At the end of the day, every election is about two things: turnout and persuasion. If you have a big-enough edge in getting people who already agree with you to vote, you win; if both sides turn out a competitive number of their voters, the winner is the candidate who persuades the persuadables. It is impossible in an election postmortem to entirely separate the two. Getting people to care enough to turn out is itself a form of persuasion, and so is getting the other side’s voters to stay home because they think it’s not worth showing up. Still, it is important in understanding the outcomes to make our best estimate of how much of the result was driven by turnout.
The 2022 results and the conclusions one might draw from exit polls suggest that Republicans won the turnout battle and lost the persuasion war. Thus, if you believe the exit polls, we had the most Republican electorate in the past two decades of midterm and general elections, but it was an election in which Donald Trump was massively unpopular and in which independents backed the Democrats in most of the key races — something that the president’s party hasn’t managed in decades. There is, however, more than one way to look at the data. There are well-known limitations to exit polls. Perhaps we can learn more by examining turnout more carefully.
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