Making Sense of the Midterms
The year began with early predictions of disastrous midterms for the Democrats. Beyond the usual “history tells us that midterm elections generally go well for the party that’s not in the White House” headlines like “Democrats Predicted to Take Massive Losses” and “Bloodbath for Democrats” flooded our news feeds. With the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and incredible engagement efforts with the base AND those in the moderate middle, the predictions began to shift. So what exactly did happen?
First, let’s look at the big picture. Congress still hangs in the balance. As of this writing, the Senate is 48 Democrats to 49 Republicans, with Arizona and Nevada not yet called and Georgia headed to a runoff on December 6th. So far, only one Senate seat has flipped; Pennsylvania, one of Galvanize Action’s priority states where we ran our ads on a range of hot topics starting in May. According to exit polls (which are notoriously unreliable, but our best source of information at the moment) 51% of white women went for Fetterman (D) and 48% for Oz (R).
In the race to 218 seats to control the House, Republicans currently have 211 and Democrats 198. Republicans have picked up 16 seats and Democrats 4, one in Ohio’s first congressional district where voters chose Landsman (D) over the incumbent Chabot (R). This was a real feat: historically the party in power doesn’t pick up the incumbent’s seat and experts gave Landsman only a 16% chance of winning. Approximately 100,000 women in our target audience live in this district and we were able to connect with them by delivering our ads on reproductive freedom, the economy, and democracy. This race was won by fewer than 15,000 votes.
Voters clearly chose abortion rights in all five ballot initiatives, with three states—Michigan, California, and Vermont— enshrining reproductive freedom into their Constitutions. We are especially proud of the win in Michigan, where our reproductive freedom ads made over 9M impressions and then were picked up by the Michigan League of Responsible Voters and ran to help secure this monumental victory! Prop 3 passed (56.7% to 43.3%), with exit polls showing white women voting for it 56% to 44%.
Now, let’s turn our attention to our audience of moderate white women in rural, small town, and suburban America. Galvanize Action reached over 2M voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio since May, resulting in over 79M ad impressions. These ads featured the economy, healthcare, reproductive freedom, culture wars, and democracy—taking a strategically layered approach to our audience’s core concerns. Did these efforts have an impact? We can now confidently say YES!
As we’ve shared previously, Galvanize Action started a tracking survey in May to understand the shifting opinions of white women voters across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. In addition to studying the issues top of mind for these women, we embedded an experiment to evaluate the impact of our work. Half of the women were placed in a treatment group and saw our ads; the other half (our control group) did not see any of them. This means we can compare the two groups to see how our ads moved folks. The One For All Committee took over this publicly available research with a tracking survey of these voters to gauge where they stood on key issues and candidates leading up to election day.
The survey asked women about their choice for the Senate, with the last survey fielded right before the elections on November 4th. Women in the treatment group who saw Galvanize Action’s ads and then ads from the One For All Committee (that utilized our research and messaging strategies), had increased support for Democratic Senate candidates and decreased support for Republican candidates by a statistically significant margin.
What we don’t know yet is exactly how our audience voted compared to all white women nationally or voters overall. That data will be available to us next year and we’ll share our findings as soon as we can! In the meantime, we’ll be watching these remaining “too close to call” races along with you and how election deniers respond to the outcomes. We’ll also be digging into all the details of our newest research including results from our audience understanding surveys asking voters about why they made the choices they did. Stay tuned for those results soon!
What we know for sure is that where we worked, positive change happened. The strategies we used this year are a powerful foundation for what’s needed in the months and years ahead. The next two years will be a roller coaster of culture wars and intense efforts to drag voters toward authoritarianism. We are ready to fight back. In 2023 we’ll scale our impact, deepen our layered approach to messaging, and continue reaching voters in our proven-effective way.
