Voter Turnout Drove GOP Gains in 2022 Midterms: Pew Report

Americans vote at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens polling place in Madison, Wis., on Nov. 8, 2022. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

Republican gains in the 2022 midterms were largely owed to an advantage the party achieved in voter turnout, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The report, published on July 12, found 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.”

Pew also found that “68 percent of those who voted in the 2020 presidential election turned out to vote in the 2022 midterms,” and that “Former President Donald Trump’s voters turned out at a higher rate in 2022 (71 percent) than did President Joe Biden’s voters (67 percent).”

The poll showed that very few voters across the elections analyzed switched party support; although “Democratic 2018 voters were slightly more likely than Republican 2018 voters to defect in 2022, with the net consequences of the party balance flipping 1 or 2 percentage points to the GOP.”

While the “red wave” failed to materialize for the GOP last year, the party was still able to win control of the House and win the nationwide popular vote in House races.

A voter casts her ballot with her child at a polling station at Rose Hill Elementary School during the midterm primary election in Alexandria, Va., on June 21, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Voter Demographics

More voters, in both parties, voted in person on election day 2022 than in 2020, according to Pew. Yet, here, Republicans held a big advantage over Democrats, 51 percent to 34 percent.

Also, voters who were 50 or older constituted, in 2022, a larger segment (64 percent) of the total number of voters than in the three elections prior. What may be another positive portent for the GOP is that among those 50-plus voters, 70 percent were Republicans and 57 percent Democrats.

“White voters without college degrees made up a majority (54 percent) of Republican voters in 2022, compared with 27% of Democratic voters,” Pew found. “Yet these voters made up a somewhat greater share of GOP voters in 2020 (58 percent) and 2018 (57 percent).”

White evangelical Protestants continue to be a large and solid segment of support for Republicans, with the advantage actually bigger in 2022 than in the previous three elections. Pew reported, “86 percent supported Republican candidates in 2022 and 12 percent voted Democratic.”

A heartening trend for the GOP, one documented in the Pew poll, is that even though most Hispanics still vote Democratic, Republicans are cutting into the advantage Democrats hold with this key demographic.

“Hispanic voters favored Democratic candidates by a 21-point margin in 2022, compared with a 47-point margin in 2018,” the Pew poll reports.

The Pew poll shows that black people are still solidly behind the Democratic Party, with 93 percent supporting Democrats in the 2022 midterms and five percent voting for Republicans. Pew said these numbers are “similar to levels of support in 2020, 2018, and 2016.”

Pew published a survey in May on the political leanings of Asians in the United States and found that about 62 percent of Asian-American voters in the five largest Asian-origin groups in America “identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and 34 percent are Republicans or GOP leaners.”

Vietnamese voters in the United States, however, favor the GOP over the Democratic Party 51 percent to 42 percent.