Commercial voter files hold great promise for studying certain aspects of American politics. These files, compiled by private vendors from administrative data collected by state and local governments, aim to get records for every registered voter in the country and are often supplemented with additional data from other sources. You can read more about them in our February 2018 study. [...]

Young voters are notoriously absent at midterms, but experts say this year could be different, in part because of the political activism surrounding guns. A July analysis from polling firm TargetSmart looked at the change in millennial voter registration before and after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They found that since then, youth voter registration has [...]

YOUTH WAVE. Younger voters are notoriously bad at showing up to vote, especially in midterm elections, but a new analysis of primary elections in 2018 suggests they are doing better this year. TargetSmart, a Democratic political analytics firm, studied 2018 primary elections in 24 states and found that 18-to-29 year old turnout increased by an average of 4 percentage points [...]