Nov 16, 2018 4 min read

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A historic number of midterm voters elected a diverse pool of candidates Nov. 6, reflecting a demographic stirred up by the presidency, a panel of experts said at California University of Pennsylvania Tuesday night.

Youngstown State University Department of Political Science Chairman Emeritus William C. Binning, Northeastern University professor of political science and Big Data and Quantitative Initiatives director Costas Panagopoulos, deputy editor of PolitiFact.com Louis Jacobson, and Emory University professor of political science Alan Abramowitz analyzed the question: “Looking back at the 2018 midterm election: What happened and what does it mean?” Jon Delano, money and politics editor at KDKA-TV, moderated the forum.

“More than anything else, what made this election special, and what made it so important, and I think what explains why the turnout was so extraordinarily high, was one man, and that was Donald Trump,” Abramowitz said.

According to exit polls the experts shared, 38 percent of voters said they were voting to oppose Trump, 26 percent said they were voting to support Trump and 33 percent said their votes were neither to support or oppose him.

“He certainly did define the election. He wanted to define the election,” Binning said.

The experts said Trump invigorates voters on both sides while simultaneously generating donors. While some votes are still being tallied, Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives, at least 36 congressional seats and seven governor seats. Among those elected were a historic number of women, bringing the number of women in Congress to 121. Most of those are Democrats. The newly elected Democrats represent a younger and diverse group, which is ideologically divided, Abramowitz said. Many of the Republicans who lost their congressional seats were more moderate, he said, which could have long-lasting implications to the political divide.

“You’re going to see the parties moving further apart in the Senate,” he said.

The Senate was intended as a “saucer” to cool the heated debate in the House, Abramowitz said, referencing a political metaphor ascribed to a conversation between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The divide in the Senate means it will not serve as a “saucer,” Abramowitz said.

The panel said midterm elections commonly favor the president’s opposing party, so high turnover was expected and not necessarily indicative of a political shift. The experts added future redistricting will likely favor Republicans.

Jacobson described the midterm election as “a realignment election, but maybe not a permanent one.” He said Democrats still have not recovered from the number of congressional seats lost under former President Barack Obama.

According to exit polls the experts shared, the biggest issue for voters was health care, followed by immigration. It was the first time in recent memory the economy was not the top issue in voters’ minds, Panagopoulos said.

About 116 million people, or about half of registered voters, cast their ballots. If numbers exceed 50 percent once the final numbers are tallied, which Panagopoulos said is expected, it will be the highest turnout for midterm elections since 1914. Historically, midterm voters are older, white and Republican, he said. For the last three midterm elections, white voters made up 77 percent of midterm voters. In the 2018 election, 28 percent of voters were people of color.

“This is a very dramatic shift,” Panagopoulos said.

Binning noted Trump’s campaigning before the midterm election was unprecedented, and wondered if it would change the way future presidents campaign during midterms. Typically, he said, a president campaigning during the midterms is bad for his party. The experts speculated the effect was balanced.

“I think there’s some kind of change going on in the electorate in this election that we don’t fully understand,” he said. “I think the big turnout says there’s a lot of interest in politics, there’s a lot of change going on. We’re all experts, but we really don’t know what’s going to happen.”