Analysis: Evangelical, senior vote hurt GOP as youth vote faded 

In an effort to explain why Democrats prevailed in the 2026 midterm elections, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said many GOP voters were frustrated with inaction by a Republican-controlled Congress.

“A lot of our voters stayed home because they were frustrated with the lack of productivity from Republicans in the House and Senate,” DeSantis told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

Exit polling data from the 2026 and 2022 midterm elections shows that key constituencies that led to success in previous elections failed to turn out in the latest balloting or, if they did turn out, turned against Republicans.

The most conspicuous were white evangelical Christians and voters ages 45 and older.

A Fox News exit poll of 39,385 respondents indicated that white evangelical Christians accounted for just 17% of voters, with 82% supporting Republicans.

By contrast, an ABC News exit poll from 2022 showed that 24% of respondents were white evangelical Christians who gave the GOP 83% of their votes.

Across all groups, turnout was up about 10% over 2022, from 112 million to 124 million in 2026, pending the count of all ballots.

That means about 5 million votes were missing from the white evangelical Christian community, with the GOP securing 22.31 million votes in 2022, compared with 17.29 million in 2026.

Vance blames war, gas prices 

That divide became apparent this week when Vice President JD Vance, who has strong support among evangelicals despite being Catholic himself, apparently broke with the president over the election results.

While DeSantis blamed the lack of results from a Republican-controlled Congress, Vance publicly claimed that the Iran war and high gas prices were to blame.

Many former GOP activists, such as Tucker Carlson, blamed the war for their break with Trump.

Carlson has a close relationship with Vance and represents a strain of America First thinking among evangelicals that has been critical of the U.S. alliance with Israel.

GOP support among Hispanic voters dropped from 39% in 2022 to 34% in 2026.

That gap may be even more significant in the future, since the number of eligible Hispanic voters has increased since 2022.

“Since 2022, Hispanics have added more eligible voters than any other group,” Pew Research said.

The Pew data shows that 5.25 million eligible voters have been added to the Hispanic rolls since 2022, increasing the total from 33.7 million to 38.95 million in 2026.

However, the Hispanic share of the total vote declined from 2022 to 2026, falling from 11% to 10%, according to the two exit polls.

In fact, the data challenges assumptions that progressives need a more racially and ethnically diverse electorate to win.

The Pew data shows that white voters have gone from 64% of the voting-eligible population in 2022 to 61% in 2026, yet their share of the vote remains 73%.

At the same time, minority populations, including Asian, Black, Hispanic and mixed-race voters, have increased to 39% of eligible voters, while the Fox News sample of nearly 80,000 voters shows the nonwhite voting population at 27% in 2026.

In 2022, Republicans received 58% of the vote among white voters, versus 40% for Democrats.

In the 2026 vote, white voters split their votes evenly between the GOP and Democrats.

That gave Democrats an 11.65 million-vote advantage among white voters over the 2022 election, with the 5 million evangelical votes accounting for about 43% of that total.

Older voters gave Democrats the biggest lift

When divided by age, the GOP did poorly in every category.

While many polls anticipated that the youth vote would play a conspicuous part in a Democratic wave, it was the senior vote that provided a lift for Democrats.

Heartlander News previously reported that the youth vote was not turning out as anticipated by many of the surveys predicting a blue-wave election that were published before the election.

If pollsters were to get the results right, we wrote, it would be because an entirely different group from those under 40 cast a vote for Democrats on Election Day.

At the same time, others were predicting a “Silver wave” election, which could save the GOP as seniors surged to the polls.

But neither a depressed youth vote nor high senior turnout helped Republicans.

Among 18- to 29-year-olds, the vote share was 11%, compared with 12% in 2022, with younger voters giving the GOP only 25% of their votes in 2026, compared with 35% in 2022.

Among voters ages 30 to 44, the vote share was down 1 percentage point, with GOP support declining 11 percentage points over the previous midterms in that age group.

The decline in both under-45 groups was significant, but probably not enough to sway an election.

By far the greatest damage came from voters 45 and older, who accounted for 70% of the vote.

The share of the vote was driven by a 9.17 million-vote swing in favor of Democrats.

The party received 34.20 million votes in 2022, compared with 44.6 million in 2026.

Republicans saw a relative decline of about 7.5% in support among all voters over 45. Higher overall turnout added 1.3 million votes for Republicans in 2026, compared with more than 10 million additional votes for Democrats.

Healthcare, inflation and Social Security are key issues for the group, which GOP candidates too often ignored.

Instead, they fought “yesterday’s battles,” DeSantis said.

“I knew Republicans were in trouble when I was reading an overview about what they were running ads on,” he said. “And they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars across the country on transgender ads.”