Huge Turnout Is Expected in 2020. So Which Party Would Benefit?

And Democrats already banked many of the rewards of higher turnout in the midterm elections, when the party out of power typically enjoys a turnout advantage and did so yet again, according to 2018 Times/Siena data.Nationwide, the longstanding Republican edge in the gap between registered and actual voters all but vanished in 2018, even though young and nonwhite voters continued to vote at lower rates than older and white voters.At the same time, the president’s white working-class supporters from 2016 were relatively likely to stay home. A large increase in voter registration would do much more to hurt the president in the national vote than in the Northern battleground states, where registration is generally high and where people who aren’t registered are disproportionately whites without a college degree.The voters who stayed home in 2018 were not much more or less likely to approve of the president than those who actually turned out, based on data from nearly 100 Times/Siena surveys, linked to records indicating who did or did not vote.Over all, the president had a 47 percent approval rating among Times/Siena respondents who voted, excluding those who did not offer an opinion about the president. The fundamental turnout shifts were similar, but the lower turnout among nonwhite voters hurt the Democrats more nationwide than it did in the relatively white battleground districts.Over all, the president’s approval rating was 45.3 percent among registered voters and 45.7 percent among likely voters, according to our estimates, based on national voter file data, the Times/Siena polling and a district-by-district estimate of the president’s approval rating based on national election surveys. In a high-turnout election, these Trump supporters could turn out at a higher rate than the more Democratic group of voters who didn’t vote in either election, potentially shifting the electorate toward the president.A high-turnout election would draw from another group of voters: those who aren’t yet registered.These voters are hard to measure.