Voter Turnout and Congressional Change
In recent decades, there have been three basic ways that turnout has worked to produce the sort of “big wave” midterm that the Democrats are hoping for next week.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Guest Contributor
In recent decades, there have been three basic ways that turnout has worked to produce the sort of “big wave” midterm that the Democrats are hoping for next week.
In an election environment which seems to favor the Democrats in so many ways, the Republicans continue to hold two strong cards; they have more money and they are better at getting out the vote than are the Democrats.
The concern among some politicians and political experts over the lack of competitiveness in U.S. elections is generally not shared by the public. Moreover, voters appear to lack a clear sense of whether the elections in their own House districts are competitive or not.
This year’s sweepstakes for 36 governors’ seats is shaping up as one for the history books. Democrats appear poised to reverse 12 years of growing Republican gubernatorial power.
National elections are the high season for pollsters and with Election Day now less than two weeks away, new polls on the fight for Congress are being released nearly every day. Commonly, pollsters use something called the “generic ballot” to assess the state of the congressional race. Just how accurate is the “generic ballot” in predicting election results?
Political pollsters continue to cast a wary eye on the growing number of Americans who use only a cell phone and have no landline. The Pew Research Center estimates that this group now constitutes one-in-ten adults. But three Pew surveys of cell-only Americans this year have found that their absence from landline surveys is not creating a measurable bias in the bottom-line findings.
One of the biggest political questions in the final weeks of this Congressional campaign is whether the national trend in support for Democratic candidates is big enough to overcome the safe-seat redistricting that in recent years has led to fewer and fewer seats turning over in Congress.
In a Pew Forum roundtable conversation, Forum senior fellow John Green and two prominent journalists speculate that it will be difficult for the Republican Party to mobilize evangelicals to go to the polls in great numbers next month. They also discuss challenges faced by the Democratic Party in appealing to this segment of the electorate.
A new survey finds large differences between Americans who are not registered to vote or vote only rarely and those who cast ballots at least some of the time. These two groups at the bottom of the voting participation scale are much less likely than regular or intermittent voters to believe that voting will make much of a difference.
White evangelical Protestants have become the most important part of the Republican Party’s electoral base, making up nearly one-in-four of those who identify with the GOP and vote for its candidates. This analysis examines the current state of evangelical support for the GOP, in light of the approaching 2006 elections.
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