Where The 2018 Democratic Advantage Came From: 2016 Nonvoters Higher Turnout By Clinton Voters And Vote Switching
Midterm elections consistently experience lower turnout than presidential elections. Yet while the 2018 turnout of 49% did not match turnout in the 2016 presidential election , it was far higher than usual. Midway through President Trump’s first term in office, both Democrats and Republicans were energized. A large majority of people who voted in 2016 also voted in 2018. But somewhat more of Clinton’s 2016 voters than Trump’s 2016 voters turned out in 2018. Overwhelming majorities of both Trump’s and Clinton’s 2016 voters remained loyal to their respective parties in their 2018 U.S. House vote, though Clinton’s 2016 voters who turned out in 2018 were slightly more loyal to Democratic 2018 candidates than Trump’s 2016 voters were to 2018 GOP candidates . Among the share who voted for someone other than Trump or Clinton in 2016, 71% voted in 2018. These voters favored Democratic candidates over Republican candidates by a margin of 49% to 37%.
Voters in 2018 who did not vote in 2016 were a small group but an important part of why the Democratic Party made gains. Among the 2016 nonvoters who voted in 2018, Democratic House candidates led Republican House candidates by a more than a two-to-one margin.
Of everyone eligible by citizenship and age to vote in 2018, 44% voted in both the 2016 and 2018 elections; 36% voted in neither; 14% were drop-off voters and a small share were new voters – voting in 2018 but not in 2016.
Even Though Biden Won Republicans Enjoyed The Largest Electoral College Edge In 70 Years Will That Last
Going into the presidential election, we expected President Trump to have an advantage in the Electoral College because the key battleground states were more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole. And that, in fact, is exactly how things panned out: Trump and the Republicans enjoyed the largest Electoral College edge in more than 70 years.
Already A Strong Democratic Group Those Unaffiliated With A Religious Tradition Became More So
In 2018, voters were highly politically polarized by religious affiliation and attendance at worship services, as they have been for many years in the U.S. Solid majorities of Protestants supported Republican candidates in 2018, while Catholics were more divided and the less religious were strongly Democratic in their votes.
The Republican Party’s most supportive demographic group were White evangelical Protestants . This margin was very similar to 2016 . A sizable majority of White Catholics also supported Republicans , with White non-evangelical Protestants close behind .
Unaffiliated voters – and especially atheists and agnostics – were even more supportive of Democratic candidates in 2018 than they had been of Hillary Clinton, with at least some of the change coming from those who had supported Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016. The margins among voters who describe their religious affiliation as “nothing in particular” were fairly similar in 2016 and 2018. Atheists supported Democratic candidates by an overwhelming 88% to 9% margin, rivaling Black support for the Democrats. Agnostics were not far behind, supporting Democratic candidates by a 79% to 18% margin.
Democrats Who Won 2018 Midterms Were More Negative Than Republicans On Twitter Research Finds
It was a mantra first popularized by Michelle Obama in 2016 and echoed again and again by Democratic politicians who vowed to rebuke the negative speech they said their Republican counterparts espoused.
“When they go low, we go high,” she said.
Only two years later, the message seems not to have stuck, according to new research from Northeastern University.
Aleszu Bajak, who teaches journalism, and Floris Wu, a Master’s student in journalism, analyzed the language in hundreds of thousands of tweets from politicians running for Senate in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
They found that the majority of Democrats running in elections posted tweets containing negative language more often than they posted tweets with neutral or positive language. And of those who used their Twitter accounts to send negative messages, most went on to win their races.
In some cases, the opposite was true for Republicans. Bajak and Wu discovered that Republicans who used positive language more often than not in their tweets won their races.
“In the Twitter data, we found the exact opposite of the mantra that, ‘When they go low, we go high,'” says Bajak, who also manages the Media Innovation and Media Advocacy graduate programs in the School of Journalism. “We found that the Democrats who won their elections were more negative in their tweets.”
Among the politicians with the highest number of negative tweets is Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.
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Who Won The Midterms Donald Trump Democrats Both Claim Victory In Contentious Elections
Democrats, Republicans and the president all claimed victory after Tuesday’s midterm elections, despite each coupling victories with some big losses.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who is expected to make a play to retake the House majority leader role, celebrated her victory and that of Democrats for winning back the House.
“Tomorrow will be a new day in America,” Pelosi told supporters at a party after it became clear that Democrats would wrangle back the House from Republicans for the first time since 2010. Pelosi said the country wanted “peace,” and that the election was about “restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration” while defending citizens’ health care.
Winning back the House affords Pelosi and Democrats the ability to investigate the Trump administration and potentially hold back the president’s most aggressive policies on immigration, such as building his proposed border wall.
On the other side, President Donald Trump declared the midterms a resounding victory for Republicans, who strengthened their hold on the Senate.
“Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!” Trump tweeted late Tuesday evening.
Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!
— Donald J. Trump November 7, 2018
Early Wednesday morning, Trump proclaimed a “Big Victory” and said he received calls of congratulations, including from foreign leaders.
Who Is Richer Democrats Or Republicans The Answer Probably Wont Surprise You
Which of the two political parties has more money, Democrats or Republicans? Most would rush to say Republicans due to the party’s ideas towards tax and money. In fact, polls have shown about 60 percent of the American people believe Republicans favor the rich. But how true is that? can help you write about the issue but read our post first.
List Of United States Presidential Candidates By Number Of Votes Received
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Following is a list of United States presidential candidates by number of votes received. Elections have tended to have more participation in each successive election, due to the increasing population of the United States, and, in some instances, expansion of the right to vote to larger segments of society. Prior to the election of 1824, most states did not have a popular vote. In the election of 1824, only 18 of the 24 states held a popular vote, but by the election of 1828, 22 of the 24 states held a popular vote. Minor candidates are excluded if they received fewer than 100,000 votes, or less than .1% of the vote in their election year.
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Democrats Got Millions More Votes So How Did Republicans Win The Senate
Senate electoral process means although Democrats received more overall votes for the Senate than Republicans, that does not translate to more seats
The 2018 midterm elections brought , who retook the House of Representatives and snatched several governorships from the grip of Republicans.
But some were left questioning why Democrats suffered a series of setbacks that prevented the party from picking up even more seats and, perhaps most consequentially, left the US Senate in Republican hands.
Among the most eye-catching was a statistic showing Democrats led Republicans by more than 12 million votes in Senate races, and yet still suffered losses on the night and failed to win a majority of seats in the chamber.
Constitutional experts said the discrepancy between votes cast and seats won was the result of misplaced ire that ignored the Senate electoral process.
Because each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, states such as Wyoming have as many seats as California, despite the latter having more than 60 times the population. The smaller states also tend to be the more rural, and rural areas traditionally favor Republicans.
This year, because Democrats were defending more seats, including California, they received more overall votes for the Senate than Republicans, but that does not translate to more seats.
However, some expressed frustration with a system they suggest gives an advantage to conservative-leaning states.
Both Republicans And Democrats Cite Masks As A Negative Effect Of Covid
Patrick van KesselDennis Quinn
The COVID-19 outbreak has upended life across the United States and exposed growing divisions between supporters of the two major political parties. And when Americans are asked to describe in their own words how the outbreak has affected them negatively, no topic divides Democrats and Republicans more than the subject of masks, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey findings collected in late August and early September.
Overall, 14% of U.S. adults mentioned the word “mask” when asked how the pandemic has made their life difficult or challenging. That made “mask” the fourth most common term in these responses, behind “family” and “work” – each of which was mentioned by 19% of the public – and “friend,” mentioned by 14% of respondents.
For this analysis, we surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel , an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
To gain further insights into these differences, researchers examined each of the nearly 1,000 open-ended responses that mentioned the term “mask.”
Gop Admins Had 38 Times More Criminal Convictions Than Democrats 1961
Democrats top row: President Obama, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy. Republicans bottom row: President W. Bush, Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon.
This is the first in a five-part series on government corruption and how that corruption is investigated.
Republican administrations have vastly more corruption than Democratic administrations. We provide new research on the numbers to make the case.
We compared 28 years each of Democratic and Republican administrations, 1961-2016, five Presidents from each party. During that period Republicans scored eighteen times more individuals and entities indicted, thirty-eight times more convictions, and thirty-nine times more individuals who had prison time.
Given the at least 17 active investigations plaguing President Trump, he is on a path to exceed previous administrations, though the effects of White House obstruction, potential pardons, and the as-yet unknown impact of the GOP’s selection of judges may limit investigations, subpoenas, prosecutions, etc. Of course, as we are comparing equal numbers of Presidents and years in office from the Democratic and Republican parties, the current President is not included.
We’re aware some of our numbers differ from other totals, but we explain our criteria below.
Figure 1. Presidential administrations corruption comparison
Why Democratic Departures From The House Have Republicans Salivating
A growing number of Democrats in battleground districts are either retiring or leaving to seek higher office, imperiling the party’s control of the House and President Biden’s expansive agenda.
WASHINGTON — With 18 months left before the midterms, a spate of Democratic departures from the House is threatening to erode the party’s slim majority in the House and imperil President Biden’s far-reaching policy agenda.
In the past two months, five House Democrats from competitive districts have announced they won’t seek re-election next year. They include Representative Charlie Crist of Florida, who on Tuesday launched a campaign for governor, and Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who will run for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman. Three other Democrats will leave vacant seats in districts likely to see significant change once they are redrawn using the data from the 2020 Census, and several more are weighing bids for higher office.
An early trickle of retirements from House members in competitive districts is often the first sign of a coming political wave. In the 2018 cycle, 48 House Republicans didn’t seek re-election — and 14 of those vacancies were won by Democrats. Now Republicans are salivating over the prospect of reversing that dynamic and erasing the Democrats’ six-seat advantage.
“It’s like going to war on a battlefield but you don’t know where you’re fighting, when you’re fighting or who you’re fighting,” Mr. Israel said.
Many Republicans Dont Believe The Election Results A New Survey Says
More than half of Republican voters either believe President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 race or aren’t entirely sure who did win, according to a new survey by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers.
The findings underscore the success Trump has had in convincing supporters of his voter fraud and election-rigging claims. While no proof of tampering has emerged so far, the president has repeatedly claimed that his election was rigged or stolen, fired members of his administration who didn’t go along with the allegations, and pressured state officials tooverturn results.
David Lazer, distinguished professor of political science and computer and information science. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University
Many GOP lawmakers and state attorneys general are backing Trump, adding credence to the fraud claims, says David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern, and one of the researchers who conducted the online study.
“Trump is like a giant domino that causes a bunch of other dominoes to fall,” he says.
“It’s still pretty shocking that less than half of Republicans say Joe Biden won the election,” Lazer says.
He plans to conduct more research, but says the issue of who “won” could be entangled in semantics.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a GOP-led lawsuit to reverse the certification.
The Demographic Profile Of Voters And Nonvoters Is Very Different
The roughly half of Americans who voted in 2018 differ from the voting-eligible adult population in some key respects. There were sizeable, if familiar, demographic and political differences in who did and did not turn out.
Compared with citizens who did not vote, voters were older, more likely to be college educated, better off financially, more likely to be White Protestants or Catholics and more Republican in party affiliation and candidate preference. These differences are regular features of U.S. elections, as a comparison with voters and nonvoters in 2016 makes clear.
All citizen panelists – whether voters or nonvoters – were asked which U.S. House candidate they supported in the general election. Nonvoters tend to express more uncertainty about the choice, owing in large part to the fact that many of them pay little attention to politics. But among those who did express a preference, Democratic candidates led Republican candidates by 14 percentage points a larger margin than among voters .
Demographically, the contrast between voters and nonvoters is most stark on age, race, education and income. Voters in 2018 were considerably older than nonvoters: 31% of voters but just 10% of nonvoters were ages 65 and older. At the other end of the age spectrum, just 11% of voters were under 30 years of age; 30% of nonvoters fell into this category. These gaps are quite similar to those seen in 2016.
In The Us Have There Been More Democrat Or Republican Presidents
The White House, home of the president of the United States.
There have been more Republican presidents than Democratic presidents. Between 1789 and 2013, 43 people have been sworn into office as the president of the United States of America. Of these, a larger number have belonged to the Republican Party than have belonged to the Democratic Party. There have been 18 Republican presidents and 15 Democratic presidents. Actually, while the Democratic Party tends to claim Andrew Johnson as their own, he was sworn into office in 1865 while he was a member of the National Union Party. This would technically make it 18 Republicans to 14 Democrats. Since the first presidency in 1789, and until 2013, there have been 44 total presidencies in the United States. This includes only those presidents who were sworn into office, not acting presidents.
In the fight for the White House, the Republican Party leads the Democratic Party.
Of course, not all of those who held office have been Democrats or Republicans. The presidency of the United States has also been held by Whigs, Democratic-Republicans, and those with no party affiliation. Most have been either Democrat or Republican presidents, however. It is important to note that, while presidents centuries ago may have been identified as Democrat or Republican, these definitions have changed over time; what a Democrat was in the 19th century is not the exact same thing that people think of a Democrat today.
Republicans Vs Democrats In Launching Wars: We Have The Numbers
If one were to compare the US political system to a dystopian society divided into distinct factions based on how many wars they have started, an interesting outcome rebuking conventional perceptions would have been observed.
It is not about the strong on defense, hawkish Republicans juxtaposed with peace-loving dovish Democrats anymore. Looking back at the past 118 years, there have been some ‘divergents’ — warmongering Democrats and amicable Republicans. However, more interestingly and surprising for the conventional-minded — the number of the XX century Democratic presidents who kept from starting wars is actually zero.
According to the research conducted by Sputnik, since the turn of the 20th century — out of 8 US presidents none have managed to stay away from initiating military aggression.
In turn, out of 12 Republican leaders, two — Warren Harding and Gerald Ford — have deviated from the generally accepted party reputation.
Since 1900, 35 conflicts have been launched by Republican administrations compared to 23 by Democrats, with 10 GOP presidents launching one or more conflicts, compared to 8 Democrats.
Values and Wars
Rooted in American conservatism, the US Republican party — commonly referred to as the GOP — has always viewed strong national defense as one of its core principles.
“Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict,” the party’s online platform says.
So who started them, and who ended them?
An Examination Of The 2018 Electorate Based On Validated Voters
Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans voted in 2018 and how their turnout and vote choices differed from 2016. For this analysis, we surveyed U.S. adults online and verified their turnout in the two elections using commercial voter files that aggregate official state turnout records.
We surveyed 10,640 U.S. adults online in November 2018 and 4,183 adults in November and December 2016. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel , an online survey panel recruited through national, random sampling of telephone numbers or, since 2018, residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The surveys are weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and many other characteristics. Read more about the ATP’s methodology. Verification of voter turnout involved matching the panelists to two or more commercial voter files. Panelists for whom a record of voting was located are considered validated voters; all others are presumed not to have voted.
Here are the questions used for this report and its methodology.
Given their relatively lower turnout, midterm elections are not necessarily predictive of what will happen in the next presidential election, when many more American voters will take part.
Democrats Have Been Shameless About Your Presidential Vote Too
After the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections, they objected to counting electoral totals.
In January 2001, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida objected to counting Florida’s electoral votes. The history of Democratic efforts to contest the outcomes of presidential elections is not a history worth emulating.Credit…Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
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Mr. Muller is a law professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in election law.
- Jan. 6, 2021
As Republicans in Congress prepare to formally contest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Wednesday, many of them have cited precedent for their effort: similar complaints lodged by Democrats in other presidential elections. After Republican victories in 2000, 2004 and 2016, for instance, Democrats in Congress used the formal counting of electoral votes as an opportunity to challenge election results.
But the history of Democratic efforts to contest the outcomes of presidential elections is not a history worth emulating. On the contrary, it only underscores that the certification of a president-elect’s victory by the House and Senate is an improper forum for the airing of political grievances and an inappropriate occasion to readjudicate the decisions of the states concerning things like vote tallies, recounts and audits.
Derek T. Muller is a law professor at the University of Iowa.
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Democrats Did Better In 2018 Than 2016 Among Men Young Voters
Among most groups, voting patterns in 2018 were generally similar to those in 2016, albeit with most reflecting somewhat greater support for Democratic candidates for the U.S. House compared with Hillary Clinton. Men, young people and secular voters were notably more supportive of Democratic candidates in 2018 than these groups had been in 2016.
Democratic gains among men resulted in some narrowing of the gender gap. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won men by 11 points and Hillary Clinton won women by 15 , for a difference of 26 points. In 2018, women supported Democratic candidates by a similar margin but the GOP advantage among men vanished . Trump carried White men by 30 points in 2016 , a Republican advantage that shrank to just 12 points in 2018 .
Much as the gender gap shrank from 2016 to 2018, so did the marriage gap. Married voters in 2016 voted for Trump by a 55% to 39% margin but supported GOP House candidates in 2018 by only a 6-point margin, 52% to 46%. Unmarried voters were strongly Democratic in both years . Much of the decline in the marriage gap came from men. Trump won married men by a 30-point margin in 2016, but this group backed GOP House candidates by 12 points in 2018. Married women were evenly divided between the parties in both elections. Among unmarried voters, women were more supportive of Democratic candidates in 2018 than they had been of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Most Complete Picture Yet Of Americas Changing Electorate
Republicans and Democrats have amassed divergent coalitions that will make coming elections especially competitive—and bitter.
Can Big Data explain the passion and vitriol of American politics? Like almost everything else in modern life, the choices are multiplying for analysts looking to understand how the key groups in American society divide in presidential elections.
Once, researchers and political operatives had only a few options: some postelection academic surveys , precinct-level analyses, and, above all, the mainstay of Election Day television broadcasts—exit polls.
Now the choices for understanding the electorate’s behavior have proliferated. The ANES poll has been joined , a consortium of academic researchers from some 50 institutions that surveys a huge sample of more than 60,000 voters. Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, produces its own estimates of voting behavior, based on sophisticated modeling and polling it does with its database tracking virtually all actual voters. The Associated Press and Fox News teamed up with the venerable NORC at the University of Chicago this year to produce a competitor to the traditional exit polls .
Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released its eagerly awaited Validated Voters survey. Pew builds its findings by surveying adults it can identify as definitely having voted in November based on voting records, a methodology many analysts favor.
Read: Democracy is already dying in the states
Class inversion is here to stay.
More Democrats Equal More Power For Republicans In Texas Math
— Texas has won two new congressional seats thanks to a surge in the population of people of color, who vote more often for Democrats. But the state’s Republicans will benefit because they’ll draw the maps allocating political power for the next decade.
The GOP-controlled legislature is expected to do what it did a decade ago when growth in minority communities earned the state four new congressional districts: try to benefit White Republicans. They’ll do so through the dark art of gerrymandering, by either crowding the other party’s voters into a limited number of districts or splitting them up so they’re outnumbered. Packing or cracking it’s called, respectively.
What Gerrymandering Means and Why It’s Here to Stay: QuickTake
Republicans’ push to impose new ballot restrictions across the country has drawn the most attention. But the decennial redistricting process could have an even greater impact on democracy, as partisans draw maps designed to secure their power in statehouses — and, for the GOP, potentially retake control of Congress next year.
Outnumbered by Republican map makers this cycle, Democrats plan to pursue court challenges where they can. This time, they’ll have fewer legal options because the U.S. Supreme Court took away a key line of attack in 2019 when it ruled 5-4 that federal judges can’t toss voting maps for being too partisan.
To read more on voting laws:Video: Texas Democrats may be the most potent force for voting rights
Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden
The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Biden’s handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats’ disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.
Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the party’s total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.
To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.
Table 1: Presidential versus House results
| Arizona |
Democrats Keep Winning The Popular Vote That Worries Them
Democrats won the popular vote in this year’s presidential election yet again, marking seven out of eight straight presidential elections that the party has reached that milestone.
And, for some Democrats, that’s worrisome.
President-elect Joe Biden has so far won 50.8% of the vote compared to the 47.4% who voted for President Donald Trump, a 5 million vote advantage that is likely to grow as Democratic bastions like California and New York continue to count ballots. Biden’s 77.5 million votes to date are the most for any winning candidate, and Trump’s 72.3 million also set a high water mark for a losing one.
Experts predict Biden’s margin of victory will surpass former President Barack Obama’s 4 percentage point popular vote lead in 2012. Only Obama’s landslide 2008 victory — with a 7 percentage point margin in the popular vote — was larger in recent elections.
But what alarms many Democrats is a growing gap between their popular vote tallies and their political power. Democrats may be winning over more supporters, but as long as those votes are clustered on the coasts or in cities and suburbs, they won’t deliver the congressional victories the party needs to enact its policies.
“There’s a massive structural challenge to the majority of Americans having any political power anytime soon,” said Rebecca Katz, a liberal Democratic strategist. “It’s a problem.”
Are America’s Richest Families Republicans Or Democrats
Forbes took at look at the 50 richest clans on our new list of America’s Richest Families. There are a handful of politicians in the mix, and an overwhelming majority that support one political party far more than another.
Some of America’s wealthiest families wear their politics on their sleeves. Charles and David Koch, notorious for their support of right-wing causes, donated more than $2.2 million during the 2012 election, nearly all to Republican candidates. Jon and Patricia
Other members of rich clans have stepped into the political fray themselves. Penny Pritkzer, part of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, became President Obama’s Commerce Secretary in June 2013. Mark Dayton, an heir to the Dayton family fortune is a Democrat and the current governor of Minnesota. Pete du Pont, descendant of the founder of chemical giant DuPont, was a Republican governor of Delaware from 1977 to 1985 and ran for president in 1988. Dolph Briscoe, Jr., member of the Briscoe ranching family, was a Democrat and governor of Texas from 1973 to 1979. Ross Perot, Sr., is famous for his two impressive but unsuccessful presidential runs as an Independent. He and his son have donated to both parties, but they lean Republican.
Infographic: David Lada
One caveat: Some of these family fortunes are shared among dozens or even hundreds of people, so we were only able to track political donations of a subset of prominent members.
1. Walton – Republican
