Democratic data analyst David Shor explains what happened in 2022 and why abortion proved to be the decisive issue.
The 2022 midterm results came as a total shock to many political observers. As of Thursday morning, Democrats appeared likely to retain the Senate and even have an outside chance at holding the House, defying widespread pre-election expectations of an impending red wave.
So what happened? Why did Democrats do so well, and what does it say about American politics going forward?
To find out, I called up David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s most influential (and controversial) elections data analysts.
Shor is best known as the leading intellectual architect of “popularism,” a political strategy that urges Democrats to focus their policy and message on the issues and policies that poll best while trying to downplay the issue areas where they’re out of step with the public. Often, that leads Shor to advise Democrats to emphasize “kitchen table” economic issues and moderate their positions on “identity” issues like policing and immigration.
But this time around, Shor says, Democrats won precisely because they campaigned on a popular identity-related issue: protecting abortion rights.
The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson was a shock to the electorate’s system, waking people up to the fact that Republicans held a truly extreme position on an issue they really cared about. The GOP’s push to gut abortion rights gave Democrats a golden opportunity to paint Republicans as extremists.
“Banning abortion without any exceptions is probably as unpopular, or more unpopular, as defunding the police,” he tells me. After Dobbs, “abortion went from being a somewhat good issue for Democrats to becoming the single best issue.”
What follows is a discussion of the 2022 data that led Shor to this conclusion, the midterms’ implications for how we understand the big picture of American politics, and whether Dobbs will remain an albatross around the GOP’s neck in 2024. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Looking at the 2022 results, what jumps out at you the most?
This is a story of Republicans being mobilized and showing up to vote, but Democrats winning anyway because Democrats did a better job of persuading independents and moderate Republicans to vote for them.
It’s really hard to put an exact number on [turnout] until more data comes in. Yet if you really look at it from a couple of different angles — whether it is ecological analysis of county-level results, whether it’s individual-level early vote data, or whether it’s the AP VoteCast exit poll — it does seem like the electorate was something like 2 percentage points more Republican in 2022 than it was in 2020.
Non-white turnout, if just defined by a drop-off from 2020, was substantially lower than white turnout. That’s fairly clear, both from early vote data and from county-level results, in places like Georgia. And it really does seem like, in relative terms, Democrats did worse in non-white areas in most of the country with the exception of the Rio Grande Valley.
The difference, and the reason why Democrats won, is that they managed to both win independents — which is probably the first time that a party that controls the presidency has won independents in a midterm since 2002. And [they] managed to get a non-trivial number of people who self-identify as Republicans to vote for Democratic incumbents.
I think that that’s due to a couple of factors. Democratic incumbents ran very, very disciplined campaigns that focused on issues that people cared about, whether it was abortion or whether it was economic issues like the cost of living.
And it’s a testament to the Dobbs decision, which I think had an immediate impact both on polling, on primary vote share, and on special election results. And also a testament to Republicans running quite bad candidates.
So of the various reasons why Democrats succeeded at persuasion, in your thinking, which one jumps out at you as most important?
I think that the biggest factor was the Dobbs decision.
If you look at every indicator that election nerds look at prior to Dobbs, whether it’s how Democrats were doing in special elections relative to their previous presidential election results, whether it’s the ratio of folks who voted in the Democratic primary relative to the Republican primary, whether it’s polling — all of the lights were flashing that Democrats were heading toward a red wave.
All of those indicators changed dramatically after the Dobbs decision. And I think it really fits into this almost optimistic vision of politics that Republicans did a thing that was really unpopular.
One of the most powerful forces in political science is this idea of what they call thermostatic public opinion, which is that voters really tend to punish dramatic policy change. This is one of the big reasons why generally midterms go very poorly for the party that controls the presidency.
What’s really unusual about this cycle is that Republicans managed to enact a radical unpopular policy change despite not controlling the presidency or the Congress. That allowed Democrats to campaign as the party of the status quo in a way that was both historically unusual and quite powerful.
On top of that, I think it’s really clear that Republicans did nominate bad candidates who both had a lot of trouble raising money and who came into the cycle with low favorability ratings. That really allowed Democrats to outperform [even in] places where they didn’t have the benefit of incumbency.
I want to read a quote from David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, on the question of candidate quality. He argued that people are overstating the importance of candidate quality in 2022 relative to elements of the national political environment:
Do you think that’s right?
It’s going to take some time to dig into the data and figure out what our overall popular vote numbers were.
