With the midterm congressional elections still more than seven months away, registered voters are evenly divided between the two major parties in their election preferences. At the same time, Republican voters are more likely than Democratic voters to say it “really matters” which party gains control of Congress in this fall’s midterms.

At this early stage of the campaign, President Joe Biden is much more of a motivating factor for Republican than Democratic voters: 71% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say they think of their vote as being “against” Biden; far fewer Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (46%) view their vote as a vote “for” the president.

The new Pew Research Center survey of 10,441 U.S. adults, including 9,021 registered voters, conducted March 7-13, 2022, finds that most voters (63%) say which party wins control of Congress in this year’s elections “really matters,” similar to the share who said this in early 2018 (65%).

Today, in contrast with 2018, Republican registered voters (70%) are more likely than Democratic voters (60%) to say which party wins control of Congress this year really matters. Four years ago, there were only slight partisan differences on this measure (67% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans said it really mattered which party controlled Congress following the elections) and that remained the case throughout the 2018 campaign.

The new survey finds that equal shares of registered voters say, if the elections were held today, they would support the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate (43% each) in their district. Another 10% say they are not sure who they would support, while 4% would vote for other candidates.

Early in the 2018 midterm cycle, Democratic candidates had a double-digit edge over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. Democrats went on to gain the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives that year.

As in previous midterms, voters are more likely to view their vote as an expression of opposition than support for the president. That is the case today: 36% say their midterm vote is against Biden, while 24% think of it as a vote for Biden; 38% say Biden is not much of a factor in their voting decision.

The partisan disparity in these views is wide: Nearly three times as many Republican voters think of their vote as being against Biden as say the president is not much of a factor in their vote (71% vs. 26%); by contrast, Democratic voters are about equally likely to say Biden is not much of a factor (47%) as to say their midterm vote will be “for” him (46%).

Amid the continuing conflicts over the 2020 election, a majority of Americans say they are very (23%) or somewhat confident (40%) that the midterm elections will be conducted fairly and accurately. However, there are sizable partisan differences in confidence: While 76% of Democrats say they are confident the fall elections will be conducted fairly and accurately (32% are very confident), only about half of Republicans (47%) say the same (12% say they are very confident).

Seven-in-ten adults are also very or somewhat confident that all citizens who want to vote in the congressional elections will be able to do so. There are partisan differences in these views as well: Democrats are about 20 percentage points less likely than Republicans to express confidence that all citizens who want to vote will be able to do so (61% of Democrats vs. 83% of Republicans).

Top election issues for Republicans and Democrats

About eight-in-ten voters (78%) say the economy is very important to their vote this fall, making it the top issue out of 15 asked about in the survey. Republicans are particularly likely to say the economy is very important to their vote in the fall: 90% say this, compared with 68% of Democrats.

Roughly two-thirds of Republican voters say that immigration (68%), foreign policy (67%) and violent crime (67%) are very important to their vote, while nearly as many (62%) say this about the size and scope of government. Democratic voters are less likely than Republicans to say each of these is very important, though the gap is particularly pronounced on the issues of immigration (just 34% of Democrats say immigration is very important to their vote in the fall) and the size and scope of government (just 26% of Democrats say this is very important to their vote).

By comparison, health care is the top issue for Democratic voters in the fall, with 74% saying it is very important to their vote; just 44% of Republican voters say the same.

About two-thirds of Democratic voters point to voting policies (66%) and education (also 66%) as very important to their vote, modestly higher than the shares of GOP voters naming these issues as very important to their vote.

But the partisan gap over climate change is one of the largest in the survey: Democratic voters are 50 percentage points more likely than Republican voters to name it as an important issue in their vote (64% vs. 14%) and are 40 points more likely to say the same about issues around race and ethnicity (54% vs. 14%).

Just a third of voters say that the coronavirus outbreak will be a very important issue in their vote this fall, though Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to say this (46% vs. 19%).

Congressional vote preferences

Overall, voters are split on who they would vote for if the elections were held today: 43% say they would vote for the Republican candidate in their district, while an identical share say they would vote for the Democratic candidate; 4% say they would vote for another candidate and 10% say they are not sure.

There are wide differences in vote preference based on race and ethnicity, age and education.

About half of White voters (51%) say they would vote for the Republican candidate, while 37% would vote Democratic. By contrast, a large majority of Black voters (72%) say they would prefer the Democratic candidate, while 7% prefer the Republican candidate. Asian voters favor Democratic over Republican candidates by about two-to-one (59% vs. 31%); Hispanic voters also favor Democrats (50%) over Republicans (28%).

As in recent elections, older voters remain more supportive of Republican candidates than Democrats: Half of voters ages 65 and older say they would vote for a Republican if the elections were held today, while 41% say they would vote for a Democrat. By contrast, about half of voters under 30 say they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the elections were held today, while 29% say they would back the GOP candidate. Voters under 30 also are about twice as likely as voters 65 and older to be unsure about who they would vote for (13% vs. 7%).

Voters with college degrees, especially those with postgraduate degrees, are more supportive of Democrats than Republicans this fall, while Republicans hold an advantage among voters with some college or less education.

This report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals:

Research team

Carroll Doherty, Director, Political Research
Jocelyn Kiley, Associate Director, Political Research
Baxter Oliphant, Senior Researcher
Andrew Daniller, Research Associate
Hannah Hartig, Research Associate
Amina Dunn, Research Analyst
Ted Van Green, Research Analyst
Vianney Gómez, Research Assistant

Communications and editorial

Nida Asheer, Communications Manager
Calvin Jordan, Communications Associate
Talia Price, Communications Assistant
Janakee Chavda, Editorial Assistant

Graphic design and web publishing

Alissa Scheller, Information Graphics Designer
Reem Nadeem, Associate Digital Producer

Methodology

Andrew Mercer, Senior Research Methodologist
Nick Bertoni, Senior Panel Manager
Dorene Asare-Marfo, Research Methodologist
Arnold Lau, Research Methodologist

Overview

The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. Panelists who do not have internet access at home are provided with a tablet and wireless internet connection. Interviews are conducted in both English and Spanish. The panel is being managed by Ipsos.

Data in this report is drawn from the panel wave conducted from March 7 to March 13, 2022. A total of 10,441 panelists responded out of 11,687 who were sampled, for a response rate of 89%. The cumulative response rate accounting for nonresponse to the recruitment surveys and attrition is 3%. The break-off rate among panelists who logged on to the survey and completed at least one item is 1%. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 10,441 respondents is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

Panel recruitment

The ATP was created in 2014, with the first cohort of panelists invited to join the panel at the end of a large, national, landline and cellphone random-digit-dial survey that was conducted in both English and Spanish. Two additional recruitments were conducted using the same method in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Across these three surveys, a total of 19,718 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 9,942 (50%) agreed to participate.

In August 2018, the ATP switched from telephone to address-based recruitment. Invitations were sent to a stratified, random sample of households selected from the U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File. Sampled households receive mailings asking a randomly selected adult to complete a survey online. A question at the end of the survey asks if the respondent is willing to join the ATP. Starting in 2020, another stage was added to the recruitment. Households that do not respond to the online survey are sent a paper version of the questionnaire, $5 and a postage-paid return envelope. A subset of the adults returning the paper version of the survey are invited to join the ATP. This subset of adults receive a follow-up mailing with a $10 pre-incentive and invitation to join the ATP.

Across the four address-based recruitments, a total of 19,822 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 17,472 agreed to join the panel and completed an initial profile survey. In each household, the adult with the next birthday was asked to go online to complete a survey, at the end of which they were invited to join the panel. Of the 27,414 individuals who have ever joined the ATP, 11,687 remained active panelists and continued to receive survey invitations at the time this survey was conducted.

The U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File has been estimated to cover as much as 98% of the population, although some studies suggest that the coverage could be in the low 90% range.¹ The American Trends Panel never uses breakout routers or chains that direct respondents to additional surveys.

Sample design

The overall target population for this survey was non-institutionalized persons ages 18 and older, living in the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii.

Questionnaire development and testing

The questionnaire was developed by Pew Research Center in consultation with Ipsos. The web program was rigorously tested on both PC and mobile devices by the Ipsos project management team and Center researchers. The Ipsos project management team also populated test data that was analyzed in SPSS to ensure the logic and randomizations were working as intended before launching the survey.

Incentives

All respondents were offered a post-paid incentive for their participation. Respondents could choose to receive the post-paid incentive in the form of a check or a gift code to Amazon.com or could choose to decline the incentive. Incentive amounts ranged from $5 to $20 depending on whether the respondent belongs to a part of the population that is harder or easier to reach. Differential incentive amounts were designed to increase panel survey participation among groups that traditionally have low survey response propensities.

Data collection protocol

The data collection field period for this survey was March 7 to March 13, 2022. Postcard notifications were mailed to all ATP panelists with a known residential address on March 7, 2022. 

Invitations were sent out in two separate launches: Soft Launch and Full Launch. Sixty panelists were included in the soft launch, which began with an initial invitation sent on March 7, 2022. The ATP panelists chosen for the initial soft launch were known responders who had completed previous ATP surveys within one day of receiving their invitation. All remaining English- and Spanish-speaking panelists were included in the full launch and were sent an invitation on March 8, 2022.

All panelists with an email address received an email invitation and up to two email reminders if they did not respond to the survey. All ATP panelists that consented to SMS messages received an SMS invitation and up to two SMS reminders.

Data quality checks

To ensure high-quality data, the Center’s researchers performed data quality checks to identify any respondents showing clear patterns of satisficing. This includes checking for very high rates of leaving questions blank, as well as always selecting the first or last answer presented. As a result of this checking, three ATP respondents were removed from the survey dataset prior to weighting and analysis.

Weighting

The ATP data is weighted in a multistep process that accounts for multiple stages of sampling and nonresponse that occur at different points in the survey process. First, each panelist begins with a base weight that reflects their probability of selection for their initial recruitment survey. The base weights for panelists recruited in different years are scaled to be proportionate to the effective sample size for all active panelists in their cohort and then calibrated to align with the population benchmarks in the accompanying table to correct for nonresponse to recruitment surveys and panel attrition. If only a subsample of panelists was invited to participate in the wave, this weight is adjusted to account for any differential probabilities of selection.

Among the panelists who completed the survey, this weight is then calibrated again to align with the population benchmarks identified in the accompanying table and trimmed at the 1st and 99th percentiles to reduce the loss in precision stemming from variance in the weights. Sampling errors and tests of statistical significance take into account the effect of weighting.

Some of the population benchmarks used for weighting come from surveys conducted prior to the coronavirus outbreak that began in February 2020. However, the weighting variables for panelists recruited in 2021 were measured at the time they were recruited to the panel. Likewise, the profile variables for existing panelists were updated from panel surveys conducted in July or August 2021.

This does not pose a problem for most of the variables used in the weighting, which are quite stable at both the population and individual levels. However, volunteerism may have changed over the intervening period in ways that made their 2021 measurements incompatible with the available (pre-pandemic) benchmarks. To address this, volunteerism is weighted using the profile variables that were measured in 2020. For all other weighting dimensions, the more recent panelist measurements from 2021 are used.

For panelists recruited in 2021, plausible values were imputed using the 2020 volunteerism values from existing panelists with similar characteristics. This ensures that any patterns of change that were observed in the existing panelists were also reflected in the new recruits when the weighting was performed.

The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey.

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request. In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

Dispositions and response rates