On Tuesday, November 8, Americans will go to the polls to vote in elections that will determine which party controls the House of Representatives and the Senate for the next two years, and will also fill many state-level legislative and executive positions.

If history is a guide, it is likely that a relatively small fraction of American adults eligible to cast ballots will actually do so, perhaps less than half. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in August found that only 36% of registered voters said that they had “given a lot of thought” to the coming election.

The share of Americans who will vote is likely to be older and whiter than the population at large. Pew’s data found that 50% of registered voters aged 65 or older have given a lot of thought to the election, compared to only 20% of those aged between 18 and 29.

The percentage of white registered voters who said they have given a lot of thought to the election was 40%, compared to 30% of Hispanic voters, 27% of Black voters, and 17% of Asian voters.

Income and education

Other major factors that correlate with engagement in the coming election include levels of education and income.

According to Pew’s data, engagement with the coming election was highest among individuals with advanced college degrees, at 40%.

Interestingly, while only 34% of college graduates with no advanced degree reported high engagement, those with some college but no degree reported the same level of engagement, 40%, as those with postgraduate degrees. Engagement was lowest among those who didn’t graduate high school or whose highest level of education was a high school diploma, at 32%.

Typically, wealthier Americans are, on average, more likely to vote than the non-wealthy. U.S. Census data indicates that while 85% of people in households with income over $150,000 voted in 2020, just 72% of people in households with between $50,000 and $74,999 did, and only 50% of people in households with income between $15,000 and $19,999 voted.

Economy a major issue

While there have been many headline grabbing issues in U.S. news reports in the previous year, the state of the economy is seen as the most important factor that most voters will be considering in November. Asked how important it was to them, 77% of people polled by Pew rated it as very important.

With inflation running high, at more than 8% year-over-year, and threats of a looming recession, it may not be surprising that voters are focused on the issue.

That news could bode ill for the Democratic Party, which currently holds the White House and both houses of Congress. In midterm elections, the party of the sitting president almost always loses seats in Congress. This year, Republicans are hopeful that, with margins already slim, this dynamic will help them take control of one or both chambers.

Abortion effect

However, while typical election participation trends might hold true in 2022, there is the possibility of a change on the margins. While still likely to vote in lower numbers than their older counterparts, participation among younger voters in November could be boosted by anger over the Supreme Court’s decision in June overturning Roe v. Wade, an earlier decision that created federal protection guaranteeing the right to an abortion.

“Anger is a good mobilizer,” Lisa Bryant, an associate professor of political science at California State University, Fresno, told VOA. “It sounds counterintuitive, but people turn out when they’re angry.”

The abortion issue may also increase participation among women, she said.

“The Democratic Party, and particularly women, which make up a larger share of the Democratic Party, are angry about the Roe decision,” Bryant said. “I think that that will motivate a lot of people to turn out this year.”

She said that voters motivated by the abortion ruling could offset, somewhat, the difference in participation between the youngest and oldest American voters.

“Young women are registering in record numbers and saying that they intend to turn out in record numbers,” Bryant said. “So we might see that gap closed a little bit this year.”

Adjustment effect

Jan Leighley, a professor of political science at the American University School of Public Affairs, told VOA that there are other reasons to question whether the conventional wisdom about midterm turnout will necessarily hold in 2022.

Pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic disruptions and uncertainty, controversial Supreme Court decisions and the ongoing investigations into former President Donald Trump, Leighley said it might be unwise to assume that past patterns of behavior will necessarily hold in 2022.

“It’s not that it’s a new normal, but maybe the old processes have shifted,” she said. “Maybe we’re still in an adjustment period.”

In particular, she said, it might affect peoples’ propensity to vote in ways that didn’t apply in previous elections.

“People have cross-pressures,” she said. “And how they put all of those pieces together, I think, changes the rational decision of whether you vote or not, especially for people who haven’t voted before.”

Historical participation

Federal elections in the U.S. take place every two years, and in every one all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the ballot, as are roughly one-third of the 100 seats in the Senate. Because U.S. presidents serve four-year terms, every other election is considered a “presidential” election, while those that occur two years later, at the midpoint of the sitting president’s term, are called “midterms.”

Historically, presidential elections have attracted significantly higher voter participation than midterms. According to the United States Elections Project, maintained by Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, turnout in U.S. presidential elections has hovered between 49% and 65% of the voting-eligible population for most of the past 100 years.

For midterms, turnout has been considerably lower, remaining between 33% and 49% for most of the past 100 years.

However, in the last two federal elections, turnout was markedly higher than in recent years. In the 2018 midterm election, participation hit 50%, the highest figure since 1914. In the 2020 presidential election, 66.7% of the voting eligible population cast a ballot, the highest percentage since 1900.

Political scientists say that recent turnout levels have been boosted by the fact that Trump, a polarizing political figure, drove engagement on both sides of the political aisle. In addition, measures taken in 2020 to make voting easier during the COVID-19 pandemic may also have increased turnout.

International comparison

It can be difficult to compare voter participation across countries because there are different ways of measuring it. Some consider the percentage of voting age people who cast a ballot. Others consider only the percentage of voting-eligible individuals who vote (excluding resident aliens, for example). Still others measure the percentage of people who have registered to vote who actually show up to cast a ballot.

By most measures, though, participation in the U.S. lags behind many of its peer countries, particularly those, like Belgium and Australia, where laws that make voting compulsory drive participation rates to around 80%.

Data collected by Pew Research, for example, showed that among all the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, only Slovenia, Latvia, Chile, Luxembourg and Switzerland had lower voter participation rates than the U.S.
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A new global public opinion survey of people in 25 countries has revealed steep declines in support for China, although Beijing still is seen favorably by many in Africa, where it is vying for influence with Washington.

The survey by the Britain-based YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project was carried out between August and September this year, polling about 1,000 people in each country, including in three large African states: Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. The survey asked people about their opinions on China, the United States and Taiwan.

The data showed that in the West, support for China has dropped considerably in the past four years. One reason for that could be the pandemic. When respondents were asked about where it originated, most people placed blame for the outbreak of COVID-19 squarely on China.

Asked if China had a “generally positive or negative effect on world affairs” only 17% of respondents in France said it was positive, down from 36% in the first survey in 2019. In Germany that figure was even lower, at 13%, down from 30% four years ago.

Many other Western countries mirrored this trend, but the story is slightly different in Africa, where China is the continent’s largest trading partner. Although its ranking also dropped slightly over the four-year-period in Nigeria and South Africa, across the continent, China was still widely seen as a force for good.

In South Africa 61% of respondents saw China’s influence in the world as positive, in Kenya the support for China was higher at 82% and, in Nigeria, it was highest out of the three, standing at 83%.

Still, despite Beijing’s no-strings loans and large infrastructure projects as part of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, African support for the U.S. remained slightly higher.

In South Africa, 69% of people interviewed saw the U.S. as a generally positive force, and in both Kenya and Nigeria that number was at 88%.

Preferred superpower

On a separate question about which country, China or the U.S., respondents would prefer to have as the global superpower, 20 of the 25 countries polled chose the U.S., including all four Africa nations by a huge margin.

Seventy-seven percent of Nigerians chose the U.S. as the preferred superpower, as did 80% of Kenyans, and to a lesser extent 59% of South Africans.

“Results from the African countries in this study stand out for how they reflect such positive views toward both America and China as actors on the world stage,” Joel Rogers de Waal, academic director at YouGov, told VOA.

“At the same time, however, they show an obvious preference for having America, rather than China, as the reigning superpower, which perhaps raises some interesting questions about the progress of Chinese soft power in these parts of Africa.”

On other, more specific questions, the U.S. fared less favorably. For example, asked which country had engaged in “bullying” behavior globally, Washington trumped Beijing in all three African nations.

Likewise on the question of which country has “given military support to one side or another in a foreign civil war, in ways that do more harm than good to the people of that country.” Africans blamed the U.S. for this more than China. And in terms of being suspected of interference in other countries’ national elections, the U.S. again fared worse than China.

And although Washington increasingly warns Africa and the world of the threat of Chinese spying and surveillance, respondents in both South Africa and Nigeria placed more blame for international cyberattacks on the U.S.

Question of Taiwan

While China was more popular among African and many other global South countries surveyed than it was in the West, that support was not unconditional.

The survey was conducted around the time Taiwan was in the news amid the controversial visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the contested island. Since then, Washington has warned that China could move to annex Taiwan sooner than expected.

In Beijing, at the Chinese Communist Party’s congress, President Xi Jinping said he reserved the option of taking “all measures necessary” on the issue of Taiwan.

While the vast majority of African governments do not have diplomatic relations with Taipei and back Beijing—which regards the self-governing island as part of greater China—the survey indicates ordinary Africans differ with their political leaders on the issue.

“If China used force against Taiwan … do you think other countries should provide help?” the poll asked. Some 60% of Nigerians thought help should be provided to Taiwan, while 63% of Kenyans agreed, as did 47% of South Africans.

Those numbers were higher even than in some Western countries, with only 38% of French people surveyed saying help should be provided to Taiwan, and just 52% of respondents in the U.S. agreeing.

The data indicates that global politics are not as binary as some believe, with ordinary people in Africa able to see China as a generally positive force in the world, while also expressing concerns about some of its policies. as well as support for the defense of Taiwan.
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In November, Nathen Avelar of Merced, California, will have his first opportunity to vote in a federal election, and the 18-year-old musician and youth organizer says that he plans to seize it, casting a ballot that, he hopes, will help move both his community and his country toward the kind of future he wants for both.

The election, in which millions of voters like Avelar will be able to cast a ballot for the first time, will determine the control of both houses of the United States Congress, as well as state legislatures, governorships, and other state level offices.

Voters will also decide on a variety of state-level referenda, such as a proposed amendment to the state constitution in California that would guarantee women the right to abort a pregnancy. The proposal is a direct response to the decision by the Supreme Court earlier this year to strip away legal protections for abortion rights at the federal level — an issue very much on the minds of many Americans headed to the polls in November.

Starting locally

Avelar, who recently graduated from high school, became active in local politics during a successful effort to persuade the Merced City Council to adopt a new affordable housing policy. Now, affiliated with the activist group Power California, he is helping to register other young voters and to persuade them to go to the polls on November 8.

Young voters, Avelar told VOA, are concerned about a variety of issues, but one thing that drives many, he said, is the desire to see more diversity among elected officials. Generation Z, the cohort of Americans born roughly between 1990 and the early 2010s, are the most diverse generation in U.S. history, and right now, they do not see that reflected in the makeup of political leadership, at either the local or federal level.

“Not being able to see people in the spaces that we want to see ourselves in, specifically our city council, or just in general in seats of power, that’s definitely been a huge driver for me,” he said. “And other people that I’ve worked with are very passionate about that as well.”

He also said that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its previous ruling in Roe v. Wade, the case that guaranteed abortion rights, has been a major motivator.

“The attack on our general rights, just as people, from the Supreme Court has been really concerning to me, specifically around reproductive rights … that is really what’s been driving me,” he said.

Conservative viewpoint

While many young voters like Avelar have policy positions that generally bring them in line with the Democratic Party, Generation Z is no monolith. Research by Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) finds that about one in three voters between 18 and 29 is motivated by conservative convictions that place them more in line with the Republican Party.

That’s the case for Zach Bauder, a junior at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. The president of his school’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a national conservative organization, Bauder told VOA in an email exchange that he and his fellow conservatives have a long list of issues driving them to the polls.

For example, he said, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling has been a major motivating factor among conservatives, many of whom support restricting or banning the procedure. Other issues animating young conservatives include the pace of migration to the United States and efforts to accommodate transgender Americans.

‘Doubling down’ on Roe

“What motivates me to vote is what motivates most young conservatives,” Bauder wrote. “We care about doubling down on the end of Roe and enacting pro-life legislation. We want to close the border, ensure election integrity, end COVID-related mandates, and oppose the gender dysphoria ideology promulgated in America’s education system.”

“Gender dysphoria” is a diagnosed psychological disorder describing the distress or discomfort experienced by a person who feels that the gender they were assigned at birth does not reflect the gender they experience or express. Many conservatives in the U.S. object to accommodations made for individuals who assert a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth, particularly in schools.

Bauder said his fellow young conservatives also want to see an end to “endless wars that have nothing to do with America’s security” and to push back against what they see as “the cultural degradation of our country over the past several decades.”

Bauder said that he is seeing more interest in this midterm election among his cohort than he did in 2018. Partly, he said, it is a factor of major changes happening in the country right now, but he believes it is also due to young conservative voters waking up to their own power to influence the direction of the conservative movement.

“My generation, I believe, is beginning to see it can make a difference in the conversation happening on the right,” he said.

Turnout questions

The presence of highly energized young voters in this election cycle is undeniable, but just how deeply that enthusiasm runs is an open question. Typically younger voters do not vote as reliably as older generations, particularly in years like 2022, when there is no presidential election to focus peoples’ attention.

“The hard fact is that turnout for young people, if you just take ages 18 to 24, is much lower than older age groups, particularly 65-plus,” Mindy Romero, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Inclusive Democracy, told VOA. “Depending on the type of election it can be 20, 30, 40 percentage points lower.”

The problem is not that young Americans are disengaged, Romero said, but that they often don’t see much utility in voting.

“It’s not that they’re apathetic; they care very much,” she said. “It’s that they often don’t see why voting is an actionable step on issues that they care about. So there may be young people that are galvanized by the issue of abortion, for instance. Some of those will take some action steps. They’ll protest, they’ll organize people’s opinions on social media, that sort of thing. But it doesn’t always translate into voting.”

Higher participation possible

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of Tufts University’s CIRCLE program, agreed that voting among young people will continue to lag behind older generations in 2022, but she did point to some factors that might increase it somewhat.

She noted that in Kansas, which had a primary election in August in which a statewide abortion ban was on the ballot, a surge in new voter registration was followed by a much larger turnout than in previous primaries.

“Usually young people have a really low participation rate, as far as we can estimate, in primaries,” she told VOA. “But a record number of young people came out and the ratio of new registrants … was overwhelmingly young women.”

If the abortion issue continues to drive young voters to the polls, she said, their participation might also be increased by the fact that a number of states have, in recent years, passed rules simplifying the process of registering to vote or simply automatically registering eligible voters.

“That’s a big win, because voter registration is, of course, a necessary step to voting, and it’s actually the harder step, a lot of times, because you need to provide some documentation that young people may not have [at] their fingertips.”

Many young people, she pointed out, don’t yet have official forms of identification. “If you don’t have a driver’s license already, which a lot of young people don’t, that’s quite a barrier,” she said.

Having a plan

Aurora Castellanos, director for statewide campaigns with Power California, said that in working with young people, her group tries to stress the importance of having a plan to vote. Especially for first time voters, the process can feel complicated, she said, so it is important to thinking it through in advance.

“In most cases, folks don’t even have a voting plan,” she told VOA. “They don’t know how they’re going to be returning their ballot, or what the process is like to be able to do that.”

Castellanos added, “We start prompting them to actually put together a voting plan—that’s part of the engagement that we do. We go from, ‘What is the time when you’re going to be turning it?’ to ‘How are you going to be getting to your polling location, so that you have a plan on how you’re going to be making that happen?’ And we think that really makes a difference.”
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A congressional race in California between two immigrants, one from Pakistan and the other from South Korea, reflects the changing demographics of the American electorate. Mike O’Sullivan reports that abortion and the economy are at the heart of rival messages in the November 8th midterm election.
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