campaigns, Trump has held an edge among voters without four-year college degrees. But his 14-point advantage among noncollege voters (56% to 42%) was double his margin in 2016. Harris won voters with college degrees by 57% to 41%, but that was smaller than Biden’s lead among this group in 2020.

A wider urban-rural gap. Trump won voters living in rural areas by 40 points (69%-29%), which was higher than his margins in 2020 or 2016. Harris’ advantage among voters living in urban areas was nearly as large (65% voted for Harris, 33% Trump).

Continued differences by religious attendance. Nearly two-thirds of voters who attend religious services monthly or more (64%) voted for Trump, while only about a third (34%) supported Harris. Harris held a narrower advantage (56%-43%) among the larger group of voters who attend services less frequently.

Methodology: 

 For this analysis, we surveyed 8,942 U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). We verified their turnout in the five general elections from 2016 to 2024 using commercial voter files that collect publicly available official state turnout records.

Turnout in 2024

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book -- titled TBD -- looks at the 2024 election.

G. Elliott Morris, Amina Brown and Katie Marriner at FiveThirtyEight:

Exacerbating Democrats’ vote share losses among key groups was a decline in turnout among those formerly their most fervent supporters. Cities saw a large decline in turnout in 2024. By our calculations, turnout in the most urban counties in the U.S. fell from 53 percent of the voting-age population in 2020 to just 45 percent in 2024. On the other hand, turnout was steady at 71-72 percent of the voting-age population in the most rural areas.


Turnout also seemed to drop in other counties that voted strongly for Biden in 2020, regardless of how urban they were. In Jefferson County, Mississippi, where Biden won 85 percent of the vote, turnout fell from 71 percent in 2020 to 58 percent in 2024, despite remaining high in counties that voted strongly for Trump in the last presidential election. Turnout fell by 6 points in Taos County, New Mexico — popular with both avid skiers and liberals (Biden won 76 percent of the vote there in 2020) — while rising by 7 points in Haralson County, Georgia — a rural county on the border with Alabama where Biden garnered just 13 percent in 2020. This story is repeated over and over again nationwide; turnout went up in the whitest, most rural and most Trump-friendly areas of the country, and it dropped in cities, Democratic strongholds and counties with high percentages of minorities — especially in the Southern Black Belt.

Nate Cohn, however, says that turnout was not the main reason she lost.

For one, the story doesn’t apply to the battlegrounds, where turnout was much higher. In all seven battleground states, Trump won more votes than Biden did in 2020.

More important, it is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her...[In] a presidential election, turnout and persuasion often go hand in hand. The voters who may or may not show up are different from the rest of the electorate. They’re less ideological. They’re less likely to be partisans, even if they’re registered with a party. They’re less likely to have deep views on the issues. They don’t get their news from traditional media.

Throughout the race, polls found that Trump’s strength was concentrated among these voters. Many were registered Democrats or Biden voters four years ago. But they weren’t acting like Democrats in 2024. They were more concerned by pocketbook issues than democracy or abortion rights. If they decided to vote, many said they would back Trump.

 

Americans Really Dislike The Choice

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

The voters are unhappy with the choice before them.

Laura J. Nelson at LAT:

Most Californians say they’re likely to vote in the November election, but among those who aren’t sure, there’s a common reason: They don’t like the presidential candidates.

That finding comes from a poll released Friday by the UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies, which asked 5,095 registered voters across California to reflect on their likelihood of voting in the Nov. 5 general election that will feature a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump.

The poll, conducted for the nonprofit Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, found that about 78% of California’s registered voters say they’re highly likely to vote. The poll also found that the intent to vote varies widely by age, race and political affiliation — as do the reasons why people say they aren’t likely to cast a ballot.

Californians who see themselves as highly likely to vote said participating in the presidential election is the leading reason. But among those who say they’re less likely to vote, 40% cited not liking the candidates for president as a reason. That rose to 55% among voters who have voted regularly in the past but aren’t sure whether they’ll vote this year.

From Pew:

 

GOP's 2022 Turnout Edge

Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voter demographics .

 Hannah Hartig and colleagues at Pew:

A new Pew Research Center analysis of verified voters and nonvoters in 2022, 2020, 2018 and 2016 finds that partisan differences in turnout – rather than vote switching between parties – account for most of the Republican gains in voting for the House last year.

Overall, 68% of those who voted in the 2020 presidential election turned out to vote in the 2022 midterms. Former President Donald Trump’s voters turned out at a higher rate in 2022 (71%) than did President Joe Biden’s voters (67%).

... 

 Other key findings:

• Voters under 30 continued to strongly support the Democratic Party, voting 68% to 31% for Democratic candidates. But this margin was somewhat narrower than in 2018. Republicans benefitted more from significant drop off in voter turnout among younger age groups between 2018 and 2022, since young voters tend to support Democrats. Voters under 30 accounted for 10% of the electorate in 2022 – similar to their share of all voters in 2018 (11%), but down from 2020 (14%).
• Ideological polarization by party was nearly complete in 2022: Only 1% of self-described conservative Republicans voted for Democratic House candidates and less than 1% of liberal Democrats voted Republican.
• Voting in person on Election Day increased sharply in 2022 compared with 2020. More voters reported casting ballots in person on Election Day in both parties, but the share remained much higher among Republican voters (51%) than among Democratic voters (34%).
• White voters without college degrees made up a majority (54%) of Republican voters in 2022, compared with 27% of Democratic voters. Yet these voters made up a somewhat greater share of GOP voters in 2020 (58%) and 2018 (57%).
• Voters ages 50 and older were a larger share of the total in 2022 (64%) than in any of the past three elections. 70% of Republican voters were 50 or older, as were 57% of Democratic voters.
• Hispanic voters continued to support Democrats, but by a much smaller margin than in 2018: Hispanic voters favored Democratic candidates by a 21-point margin in 2022, compared with a 47-point margin in 2018. This change was driven by asymmetric changes in voter turnout among Hispanic adults, rather than changing preferences among individual Hispanic voters.
• Black voters continued to support Democrats by overwhelming margins: 93% voted for Democrats in the midterms while 5% supported Republicans. This is similar to levels of support in 2020, 2018 and 2016. Black voters made up 9% of the electorate in both 2022 and 2018 and 11% of the electorate in 2020.
• The Republican advantage among White evangelical Protestants was somewhat larger in 2022 than in the past three elections. 86% supported Republican candidates in 2022 and only 12% voted Democratic.

Turmout 2022

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

William H. Frey at Brookings:

What these analyses [of the 2022 midterm] did not provide, however, was a detailed examination of turnout rates—the percent of eligible voters who voted—associated with these groups. But now, new Census Bureau data from the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration supplement provides this information for the 2022 election, and can be analyzed along with a similar data product from earlier elections.[1]

Perhaps the most notable finding with respect to voter turnout is that 2022 turnout rates were nearly as high as the record-setting 2018 midterm turnout rates. Yet unlike the previous midterm elections, the groups with the highest Democratic voting margins—in particular, young people, Black Americans, women, and white female college graduates—did not show greater turnout increases than other groups, and often displayed lower turnout rates than in the 2018 midterms. These groups displayed higher turnout rates than in the low-turnout 2014 midterms, but either did not match or did not improve on their 2018 turnout levels. And only a minority of states registered turnout increases between 2018 and 2022, while an even smaller number showed increases among young and nonwhite voters.

Liberal Dark Money and Election Funding

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

The iron law of emulation is at work. Conservative groups have made extensive use of dark money.  lLiberal groups copied their example, and conservatives are copying them back.

Steve Miller at RealClearInvestigations:

Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts, begun in 2020, to use private money to influence and run public elections.

Supported by groups with more than $1 billion at their disposal, according to public records, these partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government or political parties.

Registering and turning out voters - once handled primarily by political parties – and design of election office websites and mail-in ballots are being handed over to those same nonprofits, which are staffed by progressive activists that include former Democratic Party advocates, organized labor adherents and community organizers.

Republicans have opposed such efforts, passing legislation in 24 states since 2020 curbing the private financing of elections. But the GOP does not have a comparable, boots-on-the-ground effort to influence election boards and workers, and the private-funding bans haven’t proved absolute in some states.

...

 Many of the progressive groups seeking to influence elections are connected to Arabella Advisors, a Washington-based, for-profit consulting company founded and led by Eric Kessler, a White House appointee during the Clinton administration.

Arabella’s projects, which include the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Secure Democracy USA, had combined revenues of $1.3 billion between 2020 and 2021, tax filings show. Nonprofits supported by Arabella in 2020 gave out $529 million to “defend democracy.”

That coincided with the rise of private-public election partnerships as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated an estimated $350 million to the progressive Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) to support local efforts in the pandemic-challenged 2020 election.

Turnout 2022

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Drew DeSilver at Pew:

After soaring in 2018 compared with the previous midterm, voter turnout in the 2022 midterm elections for the U.S. House of Representatives fell back to, if not Earth, then at least the lower atmosphere.

Nationwide, nearly 107.7 million valid votes were cast in the 2022 House elections, representing about 45.1% of the estimated voting-eligible population, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of official returns from all 50 states. That was down from 48.1% turnout in 2018 – when midterm voting reached levels not seen in more than a century – but still higher than the 34.4% turnout rate for House elections in the 2014 midterms.

...

In 2022, 35 House seats, or 8% of the total, were noncompetitive or, at best, lightly competitive between parties, meaning that only one major party was represented on the ballot. (Republicans won 23 of those seats and Democrats won 12.) In 16 of these districts only one candidate was listed on the ballot, with opposition – if any – limited to write-in candidates. In 13 additional districts, a single major-party candidate faced only minor-party or independent opposition. And in six California districts, the November election was between two Democrats, due to that state’s “top two” primary system.

Youth Opinion 2022

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.   

From the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics:

A national poll released today by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School indicates that while 18-to-29-year-olds are on track to match 2018’s record-breaking youth turnout in a midterm election this November and prefer Democratic control 55%-34%, there was a sharp increase in youth believing that “political involvement rarely has tangible results” (36%), their vote “doesn’t make a difference” (42%) and agreement that “politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing” (56%). President Biden’s job approval has dropped to 41% among young Americans, down from 46% in the IOP Fall 2021 poll and down 18% overall in the past year.

The Spring 2022 Harvard Youth Poll finds that 59% of young Black Americans, 43% of young Asian Americans, and 37% of young Hispanic Americans feel “under attack” “a lot” in America. Nearly half of LGBTQ youth feel under attack “a lot.”

When it comes to student loans, 85% of young Americans favor some form of government action on student loan debt, but only 38% favor total debt cancellation. And the poll also finds that at two-to-one margins, young Americans are supportive of greater parental control over K-12 education and supportive of candidates that support teaching K-12 students that racism – intentional or not – is a fixture of American laws and institutions.

Trump to Supporters: Don't Vote

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Trump is now calling on Republicans not to vote — declaring “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if his election fraud hoax is not “solved” first. He helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms. pic.twitter.com/ARBnsfwmzJ

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) October 13, 2021

Recall Motivation

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state elections. The biggest off-off-year election is the CA recall. 

Democratic recall ballot returns continuing to outpace their share of the electorate, per @Political_Data tracker:

Dems comprise 46.5% of electorate and 55% of returned ballots

GOP is 24.1/23, No Party Preference at 23.3/22

— Jeremy B. White (@JeremyBWhite) August 27, 2021

Jonathan Brown at Capitol Weekly:

I’m not here to say Gavin Newsom is definitely going to prevail – though I expect so. But I want to say a few words about “motivation.”

When my daughter starts school next week, I will be waking up early to make her a lunch every day. I will do so grudgingly. My motivation will be quite low. However, during the last (remote) school year, I sampled a few school lunches. They were dreadful – so much pre-packaged crap of dubious nutritional value (pre-sliced apples in sealed cellophane, WHY?!). So I will make a sandwich and pack some snacks each day.

Similarly, is it that hard to imagine that a Democrat wouldn’t fill out and send in a short ballot with a push reminding them that it will prevent a Donald Trump acolyte from ascending to the top spot in state government? They only need to be highly motivated for a fleeting moment.

Indeed, Republican motivation is extremely high. In a recent survey, I found 91% of Republican voters were “very motivated” to vote in the recall election. However, two-thirds of Democrats also described themselves as “very motivated.” In sheer numbers, more California Democrats are “very motivated” than California Republicans.

Validated Voters, 2020

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

At Pew, Ruth Igielnik, Scott Keeter, and Hannah Hartig discuss findings from a study of validated voters:

The 19% of 2020 voters who did not vote in 2016 or 2018 split roughly evenly between the two candidates (49% Biden vs. 47% Trump). However, as with voters overall, there was a substantial age divide within this group. Among those under age 30 who voted in 2020 but not in either of the two previous elections, Biden led 59% to 33%, while Trump won among new or irregular voters ages 30 and older by 55% to 42%. Younger voters also made up an outsize share of these voters: Those under age 30 made up 38% of new or irregular 2020 voters, though they represented just 15% of all 2020 voters....

Here are some of the other key findings from the analysis:

• Biden made gains with suburban voters. In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51%-47%); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54%-38%). At the same time, Trump grew his vote share among rural voters. In 2016, Trump won 59% of rural voters, a number that rose to 65% in 2020.
• Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Even as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41% vs. 30%).
• Apart from the small shift among Hispanic voters, Joe Biden’s electoral coalition looked much like Hillary Clinton’s, with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters and those of other races casting about four-in-ten of his votes. Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party, voting 92%-8% for Biden.
• Biden made gains with men, while Trump improved among women, narrowing the gender gap. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men and because of gains Trump made among women. In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).
• Biden improved over Clinton among White non-college voters. White voters without a college degree were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%. In 2018, Democrats were able to gain some ground with these voters, earning 36% of the White, non-college vote to Republicans’ 61%. In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats’ 2018 share among the group, improving upon Clinton’s 2016 performance by receiving the votes of 33%. But Trump’s share of the vote among this group – who represented 42% of the total electorate this year – was nearly identical to his vote share in 2016 (65%).
• Biden grew his support with some religious groups while Trump held his ground. Both Trump and Biden held onto or gained with large groups within their respective religious coalitions. Trump’s strong support among White evangelical Protestants ticked up (77% in 2016, 84% in 2020) while Biden got more support among atheists and agnostics than did Clinton in 2016.
• After decades of constituting the majority of voters, Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation made up less than half of the electorate in 2020 (44%), falling below the 52% they constituted in both 2016 and 2018. Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points, while Gen Xers and Boomers were more evenly split in their preferences. Gen Z voters, those ages 23 and younger, constituted 8% of the electorate, while Millennials and Gen Xers made up 47% of 2020 voters.1
• A record number of voters reported casting ballots by mail in 2020 – including many voters who said it was their first time doing so. Nearly half of 2020 voters (46%) said they had voted by mail or absentee, and among that group, about four-in-ten said it was their first time casting a ballot this way. Hispanic and White voters were more likely than Black voters to have cast absentee or mail ballots, while Black voters were more likely than White or Hispanic voters to have voted early in person. Urban and suburban voters were also more likely than rural voters to have voted absentee or by mail ballot

.Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic:

The new Pew data, like the earlier 2020 assessments, underscore the durability of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in each party’s base. In the ANES studies, the longest-running of these sources, every Democratic presidential nominee from Adlai Stevenson through Jimmy Carter ran better among white voters without a college degree than among white voters with one. But as cultural issues supplant economic concerns as the principal dividing line between the parties, every Democratic nominee since Al Gore in 2000 has run better among white voters with a degree than among those without one.

The class inversion hit a new peak in 2016, with Hillary Clinton running at least 15 points better among college than noncollege white voters in most of the major data sources (including a breathtaking 27 points better in Pew’s assessment). In 2020, Catalist and the exit polls showed the gap widening, while Pew found it slightly narrowing, but the class inversion remained enormous in all three; each study also found Biden winning a majority of college-educated white voters. (Those gains were central to his strong showing in white-collar suburbs around major cities.) He was especially strong among college-educated white women: “We have the ability to make [them] a base group,” says Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters. But ominously for the GOP, all three sources also showed Biden gaining significantly over Clinton in 2016 among college-educated white men, who historically have been a much more reliable Republican constituency. And while white people without a college degree have been steadily shrinking as a share of the vote, these college-educated white people have slightly grown since 2004 (from about 28 percent to 31 percent of the electorate, per the census). Especially valuable for Democrats: They are highly reliable midterm voters.

 

“Only his gains among moderate to conservative voting groups allowed him to prevail."

Huh.https://t.co/szzM5SboNO

— Reed Galen (@reedgalen) July 1, 2021

Democratic Postmortem

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses issues, organization, and voter demographics.

Alexander Burns at NYT:

Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.

A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.

The 70-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.

The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.

From the report:

1. Voters of color are persuasion voters who need to be convinced
2.  Republican attempts to brand Democrats as " radicals worked
3. Polling was a huge problem - even after 2016 adjustments
4.  COVID-19 affected everything
5. Year-round organizing worked, as did cross- Party collaboration
6. Our hopes for 2020 were just too high

Asian American Population and Turnout

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the demographics of the 2020 election.

Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic:

Asian Americans still represent a small sliver of the population in all but a few states. But census figures show that from 2010 to 2019, the group grew rapidly, increasing its population nationwide by nearly 30 percent, or just over 5 million people. In percentage terms, that was by far the biggest increase over the past decade for any major racial group. Among adult citizens eligible to vote, Asian Americans have doubled their share, from 2.5 percent in 2000 to 5 percent in 2020, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
...

The Asian American population isn’t nearly large enough to decide those states on its own. Although Asian Americans represent almost 9 percent of eligible voters in Nevada, they represent only about 3 percent in Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, Frey shared with me. Yet the rise in voter participation has proved crucial for Democrats in several closely balanced states. A growing number of Asian American voters—mostly in the Washington, D.C., suburbs—were central to tilting Virginia blue over roughly the past 15 years. They played a comparable tipping-point role in Democrats’ victories in Georgia last year, at both the presidential and senatorial level. TargetSmart, a Democratic voter-targeting firm, calculates that some 60,000 more Asian Americans voted in the state in November than had in 2016—an increase that far exceeded Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory there. “In Georgia, they delivered this election for Joe Biden,” [AAPI Victory Alliance Executive Director Varun] Nikore said. “And then they delivered Joe Biden the Senate.”

Nationwide, Asian Americans increased their turnout at an astounding pace last year—soaring from about 49 percent in 2016 to just over 59 percent, the census found. Although turnout rose substantially for every major racial and educational group in 2020, the increase among Asian Americans was significantly larger than the growth among college-educated white voters (just over three percentage points), Latinos (just over six points), and even Trump’s core supporters, white voters without a college degree (also a little more than six percentage points)....

Higher turnout from an expanding pool of eligible voters combined to produce a dramatic rise in votes from the Asian American community. In its recently released analysis of voter files nationwide, Catalist calculated that the total number of votes cast by Asian Americans grew from 2016 to 2020 by almost 40 percent, reaching about 7 million. TargetSmart, in its analysis, put the increase even higher, at about 47 percent.

...

The biggest problem for the GOP may be that Trump’s words stamped his party precisely at a moment when the clay was soft—in other words, when 2020 produced a huge influx of young and first-time Asian American voters without long attachments to either party, according to research from both[political scientist Karthick] Ramakrishnan and Catalist.

Public Perceptions of the 2020 Election Process

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voting procedures.

 Karlyn Bowman and Samantha Goldstein have a report at AEI titled; "Voices on the vote: Impediments and confidence in the 2020 election."  Key Findings:

• A vast majority of Election 2020 voters said voting was easy, despite major changes in how people voted.
• Pluralities of Republicans and Trump voters voted in person. Majorities of Democrats and Biden voters cast ballots by mail.
• Sixty-two percent of white, 47 percent of black, and 51 percent of Hispanic voters waited 10 minutes or less to vote; 7 percent of white, 13 percent of black, and 8 percent of Hispanic voters waited an hour or more.
• Out of eight possible impediments to voting, none were experienced by more than 3 percent of Americans nationally.
• Seventy-three percent of voters said they were confident their vote was accurately counted. There was a chasm in vote confidence between Trump and Biden voters that was larger than in previous elections.

From the report:

In this survey, people were almost equally confident that their own vote (73 percent very or somewhat confident) and votes in their community (76 percent very or somewhat confident) were counted accurately. They were less confident that votes across the U.S. were counted as intended, at 60 percent. Democrats participating in the VOTER Survey were highly confident that their own vote, votes in their community, and votes across the country were correctly counted. Republicans were much more pessimistic than Democrats about each of the three scenarios the VOTER survey described. Fifty percent of Republicans were very or somewhat confident about their own vote, 58 percent about the votes in their community, and only 21 percent about votes across the country. In contrast, 94 percent of Democrats were very or somewhat confident about their own vote, 93 percent about the votes in their community, and 91 percent about votes across the U.S

Iron Law of Emulation: CA GOP Ballot Harvesting

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Tobias Hoonhout at National Review:

Former state Republican chair Shawn Steel echoed Ryan’s sentiments in an op-ed at the time. “How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule,’’ he wrote, referencing Young Kim’s loss to Democrat Gil Cisneros in Orange County’s open seat for the 39th District.

But in 2020, California Republicans are singing a different tune, even as California governor Gavin Newsom signed a Democrat bill requiring that every registered voter in the state receive a mail-in ballot for the November elections.

Of the seven seats that Republicans lost two years ago, two in Orange County have flipped back to red — Steel’s wife, Michelle Park Steel, won in California’s 48th, while Kim defeated Cisneros in a second try — and Republicans lead by narrow margins in two more.

So what changed?

“I think one of the big areas is ballot harvesting,” California GOP spokesman Hector Barajas told National Review, crediting the pragmatic leadership of state chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson to emphasize the practice in several key races.

“We were either going to do two different things,” Barajas said of the state party’s shift in attitude. “We were either going to continue to whine, oppose valid harvesting, and lick our wounds after the election, or we were going to figure out the rules, look at the chessboard that was put before us, and figure out how to play the game.”

Legislatures

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Russell Berman at The Atlantic:

Jessica Post ... now runs the DLCC and helped the committee raise a record $50 million to spend on legislative races this year. But Election Night 2020 was another disappointment: Democrats whiffed in their bid to flip a single state legislative chamber and lost the majorities they gained in 2018 in New Hampshire. The biggest prize they lost was Texas, where the party needed nine seats to win the state House after making inroads two years ago; Democrats likely failed to gain a single seat.

“It turned out we hit a different electorate than everyone was expecting,” Post told me in an interview last week. Democratic strategists initially pointed to two main factors behind the losses: the surge of turnout among Trump’s base that public and private polling failed to capture, and the pandemic, which might have had a disproportionate impact on down-ballot Democratic campaigns.

Post said the DLCC saw evidence that the races were tightening in the final days and sent money to fortify incumbents in places such as Minnesota, where Democrats thought they had the best chance of flipping the state Senate and securing control of both the legislature and the governorship. But it was not until Post saw the long lines of Election Day voters in Republican areas that she realized the party’s assumptions about turnout were woefully off. “It’s not just Democrats who were turning out,” Post thought. The supersize showing by Trump’s base was particularly damaging in key state legislative races because the Democrats’ path to majorities ran through districts that Republicans had gerrymandered to their advantage.

... 

In no state was the outcome more disappointing for Democrats than Texas, which they had made a presidential battleground for the first time in decades only to see Biden lose by nearly six points. After picking up 12 seats in the state House in 2018, Democrats could not make a dent in the nine more they needed to capture the majority. “We’ll do some soul-searching,” a Texas Democratic strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the party’s performance. “Republicans were definitely better organized than they were in 2018.” The strategist said Democrats might have “overhyped” the party’s chances, but the promotion was necessary to draw donor money to such an expensive state. The strategist also said that Biden’s comments in the second presidential debate about transitioning “away from the oil industry” hurt Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley.

While the coronavirus pandemic did not stop voters from turning out in record numbers across the country, Democrats believe that it did hamper them in down-ballot races, where in-person campaigning is equally if not more important than TV ads. And just as at the presidential level, Democratic candidates were much more likely than Republicans to curtail their canvassing in the interest of public health and safety. “The candidate that knocks on more doors in a state legislative race is going to outperform the district,” says Daniel Squadron, a former Democratic state senator from New York who in 2018 founded the Future Now Fund to help the party flip legislative chambers across the country. “We’ve never before had a scenario where one party did it and the other party didn’t.”

 Lou Jacobson at US News:

So what happened? As the congressional results have shown, the GOP consistently managed to hold its own further down the ballot even as Biden ousted President Donald Trump. Put simply, it was a Biden victory without coattails.

In Pennsylvania, a state Biden is on his way to winning, the Democrat had advantages, but "there were simply no real signs that 2020 would be a wave election in the state," says Christopher Borick, a Muhlenberg College political scientist. "Ultimately, the Democrats made marginal, yet impactful, gains to flip the presidential race, while Republicans nudged a few seats their way."

Much the same occurred in Wisconsin, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden.

"Biden won the state by a narrow margin and only shifted the vote about a point and a half from 2016," Burden says. "Such a small change did not produce significant shifts in the state legislature, where districts have been drawn to prevent it from responding to movement in the popular vote."

Wisconsin's district lines from 2010 aren't the only ones that have held up remarkably well for the GOP majorities that drew them.

Favorable district lines also helped Republicans keep their majorities in North Carolina, a state that Trump appears to be on his way to winning narrowly.

"Despite a court-ordered mid-decade redistricting, the new legislative districts were not particularly favorable to the Democrats," says Christopher A. Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. "Republicans won 51.6% of the vote in the House, but they will hold 56% of the seats."

Another challenge for Democrats: A growing urban-rural divide. In many key states, Democrats had to protect long-serving incumbents from rural districts. Yet Democrats had also made such significant gains in suburban districts in 2018 that they ended up harvesting much of the low-hanging fruit that year.

"Democrats were counting on the blue wave of 2018 that swept them into control of the Minnesota House of Representatives to do the same with the Minnesota Senate in 2020," says David Schultz, a professor of politics and law at Hamline University. "However, there really were no more than eight or nine potentially competitive seats in the Senate out of 67. The Democrats already controlled most of the ones they could pick up."

Republicans Say -- Out Loud -- That High Turnout Would Hurt Them

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.  Coronavirus has prompted some states to expand voting by mail.

Interview: Donald Trump Calls In to Fox and Friends for an Interview - March 30, 2020

Well, not expand. It's just the common facts. I mean, they have a majority in the House, and therefore you need their vote, and they want to get certain things. I will tell you this. If you look at before and after, the things they had in there were crazy. They had things -- levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.

 Mark Niesse and Greg Bluestein at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

All 6.9 million active voters in Georgia are being mailed absentee ballot request forms this week by the secretary of state’s office. Voters who return the absentee ballot request forms will be able to participate in the primary without having to come into contact with other people on election day or during early voting.

“This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia,” [state House Speaker David] Ralston, a Republican from Blue Ridge, said during an interview with FetchYourNews, a North Georgia news site. “Every registered voter is going to get one of these. … This will certainly drive up turnout.”

Ralston later claimed that he was talking about fraud.  He did not explain why he thought fraud would hurt Republicans and not Democrats.   Actually, vote fraud is extremely rare, and the most prominent recent example involved GOP perpetrators.

Persuasion and Turnout

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

Ruy Teixeira at WP:

[In 2018] the overwhelming majority of the Democrats’ improved performance came not from fresh turnout of left-of-center voters, who typically skip midterms, but rather from people who cast votes in both elections — yet switched from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2018. The data firm Catalist, whose numbers on 2018 are the best available, estimates that 89 percent of the Democrats’ improved performance came from persuasion — from vote-switchers — not turnout. In its analysis, Catalist notes, “If turnout was the only factor, then Democrats would not have seen nearly the gains that they ended up seeing … a big piece of Democratic victory was due to 2016 Trump voters turning around and voting for Democrats in 2018.”

Crucially, Democrats in 2018, especially the successful ones, did not run on particularly radical programs but rather on opposition to Trump himself, and to unpopular GOP actions on economic policy and health care (tax cuts for the rich and efforts to repeal Obamacare’s protections, for example). In the end, the 2018 results do not support Sanders’s theories — not the central importance of high turnout, nor the supposed non-importance of changing mainstream voters’ minds, nor the most effective issues to run on.

What about the magic of higher turnout?

As Nate Cohn of the New York Times has noted after scrutinizing the data, it’s a mistake to assume that Democrats would benefit disproportionately from high turnout. Trump is particularly strong among white noncollege voters, who dominate the pool of nonvoters in many areas of the country, including in key Rust Belt states. If the 2020 election indeed has historically high turnout, as many analysts expect, that spike could include many of these white noncollege voters in addition to Democratic-leaning constituencies such as nonwhites and young voters. The result could be an increase in Democrats’ popular-vote total — and another loss in the electoral college.

And most voters say that they would not vote for a socialist. 

Student Turnout

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

A release from  from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life.

College-student voting rates in the 2018 midterm elections doubled compared to the 2014 midterms, marking a watershed election year for student voter turnout, according to a report today from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. The report, Democracy Counts 2018, is based on an analysis of the voting patterns of more than 10 million college students on more than 1,000 campuses participating in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE).

In 2018, the Average Institutional Voting Rate (AIVR) among campuses in the study was 39.1 percent, nearly 20 percentage points higher than 2014’s average turnout rate of 19.7 percent. Turnout increases were widespread, with virtually all campuses seeing an increase over 2014.

Major research findings include:​​

• In the 2018 midterm elections, college students turned out to vote at double the rate of the last midterm. Across all students in the study, the National Student Voting Rate (NSVR) in 2018 was 40.3 percent. Remarkably, this 2018 student turnout was closer to the NSLVE-estimated voting rate for the 2016 presidential election–51.3 percent–than to the previous midterm in 2014–19.3 percent;

• According to the U.S. Elections Project, the voting rate among all Americans increased 13 percentage points in 2018 as compared to the prior midterm. By comparison, the college and university National Student Voting Rate (NSVR) rose 21 percentage points;

• In 2018, the voting rates of 99 percent of campuses in the study increased from the 2014 midterms, and nearly half of all institutions saw their rate increase between 15-24 percentage points;

• Women in college continued to vote at higher rates than men in 2018, with black women maintaining their position as the most active voters on campus, and Hispanic women making the largest gains;

• The largest voting rate increase across racial/ethnic groups was among Hispanic students, up 22.5 percentage points and more than doubling–from 14 percent in 2014 to 36.5 percent in 2018;

• While older Americans historically vote at higher rates than their younger counterparts, 2018 data showed a trend toward age parity. The turnout gap between students over 30 and those under 22 narrowed from 22.3 percentage points to 16.9 points;

• There was relative consistency in voting rates between students attending two-year, four-year, public or private institutions. Women’s colleges continued to vote at the highest rates among institutional types, but two-year, four-year, public, and private institutions showed consistent upward movement between 2014 and 2018; and,

• Voting gaps between disciplines persisted in 2018. Turnout among students in STEM fields, as well as those majoring in business, lag behind students studying the humanities, social sciences, and education.