Scott Keeter, director of survey research, explains why pollsters switch from registered voters to likely voters in their samples as Election Day nears, and how the Pew Research Center determines who is likely to vote.
Following voting trends, white Protestants voted overwhelmingly Republican and religiously unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly supported Democrats. But Catholic voters swung to the GOP, and Republicans made gains in all three groups.
An older and much more conservative electorate than in 2006 and 2008 propelled the Republican Party to a broad victory in the 2010 midterm elections. But the vote was more repudiation than endorsement. Views of the Republican Party are no more positive than those of the Democratic Party.
There will almost certainly be far more nonvoters than voters this year. Nonvoters are younger, less educated and more financially stressed than likely voters. They are also significantly less Republican and more likely to approve of Obama’s job performance.
Hispanic voters are nearly three times more prevalent in states that gained congressional seats and Electoral College votes in the 2010 reapportionment than they are in states that lost seats.
Millennials continue to be among the strongest backers of Democratic candidates this fall, though their support for the Democratic Party has slipped since 2008. But young voters have given far less thought to the coming elections than have older voters, and this gap is larger than in previous midterms.
Older Americans have a more negative view of incumbents, are more likely to vote for a candidate with no elective experience and less likely to support those who compromise than are Americans younger than age 65.
At a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, Pew Research Center analysts and outside experts discussed research findings about the Millennial generation, the American teens and twenty-somethings now making the passage into adulthood. The last of three sessions addressed the question of whether Millennials, who rocked the vote in 2008, will show up at the polls this November and how they may shape the political landscape beyond?
by Jodie T. Allen, Senior Editor, Pew Research Center In the year 1980, 59.4% of voting-age U.S. women cast ballots in that fall’s presidential election. According to the Bureau of the Census, they were joined by 59.1% of voting-age men. That comparison is noteworthy because, 60 years after passage of the 19th Amendment granted them […]