Midterms on Reddit: how much people wrote about the 2026 vote, against 2022

There’s the perennial question of how much attention midterms get, and what your feed looks like is one way to guess at that. But keep in mind that your feed is not the same thing as Reddit, which is what I’m counting here.

Comments containing either “midterm” or “midterms”, from July through September, in both the current year and the previous year, midterm years.

In the current-year window alone, there were over a billion text-bearing comments.

How big an increase was this cycle, where were they discussed, and among people who discussed them, did Democratic-leaning or Republican-leaning subreddits have more?

How much did Reddit write about the midterms?

First off, it’s worth remembering that the word “midterm” has multiple meanings; it can also refer to a school exam. So if I just look at raw word counts, I’ll be mixing together people talking about elections with people taking chemistry.

So to get around this problem, I’m going to use two steps, a filter on words like “vote”, “Senate” or “Trump” in addition to the word “midterm”. Think of these as two automated judges, who will take a blind sample of comments, some containing one of those political words and some not, and tally how many comments on each side are really about US elections.

As it turns out, that second step turned out to be more important than I’d thought, at least by my estimate. (I should note that there are probably many genuine election comments that contain none of those political words; hopefully you can picture what kind of language your own wording might be.) Even in the earlier window, the filter alone misses about a quarter of genuine election talk. In the later window, it’s closer to 38%.

So the headline figures here are adjusted for this sample, and the corrected estimate is shown alongside the keyword filter used by itself.

Another possible explanation for this trend would be platform growth. All the figures presented here are therefore given as rates, per million comments.

The rise is not evenly spread throughout the summer; here’s the rate of the word-filter, for each month, for both years.

As you can see, July is pretty flat between the two years, but August is where things start to get interesting; it’s about 1.12× the rate of the same month four years back. September is where the jump really happens; it’s around 1.9× the rate of the same month four years back.

But if you look at the earlier cycle, it continued rising after September. In fact, November was higher than any month in this year’s data, and the records stop in September. Hence, it is still not clear if the whole current cycle will end up being higher than the last one. There’s another unexplained oddity: this year’s January is already higher than any month before October in the previous cycle.

One possible explanation for this could be more general election talk, so I looked into that. When looking only at the same months in both cycles and filtering for comments containing the word “election” but not “midterm”, I found that they were around 0.85× as frequent this year as in the previous cycle. It seems that election-only talk has gone down, while midterm talk has gone up.

Another unplanned twist: I’d looked at the five hundred subreddits that were busiest four years ago, and tracked them forwards. The rate of “word-filter” talk in those communities had risen more than on Reddit as a whole.

The 500 subreddits that were busiest in 2022 accounted for 43% of text comments on the site back then; they’re responsible for just 16% today. Most of the new comments are in places that barely mention the midterms at all, and that’s pulling the overall rate down.

Which subreddits talk about the midterms most?

I’d assumed that most of the midterm talk was happening in a handful of big political subreddits, but that’s wrong. In July through September 2026, the top ten subreddits by number of comments containing instances of the word filters together accounted for only about a third of comments, 31.7%.

Try itThe same monthly count for any word or phrase you pick: Historical search

This summer, r/politics was the top subreddit overall, with 11.7% of such comments, but even so, the count is lower than four years ago, while the rate per million has risen.

There are several new leaders who were hardly visible in the last round, including r/askanything and r/oil. Both had virtually no comments back then, but now they’re near the top. I haven’t looked into why that is; all this post does is show where the comments were located.

Do Democratic-side or Republican-side regulars write about the midterms more?

I used the camps from my previous analysis of Democrats and Republicans on Reddit, which identified who was speaking. In this context, a camp refers to someone who’s a regular of one or another set of subreddits, either wholly on the Democratic-side or wholly on the Republican-side. To qualify as a camp, you have to exclusively post on one side or the other (not both) and have been active for at least two separate months over the course of the last twelve months, through September.

Then I counted how often those people used the word midterm anywhere on Reddit, per million of their comments. Here's what you get:

Democratic-side regulars talked about the midterms more than Republican-side ones, in both years. In the summer, the word “midterm” was used by people on the Democratic-side at 2.3 times the rate of those on the Republican-side.

The two ranges still overlap, so the change is not statistically significant. Still, if you look at all the variants I’ve tested, the gap in 2026 is larger, and it’s certainly possible.

The same is true even after removing r/Conservative from the Republican-side of the calculation. It’s also true if you restrict the data to only include people who were regulars and were active for no fewer than four months during the year.

But what if you refuse to measure any camp against its own earlier years? That is, on the Republican-side, regulars declined from 80,590 to 22,288. Meanwhile, the Democratic-side camp grew. But again, the members of each community are different from one year to the next, and the communities aren’t exactly the same either.

What does each camp mention in midterm comments?

Here are the neighbors of the word for each camp, where I’ve preselected seven topics; each has a fixed list of words:

economy, abortion, immigration, health care, Trump, Democratic leaders, democracy + voting rules

That’s fourteen comparisons across two years, so there were bound to be some differences by chance, and I have adjusted for that. Six survived that adjustment, and they’re listed below.

Republican regulars, economy mentioned more often, both years.

Midterm comments this year, 13.1% on the Republican side, 8.2% on the Democratic side.

On the Democrat-side, regulars who mention health care lead on both years, with abortion and voting rules also showing up as earlier topics. Trump is mentioned about equally by both camps’ regulars this year, at least based on their midterm remarks, and does not appear to be a major divider.

The quoted shares refer to the entire camp, not any particular individual. In fact, one person wrote 40% of all the comments on a single topic within a camp. The camp counts reflect any mention of the word; for instance, if someone mentioned “school” in reference to an exam, that would count toward the total.

So is Reddit paying more attention to the midterms than in 2022?

On this measure, the answer is yes, but only through September. I’ll quote the range, because the result changes depending how you label the sample, and remember that people using Reddit aren’t the same as the actual voting public.

As for why, there’s no way to know from this data, since the causes weren’t measured, so I’m not going to guess. If you want to look up any particular subreddit and see whether it leans more Democratic or Republican, you can do a lookup.

So, what’s next? What other questions are there about Reddit and elections that would be worth checking out? I’m promising to look.

What this data can't tell you

One thing this data isn’t great for: comments aren’t people, so someone who comments a lot in one month can throw off the numbers. Also, Reddit users aren’t like US voters, so higher counts don’t necessarily mean rising public interest. And since the platform has grown roughly one half over both time windows, I used rates instead of raw numbers.

I needed something like midterm followed by a list of politically relevant words, but that missed some of the real election talk. I found it missed more in 2026 than 2022, so I updated the headline to reflect that (with a sample). I also just counted comments with midterm or midterms, which missed other ways of saying it. I took that as a floor, and didn’t include spellings used with numbers (e.g., “midterm 2026”) or hashtags, or hyphenated mid-term. I did allow in matches in other languages and links to spammy sites. I removed those too, but based on an estimate from a sample.

I used two automated judges, and one arbiter who labelled a sample. There was no human re-check of those labels, and some comments were vague (e.g., after the midterms). Their handling could affect that estimate, and thus the range.

I dropped accounts on known lists of bots, but did not remove ones not on such lists. I could not see if comments were changed or deleted after my snapshot of the site. I copied these data a few weeks later, so any removals of comments from four years ago would have lost their text. However, I did see most removals this year, and they were captured in my earlier snapshot, which could have nudged the latest rate a bit higher. Even assuming that removed comments mentioned the midterms twice as often as non-removed ones, the latest rate would still be higher.

A camp refers to habitual posters in a particular set of subreddits: seven on the Democratic side, and eight on the Republican. It describes those particular communities, not all voters of either party. Debaters are included in those rates, since someone who only posts to one side of a debate during at least two months is considered part of a “camp”. The camp rates only include comments where the author still exists. Removed comments don’t have authors, so I can’t tell if one side is more likely to be removed. The subreddits and people involved in 2022 were different, so I can’t compare camp rates across the years. School exams are included in those rates, for both camps.

The topic word lists used to identify comments on the topic were fixed, so some comments that phrased the topic in another way were missed. Some of the keywords also appeared in a different context (school was one of them).

The data ends 30 September 2026, five weeks before the vote, so there is only a run-up to the vote, and October does not appear. In the previous cycle, the peak was in October and November 2022, but there is nothing like that yet.

Most of the growth in Reddit has been in other subreddits, where midterms are rarely mentioned. So the overall rate is a blend of change within subreddits and change between them.

Method

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

The data

There are CSVs with rates by month, list of subreddits, and topic shares for both camps. Rates are per million text-bearing comments or posts, shares are fractions of one, and neither include any usernames or comment text.

These files are licensed under CC BY 4.0; if you use them please attribute “KissMyPost” and include a link to this page.

• CSVMidterm comments by month, 2022 and 2026Comments with midterm and a political word per million comments with text, by month (x = month, y = rate, n = comments with text), with Poisson 95% intervals.
• CSVComments with the word midterm (any meaning) by monthComments with midterm or midterms in any context per million comments with text, by month, with 95% intervals.
• CSVMidterm posts by monthPosts with midterm and a political word per million posts with text, by month, with 95% intervals.
• CSVSubreddits with the most midterm commentsTop thirty subreddits by word-filter midterm comments in July to September 2026, with counts, bases and rates for 2022 and 2026, share of 2026, and whether the subreddit is in the 2022 panel.
• CSVTopics in midterm comments, by campShare of each camp's comments with the word midterm that mention each of seven topics, July to September 2022 and 2026.
• CSVTopic differences between the campsDemocratic-side minus Republican-side share for each topic and year, in percentage points, with Holm-adjusted p-values for fourteen comparisons.
• PNGMain chart as an imageMidterm comments by month, 2022 and 2026, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24234338

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