Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms
Lisa Ghelfi, a 58-year-old registered Republican in Arizona, voted for Donald Trump for president two years ago but has grown tired of his election-fraud claims. It is the main reason she voted for Democrats for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general this fall and plans to change her registration to independent.
“Not allowing the election to be settled, it’s very divisive,” Ms. Ghelfi, a semiretired attorney from Paradise Valley, said of the 2020 race. “I think the election spoke for itself.” She said she voted for Republicans down-ballot who weren’t as vocal about election fraud or as closely tied to Mr. Trump, yet couldn’t support Arizona’s four major Republican candidates because they echoed Mr. Trump’s false claims.
Republicans succeeded in one of their top goals this year: They brought more of their party’s voters to the polls than did Democrats. But in the course of energizing their core voters, Republicans in many states lost voters in the political center—both independents and many Republicans who are uneasy with elements of the party’s focus under Mr. Trump.
Control of the House and Senate, which had seemed poised to land with the Republican Party, is coming down to a handful of races that so far are too close to call, though the GOP remains on track to winning a narrow majority in the House. Republicans have won nearly 5.5 million more votes in House races than have Democrats, a tally by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report finds, as many voters were motivated by anxiety over high inflation and a low opinion of President Biden’s response.
At the same time, Republican analysts said their unexpectedly weak showing in the election indicated that they had failed to press hard enough on those issues. In Michigan, the Republican Party’s state committee said a failure to talk to voters in the political center was a central reason that Tudor Dixon, the party’s Trump-endorsed nominee for governor, was crushed in a 10 percentage point defeat by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“Tudor’s efforts focused largely on Republican red-meat issues, in hopes of inspiring a 2020-like showing at the polls,” a memo from the GOP committee said. “There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread-and-butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”
More than 30% of the midterm voter pool, by one measure, were independent voters, or people who don’t affiliate with either political party. David Winston, a Republican pollster who consults with the party’s House and Senate leadership, said polling showed that they were unhappy with the country’s direction and assigned blame for high inflation to President Biden.
“So, the door was open for Republicans to have a good interaction,” Mr. Winston said. “If everyone was focused on turnout of their base, they missed almost a third of the electorate—and basically the third of the electorate that’s in play.”
Mike Cernovich, a conservative blogger and supporter of Mr. Trump, said in an online analysis of the election outcome, “I would say the single biggest issue was, if your focus in 2022 was the 2020 election, then you were going to have a bad night with independents.”
Nationally, Republican candidates this year had the advantage of a favorable voter mix. Some 49% of midterm voters were Republicans, and 43% were Democrats, a 6-point GOP advantage, AP VoteCast, a large survey of the midterm electorate, found.
The GOP edge was similar or larger in states with competitive Senate races: 5 points in Pennsylvania, 8 points in Georgia and 11 points in Arizona. Despite those advantages, Republicans lost the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona and will compete again in Georgia, where the race goes to a runoff next month.
Undercutting the GOP advantage was that independents favored Democrats by 4 points nationally, the survey found, and by a far more substantial 18 points in Pennsylvania, 28 points in Georgia and more than 30 points in Arizona.
Polling shows that independent voters have little enthusiasm for either party. Both parties were viewed favorably by less than 30% of independents and unfavorably by 50% or more, the AP VoteCast survey found.
“It’s picking the lesser of two evils sometimes,” said Micki LePla, 65, a retired respiratory therapist near Port Huron, Mich., who backed Ms. Whitmer for governor.
“I voted for her because I just didn’t want Tudor Dixon to be the governor,” she said. She opposed Ms. Dixon, she said, “because of her viewpoint on abortion, and also she’s a Trump supporter and an election denier. She’s a ‘no’ on so many levels.” Ms. Dixon opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest.
For many voters, support for legalized abortion changed the election from a referendum on Democratic control of Washington into more of a choice between the two parties.
James VanSteel, 29, an independent voter and transportation planner in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, said he would have considered a Republican candidate for governor in the mold of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. He doesn’t agree with Mr. Romney’s restrictive view of abortion rights, but he sees the senator as a moderating force in government and open to working with both parties. In Michigan, however, the primary season only drew more ideologically driven Republicans, he said, eventually yielding Ms. Dixon as the nominee.
Ms. Dixon’s position on abortion was a nonstarter with him. “If they had talked about some kind of middle ground for regulation but keeping abortion legal in our state, I might have considered her more openly. But that was a very hard line she took,” he said.
Jennifer Borzone, 52, a stay-at-home mother in Phoenix, said she voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and couldn’t remember whom she voted for in 2020. She said she supported Democrats for every office this year because of their support of access to abortion.
“I don’t think the government should tell women what to do with their body,” she said, adding that her votes were solely decided on that issue.
Where Republicans won in high-profile races, they were sometimes helped by a favorable voter mix in the electorate. In North Carolina, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 7 percentage points in the midterm voter pool, and the victorious GOP Rep. Ted Budd limited his loss among independents to 9 points, a narrower deficit than for many other GOP Senate candidates.
The election results revive a debate that runs through many election campaigns about whether to drive turnout among a party’s core supporters, which often means promoting the most ideologically sharp policy ideas, or whether the better course is to try to persuade voters in the political center.
“Motivating the base makes sense, but you have to make sure your party doesn’t nominate people who are so flawed that your base can’t accept them,” said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster.
He said that was the case in places such as Arizona and accounts for why GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters, who aligned himself with Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and said he would support national abortion restrictions, not only lost independent voters by more than 30 points but also forfeited 14% of Republicans to his rival, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who won. By contrast, only 2% of Democrats backed Mr. Masters, AP VoteCast found.
There was no fraud in the 2020 election widespread enough to change the result, federal officials have said, and dozens of lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump’s supporters challenging the results failed.
In Pennsylvania, some Republicans worried that their nominee for governor, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, would alienate centrist and independent voters with his no-exceptions position on abortion and his role as a leading promoter of Mr. Trump’s unfounded election-conspiracy claims. They feared that Mr. Mastriano, who lost his election by 14 percentage points, would also push those voters away from backing the party’s Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz.
Mr. Oz lost independent voters by 19 points. Some 8% of Republicans backed his victorious opponent, John Fetterman, more than the share of Democrats who supported his campaign.
“Goodness gracious, that’s a state they should have won,” said Mr. Yang, referring to the greater number of Republicans than Democrats who voted.
Independent voters have been an essential ingredient in both parties’ successful campaigns to win control of the House. Republicans carried independents by 14 points in 1994 and by 19 points in 2010, when they claimed the speaker’s gavel, Mr. Winston said. Democrats won independents by 18 points in 2006 and 12 points in 2018, years when they reclaimed control of the House.
