Republicans stalled: No GOP headway with independents despite rejection of Democrats
Cami Mondeaux
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Republicans failed to make any headway with independent voters in the midterm elections even as they shifted away from Democrats. The failure reveals that the party’s messaging criticizing President Joe Biden was ineffective with a crucial voting bloc.
GOP support among independents has remained stagnant for the past four years, with only 38% supporting Republican candidates in 2022. That’s a slight increase over the 37% in 2020 but only on par with the 38% who backed the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections, according to data from the Associated Press.
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The party’s lack of progress among independent voters comes despite the fact that the group has recoiled from Democrats. Only 42% of independent voters backed Democratic candidates in 2022 compared to 51% in 2018 — a 9-point drop in just four years.
The data indicate that voters are increasingly unimpressed with Democratic candidates but hesitant to switch their votes if an alternative is perceived as too far to the right. As a result, about 20% of independents didn’t back either party in the November elections.
The numbers help explain Republicans’ lackluster performance last month when they failed to capture the Senate and gained only a slight majority in the House despite initial projections that the GOP would gain control of both chambers in the next Congress. Republicans were also hoping to seize on Biden’s low approval ratings among independent voters, centering much of their campaign on the president’s perceived policy failures.
That messaging didn’t resonate with independent voters.
“You’ve got to tell them what you’re going to do,” David Winston, a Republican pollster and senior adviser to House Republicans, told the Associated Press. “Somehow the Republican campaigns managed not to do that. And that’s a real serious problem.”
Data show independent voters who blamed some of the nation’s problems on Biden believed that others, such as inflation, were beyond his control. More than half of voters, 51%, said rising inflation rates were due to factors outside of Biden’s control compared to 47% who said he was to blame, the survey found.
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Independent voters may have also just been hesitant to back Republican candidates closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, according to Winston.
“Change has to be something they are willing to vote for as opposed to just the knee-jerk reaction that ‘this is bad so I’m just going to go another direction,’” the pollster said.