Voters in the U.S. midterm election had a constellation of issues on their minds: inflation, abortion, crime, gun policy and immigration. The charts below illustrate sharp partisan divides over what decided votes, according to exit polls from Edison research.
For instance, of the voters who cited immigration as the top issue in casting their ballots, 69% were Republicans and 28% were Democrats. On abortion, the scenario was flipped with Democrats ranking it as their leading concern by a three-to-one margin compared to Republicans.
Republican voters said by large margins that inflation was severely hurting them and their families. The vast majority of Democrats said inflation had caused no hardship.
Democratic voters strongly support access to legal abortion in all cases; Republican voters say it should remain illegal in all cases. Yet the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion rights landmark scrambled some of those certainties, with Democrats as well as Republicans expressing dissatisfaction.
Biden himself was not on the ballot. But at the halfway mark of his presidential term, Republicans overwhelmingly believe that his policies are hurting the United States while Democrats think they are helping, according to the exit polls. Attitudes toward the president’s plan to cancel some student debt are also far apart and break along partisan lines.
Election denial remains core to Republican Party identification. Only a quarter of Republican voters in the midterms accept that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020. The universe of election deniers remains almost exclusively Republican. And yet a majority of Republicans believe that U.S. democracy is very secure. Democrats are less confident.
Republicans were more likely to wait until the last three days of the campaign to decide who to vote for.
Source
The National Election Pool Exit Poll was conducted by Edison Research. In the United States, a total of 17,912 voters who cast ballots on Election Day were interviewed at 250 Election Day polling places and 87 early in-person voting locations. This survey also includes 2,981 absentee and/or early voters interviewed by telephone using a registration-based sample (RBS). The National Election Pool members (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC) prepared the questionnaire. Data are as reported at 5 p.m.
An upper bound on the error due to sampling for a 95% confidence interval is +/- 4% for a typical characteristic. Characteristics that are more concentrated in a few polling places, such as race, have larger sampling errors. Other non-sampling factors may increase the total error.
Edited by
Suzanne Goldenberg
