By Jason Lange and James Oliphant
WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (Reuters) – Recent electoral victories have given Democrats increasing hope of taking back one and perhaps both houses of the U.S. Congress in next year’s midterm elections, but a new Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that some of that enthusiasm may be premature.
Republicans hold a greater advantage with older voters, who are more likely to turn out during non-presidential years. And those voters may be less swayed by the kind of cost-of-living issues that have animated recent Democratic campaigns, the poll found.
The poll “shows there is still a lot of work ahead for Democrats to unify their base and to demonstrate they can meet the moment,” said Joel Payne, a longtime Democratic strategist.
Democratic candidates have in recent months been able to leverage voters’ concerns about the economy and President Donald Trump’s overall unpopularity into a series of wins that have injected energy into a party that was moribund after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ loss last year.
The most recent victory was in Miami, where Eileen Higgins on Tuesday became the first Democrat in almost 30 years to be elected mayor. That came on the heels of Democrat Mikie Sherrill winning the New Jersey governor’s race and Democrat Abigail Spanberger being elected Virginia’s governor last month.
WARNING SIGN FOR DEMOCRATS
But the Reuters/Ipsos poll contains some blinking-red warning signs heading into a year where the party needs a net gain of three seats to win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives and a net gain of four seats to take the Senate.
Some 46% of U.S. voters aged 50 and older said they planned to vote for the Republican running in their congressional district, 8 percentage points more than the 38% who said they would vote Democrat, according to the poll, which concluded on Monday.
The strong Republican lead marks a significant change from past midterm election cycles, held midway through U.S. presidential terms.
In December 2021 – ahead of the last midterm elections – older voters favored Republicans by only a single point – 43% to 42%. In the same month ahead of the 2018 election, when Democrats ended up winning the House, they had a small lead among older Americans age 50 and up, 40% to 38%.
As they have traditionally, Democrats enjoy an advantage among younger voters. The poll gave them an 11-point lead on the generic congressional ballot among voters under 50 — 42% to 31%. Summing together voters of all ages in the latest poll, 40% picked Democrats and 39% picked Republicans, pointing to a tightly divided country.
OLDER VOTERS MORE OFTEN TURN UP IN MIDTERMS
But older voters are deemed more reliable voters in midterm elections, meaning there is some chance that key parts of the Democratic base won’t show up without Trump on the ballot.
Doug Sosnik, a former political adviser to former President Bill Clinton, said that Democrats now excel at turning out high-propensity voters except when it comes to older Americans, which could pose a problem next year.
“You have to look at everything through the prism of the midterm,” Sosnik said.
Voters over 50 made up 56% of the electorate in last year’s presidential elections but comprised 64% of voters in the 2022 midterm contests, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, which surveyed 4,434 adults nationwide, found 60% of older voters strongly agree with a statement that they would regret not voting in next year’s congressional elections, compared to 40% of younger voters who said the same.
That pattern played out in the recent gubernatorial elections, where both Sherrill and Spanberger managed to squeeze enough support from older voters to prevail. Both won about two-thirds of voters under 45, according to exit polls conducted by a consortium of networks including CNN, but a bare majority of voters 45 and over.
Reaching those voters may remain a challenge. Affordability was a central theme to both Sherrill’s and Spanberger’s campaigns, as well as Higgins’ candidacy in Miami. But the Reuters/Ipsos poll found that older voters are less likely to cite the cost of living as the most important issue for how they will vote next year. While five in 10 voters age 18-49 said the cost of living was the top issue, just four in 10 older voters said the same.
OLDER VOTERS HAVE DIFFERENT WORRIES
Older voters may be more insulated from day-to-day worries, Sosnik said: “Wealth creates an environment of a different set of issue concerns.”
Some 27% of voters age 50 and up said democratic values and norms were the most important factors, compared to 22% of younger voters. People also differed by age in which democratic values were most pressing, with older folks more likely than younger voters to cite the dangers of noncitizens voting and election fraud.
In addition, some 19% of voters age 50 and up said immigration was their top concern, compared to 12% of younger voters — an area where Republicans have historically kept an edge.
Sosnik said that Democrats don’t need to revamp their message next year but rather must tweak it to draw older voters, making prosperity “an issue for all age groups.”
That means, he said, going beyond job creation and affordability to making it easier for Americans to build careers and accumulate wealth.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted online, had a margin of error of 2 percentage points among all registered voters, including those age 50 and up. Among younger voters, the margin of error was 3 percentage points.
(Reporting by Jason Lange and Jim Oliphant; Editing by Scott Malone and Lisa Shumaker)
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