Wanting to vote versus actually showing up on Election Day to pull the lever or dot the paper is not the same thing.
With that in mind, pollsters spend a lot of time figuring out which demographic voting groups are more likely to actually vote. Being registered to vote doesn’t mean you bother voting, especially in these midterm years when there’s no presidential race on the ballot.
Following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, enthusiasm among Democratic women spiked but then receded. Since that time, there have been shifts in voter enthusiasm but the most recent iteration finds that among likely voters, Republican men are more jazzed about voting right now than anyone else.
Writing in the Washington Post, analyst Philip Bump spent time digesting data from YouGov surveys over the past several months. The standout trend lines might provide some indication of where voter enthusiasm may land in November:
On Tuesday, I looked at the growing murmurs that American women in particular are going to flood the polls in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Protecting access to abortion in the wake of the dismantling of Roe v. Wade quickly became a rallying cry aimed at November — but polling doesn’t indicate that Democrats have seen a big surge in support from female voters.
In fact, data provided to The Washington Post by the polling firm YouGov indicate that the group that reports the most enthusiasm about voting is the polar opposite of what many expect: Republican men. And that this enthusiasm has grown.
For example, Democratic women saw a large bump when the Dobbs ruling was announced back in late June:
The spike jumped in June but then fell back to the expected norm. In fact, every group of women saw a slight bump but the impact seems to have worn off. What’s noteworthy is that before that time, Republican women were already more enthusiastic to vote in November.
As for men, the trend lines look a little different with a notable standout:
Democratic men also joined the abortion bandwagon back in June but that enthusiasm wore off more quickly than Democratic women.
The standout group, among both charts, is Republican men, whose trend line is the highest of all groups and locked in an upward course.
Democrats are counting on abortion as the issue to overcome Biden’s record inflation, foreign policy failures, and problematic energy prices. Since that enthusiasm seems to be waning to some extent, the new Biden pivot is attacking “MAGA Republicans” as being a threat to democracy, another area that might motivate some Democrats to vote but it will not help stabilize the cost of groceries or reduce the price of fuel at the pump.
This could either mean that Democratic enthusiasm is being under-reported or that Republican enthusiasm is being over-reported.
The other possibility is the opposite, that Republican enthusiasm is higher than the chart portends and Democrats are still trying to cobble together a motivational message to get voters to the polls in November.
Whatever the case, it’s a myth that Democratic women are fired up in such numbers as to overcome Republican enthusiasm overall or somehow account for Biden’s first two years of failure.
Will Biden attacking half the country as “semi-fascist” make people more or less enthusiastic to vote? The answer to that may be the trend line among Republicans who feel personally attacked and more inclined than ever this year to make their voices heard.
