Voter Demographics

Widely cited findings in the national exit polls suggest Latinos tilted heavily in favor of the Democrats in the 2006 election, taking back a significant portion of the support they had granted the Republicans just two years earlier.

With roughly 95% of the votes tallied so far in House races across the country, the overall partisan breakdown is 52% for Democratic candidates, 46% for Republican candidates and 2% for others. In actual votes, Democratic House candidates in 2006 have already tallied nearly 5 million more votes than they did in 2002, while the Republican tally is down more than 3 million from four years ago.

The key to the strong Democratic showing yesterday was the support their candidates drew from moderate and independent voters, an analysis of the exit polls shows. With more than nine-in-ten Republicans and Democrats casting ballots for representatives of their parties, just as they did two years ago, the Democrats' 57%-39% advantage among independents proved crucial.

In recent decades, there have been three basic ways that turnout has worked to produce the sort of "big wave" midterm that the Democrats are hoping for next week.

Political pollsters continue to cast a wary eye on the growing number of Americans who use only a cell phone and have no landline. The Pew Research Center estimates that this group now constitutes one-in-ten adults. But three Pew surveys of cell-only Americans this year have found that their absence from landline surveys is not creating a measurable bias in the bottom-line findings.

In a Pew Forum roundtable conversation, Forum senior fellow John Green and two prominent journalists speculate that it will be difficult for the Republican Party to mobilize evangelicals to go to the polls in great numbers next month. They also discuss challenges faced by the Democratic Party in appealing to this segment of the electorate.

This fact sheet presents estimates for the number of Hispanics who will be U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old and thus eligible to vote as of November 2006.

Red States Stay Red, Blue States Get Bluer, Swing States Deadlock

The Center's report offers a richly textured portrait of the American electorate, including a new analysis of 2004 election returns that reveals the congruence between where people live and how they vote.

Hispanics accounted for half of the population growth in the United States between the elections of 2000 and 2004 but only one-tenth of the increase in the total votes cast.