With fewer than 720 days until the 2024 presidential election, we plan to continue examining important demographic trends that could shape the election and the country’s trajectory. For the next few weeks, we’ll comb through the surprising midterm results and explore what they tell us for future elections.

Our final polling average had Republicans favored on the generic ballot by a point and a half. Though millions of votes are still being counted on the West Coast, the best estimates point to an eventual generic ballot of around R+3, suggesting topline polling was quite strong in 2022. Demographic subgroup polling, too, proved largely accurate. The table below shows that in most cases the demographic averages we reported match the National Election Poll and AP/VoteCast surveys.

Key Findings

• In several preelection posts, we warned that Democratic margins with Hispanic voters would continue to fall. Our final average placed the Democratic advantage at about 18 points—nearly exactly what VoteCast and the exit polls later found. This represents a roughly 10-point drop from President Biden’s 2020 performance according to VoteCast.
• Republican strength with white non-college voters slightly exceeded our 30-point expectation, though yet again the polls were quite accurate. Despite the overall Democratic over performance, the white working class continues to abandon the party in droves. The 33–34 point deficit with white non-college voters is significantly worse than Biden’s 25-point loss among the same group.
• Our polling average expected college-educated voters to support Democrats by 11.1 points. While the exit polls align with the predicted margin, VoteCast finds that Republicans lost that group by just 2 points.
• High-income voters slightly preferred Republican House candidates, a divergence from polling that suggested Democrats would carry those with a household income greater than $100,000. 
• Polling underestimated Republican support among white-college voters—and white voters more broadly. The GOP beat expectations by 3–5 points among both groups.
• Black voters, however, cast their ballots for Democrats at a higher margin than the polls predicted. The roughly 70-point margin of victory, however, is a decrease from Biden’s 83-point margin in 2020.

Previous election data is drawn from AP VoteCast and the National Election Pool exit polls.

*How we did this: This month-long average is a compilation of online and live-caller polls that release crosstabs. Internal and explicitly partisan polls are excluded. This edition averages polls from Monmouth University, Economist/YouGov, Morning Consult/Politico, Harvard/Harris, ABC/Washington Post, CBS News, Emerson, Marist, Yahoo News, Rasmussen, Echelon Insights, Marist College/NPR/PBS NewsHour, New York Times/Siena College, and Fox News.

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