Philippa Kaur

The November 2022 midterms have come and gone, but there are still some potential lasting implications that could influence the next election season.

One is that young people, aged 18 to 29, had one of the highest voter turnouts in a midterm election in recent history, according to our early analysis.

Specifically, an estimated 27% of eligible voters in that age group turned out to the polls in 2022, according to research by my team at CIRCLE – a research group at Tufts University focused on youth civic engagement. This marks only the second time in the last 30 years that more than 1 in 4 voters under 30 voted in a midterm cycle. In 2018, approximately 31% of young people voted.

It was young people’s support for Democratic candidates, specifically, that led them to have a major impact on elections in key states this year. Their votes were influential or outright decisive in several close races won by Democrats, such as Nevada’s senate election. The same was true in the Georgia senate and Arizona gubernatorial races.

Voter turnout across all age groups tends to be significantly lower in midterm elections than in presidential elections.

Young people, though, have historically voted at even lower rates than older adults in general. This trend has begun to change, with double-digit increases in youth turnout between 2014 and 2018 and between 2016 and 2020.

As a scholar of young people’s participation in democracy, I think the youth vote in 2022 underscores much of what works to increase young people’s electoral participation.

More registration, more votes

For starters, there was higher youth voter registration in 2022 than in 2018 in many states, including Michigan, Nevada and Kansas. Young political and civic leaders and voters also connected to issues that affect their lives – like abortion rights – in this election.

These trends also highlight what could help lessen ongoing challenges to get more young people to vote. There are voting laws, for example, that make it easier to register and vote.

Young people typically are less likely than older people to vote in both presidential and midterm elections.
Aaron Jackendoff/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

What happened in November 2022

The overall 27% youth turnout rate is only one part of the story.

This was the 10th election cycle in a row in which 18- to 29-year-olds supported Democratic House candidates by at least a 10-point margin, according to CIRCLE’s analysis of the Edison Research data.

This year, young voters preferred Democratic House candidates by a 28-point margin. Youth of color, young women and LGBTQ youth supported Democrats by an even wider margin.

Young voters’ preference at the polls was markedly different from that of other age groups. Nationally, voters ages 30 to 44 preferred House Democrats by only 4 percentage points, and voters over the age of 65 preferred House Republicans by more than 10 points.

Why did it happen

Many reporters have asked me and my colleagues who contributed to this article – including Alberto Medina, CIRCLE’s communications team lead, and Ruby Belle Booth, CIRCLE’s elections coordinator – why youth voter turnout dropped in 2022 below the 2018 levels.

Throughout 2022, there were some signs that youth participation in the midterms would be relatively strong, including the number of young people already registered to vote. However, in that same analysis, my colleagues and I found that voter registration among 18- and 19-year-olds was lagging compared to 2018.

Supporting these young people to vote remains an enduring challenge.

Many campaigns and organizations rely on the existing voter rolls and other lists of registered voters to conduct outreach, so they often miss these potential new voters. That’s compounded by another issue: Young people are less inclined than other voters to identify or register with a political party.

Politics is personal

Instead, many young people approach politics based on the issues they care about.

In 2018, for example, the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, which killed 17 people, led more young people to vote for candidates they felt would do more to curb gun violence.

A number of high-profile climate change protests in 2020 also appeared to boost youth voter turnout that year.

In 2020, many young voters focused on racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, following the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. That spurred considerable political engagement, like participating in public protests, that connected to a major increase in youth voter turnout between 2016 and 2020.

In 2022, young people continued to push for change on issues they consider personal, like climate change, gun violence and racial justice.

And after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion rose to the top of young people’s issues of concern.

While nearly 3 in 4 young people said they favor legal abortion, both young people who are for and against abortion rights said this was a top issue for them.

Our analysis of exit poll data found that young voters were the only age group to cite abortion as their top reason for voting. Other groups of voters over 30 said that inflation was their top priority.

Voter turnout among young people has historically been low, in both midterm and presidential elections.
John Moore/Getty Images

Implications for 2024 and beyond

Millions more young people born after 1996 will reach voting age by 2024. Their political power will only grow in the years to come, while those over the age of 65 will make up a declining share of the population and the electorate.

What that shift means for election results will depend on how political parties and other political and civic groups engage young people.

In recent years, most young people have voted for Democrats. This is a shift from just 20 years ago, when voters under 30 split their vote fairly evenly between Democrat and Republican candidates.

But Republicans lag behind Democrats when it comes to directly communicating with young people. Just less than 1 in 3 people aged 18 to 29 said they heard from the Republican Party or the Donald Trump campaign in the month before Election Day in 2020. Half of young people, conversely, said they heard from the Democratic Party or Joe Biden’s campaign.

There are other actions and policies that could get more people under 30 to the polls.

Preregistration, which allows young people to register to vote at age 16 so they’re ready to cast a ballot once they turn 18, can increase youth turnout, but it’s only available in 16 states. Other policies and efforts by election administrators to get more young people to vote can vary widely across states, leading to major differences in participation. In 2020, youth turnout varied from 32% in South Dakota to 67% in New Jersey.

Young people’s estimated 27% turnout rate in 2022 marks a near-record for an age group that has historically participated at lower rates in midterm elections. Whether this is a long-term trend or not will depend on whether communities and political groups implement the changes that research suggests can lead to sustained increases in youth voter turnout. More

Runoff elections tend to be races of attrition. Turnout will most likely be lower, as voters are less accustomed to turning out for off-cycle elections. Candidates, then, must try to minimize attrition among their supporters, and the one with the least erosion is most likely to win.

Such was the case in Georgia on Dec. 6, 2022. Fewer people voted for either candidate in the runoff: Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, saw the number of people who turned out to vote for him drop by about 131,000 from the November vote; Republican Herschel Walker lost closer to 200,000 voters. This would explain how Warnock was able to grow his lead in the runoff.

On turnouts and turnoffs

Overall, voter turnout in the Georgia Senate runoff election was nearly 90% of the turnout in the November general election. That’s not a huge drop-off and reflects voter interest in the outcome of a race that has been the subject of intense mobilization campaigns by both candidates in the past month.

When looking at the 10 counties with the highest proportional attrition from November to December – that is, counties where runoff turnout was only 83% to 88.1% of general election turnout – one thing stands out: They were all in metro and exurban Atlanta or north Georgia, the counties close to Tennessee and the South Carolina state line near I-85.

While some of these counties are Republican strongholds, many of them are increasingly diverse racially. Some of these counties are also rich with the college-educated white voters whom both parties covet.

Warnock earned a higher percentage of the vote in the runoff compared with November in each of these “high-attrition” counties. Walker, however, lost vote share in three of these counties.

Furthermore, in the seven high-attrition counties where both Warnock and Walker got a larger percentage of the vote than they did in November, Warnock garnered more vote share in all but the three most sparsely populated counties.

This suggests that Warnock may have won the majority of the eliminated Libertarian candidate’s votes that were up for grabs in the runoff.

There was also a nontrivial number of new runoff voters – people who voted in the runoff but not in November. We know that almost 78,000 of these new voters participated in early voting, and that this group was disproportionately voters of color – people who tend to vote Democratic.

Warnock overperformed in the most densely populated counties, too. My analysis shows that in the 10 counties that cast the most ballots in this election cycle, Warnock improved his vote share in the runoff by a range of 1 to 3.2 percentage points in each county. Walker, meanwhile, lost vote share in six of the 10 counties.

There was only one county of the top 10 – Hall County – where Walker’s increase in vote share outpaced Warnock’s increase. With the exception of Chatham County, home of Savannah, all of the vote-rich counties where Warnock gained and Walker tended to lose vote share are in metro or exurban Atlanta.

Deficiencies as a candidate

This raises the necessary but uncomfortable conversation about candidate quality. Pundits and observers had long been concerned that Walker’s deficiencies as a candidate would be a particular turnoff to suburban Republican voters, and that they might register their opposition by not voting at all. That more attrition took place in and around Atlanta suggests that there were grounds for that concern.

Walker was particularly compromised as a candidate. By standard political science measures of candidate quality – such as whether a candidate has relevant prior experience – Walker was a low-quality candidate.

His unintelligible policy pronouncements and bizarre non sequiturs about bulls and werewolves only reinforced the impression among some voters that he was not capable of handling the job of U.S. senator.

And when you compound those problems with the explosive allegations about domestic violence and pressuring girlfriends to get abortions, it looks like a small but significant sliver of likely Republican voters decided to prioritize their concerns about candidate quality over naked partisanship.

Meanwhile, Warnock has nearly two years of Senate experience and was able to draw on a modicum of incumbency advantage to help him in the contest. This was certainly reflected in his prodigious fundraising over the course of this cycle.

Yet Warnock was one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats in this midterm election cycle for a reason. Georgia Democrats may be increasing in number and voting power, but other recent elections suggest there are still more Republican than Democratic voters in the state. Other GOP nominees in the state, such as Gov. Brian Kemp, were able to coast on that numerical advantage and Joe Biden’s net negative favorability to win decisive victories in November – without runoffs.

That Walker struggled was a signal of his weaknesses as a candidate. But many of his weaknesses and his lack of experience were known going into the primaries. That should have been enough for Republican leaders to challenge Donald Trump’s insistence that Walker was the best candidate to run against Warnock.

In the future, the Republican Party might think twice about selecting a candidate based on a party leader’s whim and not experience, substance or a demonstration of electability. If there is one lesson we can take from the 2022 Georgia Senate election, it is that candidate quality matters. More