How Young Women Saved the Democratic Party in 2022

Donald Trump and Dobbs are defining the politics of a new generation of women

Even with polls mostly showing a narrowly divided electorate, the fundamentals—Biden's anemic job approval numbers, pessimism about the economy, and worries about inflation—suggested Democrats’ hopes for holding Congress were in trouble. Only twice in the past 40 years has the party controlling the White House not lost a significant number of seats in the midterm. Make that three.

Pundits have offered various explanations for the Democrats’ surprisingly strong showing, such as Republican candidate quality and the Dobbs decision. I think that’s largely right, but it ignores the fact that these things were especially important to a certain type of voter: young women. There was lots of chatter about the youth vote in the lead-up to the 2022 election, but it was young women who appeared uniquely motivated this year and who contributed significantly to the Democrats’ surprising performance.

How did young women make a difference? As with previous national elections, young voters skewed Democratic this year while older voters leaned Republican. Sixty-three percent of young voters (age 18 to 29) supported the Democratic candidate in their district, while only 35 percent supported the Republican candidate. This is slightly lower than Biden’s margin among young voters in 2020. But what’s most notable is that the Democratic advantage was largely driven by young women. According to national exit polls, more than seven in ten (72 percent) young women voted Democrat this year, compared to a bit more than half (54 percent) of young men.

This youth vote gender divide was evident in pre-election polling as well, but the size of the gap is still startling. Even more intriguing is that the gender gap among young people far exceeded the gender divide overall.

What about turnout?  At this stage, there doesn’t appear to have been an unprecedented surge of youth voting this cycle for reasons I laid out last time. Preliminary estimates from CIRCLE suggest that voting was slightly lower among young adults than it was in 2018 but higher than in previous midterm elections. In the last midterm election, young women voted at significantly higher rates than men. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the same thing this year. Young women seemed very motivated to vote. On college campuses, videos showed long lines of early voters composed almost entirely of women.

NextGen America @NextGenAmerica

Don’t let anyone tell you young people don’t show up to vote. We are — and we will continue to show up these last five days until Election Day, including on campus at UT Austin!

The most obvious explanation for the youth gender divide in voting is abortion. The issue is incredibly salient for young women, but far less so for young men. In the fall, our survey found that 61 percent of young women—compared to only 32 percent of young men—reported that abortion was a critical concern. For young women, no issue was more important. Abortion also featured prominently in the 2022 campaign. Democrats spent an enormous sum on campaign ads featuring abortion. The issue was also put directly to voters in the form of referendums in five states.

The Dobbs decision didn’t just raise the salience of abortion as a political issue, it may have actually increased support for it. After the Dobbs ruling, support for legalized abortion increased significantly. Nearly half of young women now say abortion should be allowed without any conditions or restrictions, compared to about one in three young men. And, after the Dobbs decision, our polling shows that young women increasingly see their fate tied to that of other women, a perspective not shared by older women. Two-thirds of young women say that “what happens to women in the US” affects them as well.

Case closed, right? Not exactly. If differing views on abortion are the source of the youth gender gap, we would expect voting differences to be markedly different this year. But, the gender gap among young voters really emerged after the 2016 election that made Donald Trump president. Before Trump, Democratic candidates averaged around 60 percent of the vote among young women. That number rose to 70 percent in the years following his election.

There’s good reason to believe Trump was an issue for voters this year. Typically, midterm elections serve as a referendum on the incumbent. But this year Trump, if anything, was more visible than Biden. In nominating a number of candidates who denied the 2020 election results, the Republican Party injected Trump’s big lie into the midterm elections. As Nate Cohn noted in a recent New York Times Podcast, Democrats overperformed in states in which abortion and democracy were salient issues. Cohn went so far as to state, “in some states, it was explicitly a referendum on the last presidential election.”

Trump’s presence matters for a number of reasons, not least because he is incredibly polarizing. Young women view him far more negatively than most other Americans. Nearly three-quarters of young women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, compared to 57 percent of young men.

In any close election, everything matters. Every group of voters is pivotal, and even marginal issues can make a difference. That said, the youth vote appears to have had an outsized influence this year, driven largely by the especially strong support Democratic candidates received from young women. It’s not so much a matter of understanding what issues or factors are important to voters but identifying who they matter to most. When it comes to abortion and Trump-style politics, many swing voters were turned off by extreme Republican candidates, but this combination proved uniquely repellant to young women.

With Trump announcing his candidacy for president this week, we may well see him define the 2024 election just like he did the previous four. For now, young women appear more committed than ever to opposing him.