About This Data
In order to make the 2018 election results easier to understand, we’ve broken down the individual vote history by demographics so it’s clear how the electoral demographics have shifted from 2014 and 2016 to 2018. This data comes from TargetSmart analysis of data that has been released by individual state election officials. While it’s important to keep an eye on 2016, the most relevant comparison is to 2014 as it was the last midterm election. For each of the following demographic data points, we’ve broken down the electorate by vote share as well as turnout. More information about these metrics can be found below as well as a few notes about the variables we’ve included.
- Race: Where self-reported race is not available, a TargetSmart model is used. 2018 and 2014 voter records have been classified using the same TargetSmart race model. The “Uncoded” category indicates that the TargetSmart race model is not confident enough to make a prediction.
- Gender: Where self-reported gender is not available, a TargetSmart model is used.
- Voter Score: Quintiles of voting frequency in general or primaries going back to 2000 for registrants that have voted in at least one of these elections. Calculated at the county level.
- Party Rollup: Party registration is not available in every state. In states where it is not available, all voters will be labeled as ‘Unaffiliated’.
- Urbanicity: A TargetSmart-specific measure that describes how densely developed an area is based on population, employees, businesses, traffic counts and other factors. The urbanicity measure is broken down into 6 classifications: Rural 1, Rural 2, Suburban 3, Suburban 4, Urban 5, and Urban 6. For this site, they’ve been summarized further to Rural, Suburban, and Urban.
- National Summary: An aggregate of the states specified as available in the map above. Until vote history is available in all 51 states plus DC, it won’t be a complete national summary.
- Vote Share: Percentage of votes cast that each demographic accounted for.Vote Share: Percentage of votes cast that each demographic accounted for.
- Turnout: Percentage of people in each demographic that ultimately voted.
- Note: Turnout as a percent of registration is a moving target based on purges and inconsistent application of inactive tags. We recommend relying on vote share more than turnout percentage.
- Race with Education: This divides Caucasian voters into those with and without a college degree. Recent research has shown that these groups exhibit quite different voting patterns.[1]
Please note that in some states, it takes multiple data updates to obtain the full, individual-level vote history. We include states in the analysis on this site once our data represents 90% of the ballots that were cast in the election.
