A team of reporters and graphics designers at WSJ asks, “What Does It Take to Flip the 2024 Battleground States?“
Their setup:
The nation is becoming more diverse and more educated. Growing Latino and Asian-American communities are changing the voter composition in many states. The number of white, working-class voters—a majority of the electorate as recently as 2008—continues to shrink with each election.
These trends, combined with changes in candidate choices by various voter groups, mean that the 2024 presidential candidates are navigating a landscape different from earlier elections.
Our Swing-States Dial shows how such shifts in the seven battleground states can alter the outcome of the presidential election. Even small movements in voter turnout or party preference among a single subgroup can tip not just one swing state, but multiple states—and therefore the Electoral College.
What is this Dial of which they speak?
The Dial considers three inputs to create different election-outcome scenarios:
- Which Americans make up the voter pool? Latino voters, for example, are a growing force in the electorate and are likely to exceed the 10% share of all voters they posted in 2020. White, working-class voters—those without a college degree—are projected to fall by nearly 2 percentage points.
- Which Americans will choose to vote? Will young voters sit out the election, in part because of anger at U.S. policy in the Israel-Hamas war? Will former President Donald Trump drive up turnout among white, working-class voters?
- Which candidate wins their vote? Will college-educated voters continue their Democratic tilt? Will Republicans increase their share of voters without college degrees?
The feature is interactive, allowing readers to play with each of these inputs for each of the seven swing states. I won’t try to replicate that here.
Their state-by-state analysis is interesting, though, emphasizing just how “swing” these states are.
Pennsylvania
White, working-class voters are hugely important to Trump, providing 57% of all the votes he received nationally in 2020. This group remains a majority of the voter pool in the swing states of the industrial north: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, they cast 53% of the ballots in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the electorate that year.
That is such a big share that only a 1-point increase in Republican support among this group would flip the state from President Biden to Trump—even as its ranks give way to a younger cohort that is more diverse and educated.
Educational attainment—whether someone has a four-year college degree—has divided white voters sharply into those backing Democratic candidates and those backing Republicans. The same hasn’t been true among Black or Latino voters. Nationally, Trump in 2020 won white voters without a four-year degree by 25 percentage points, while Biden won white college graduates by 7 points.
Georgia
Black voters, by contrast, weren’t divided by their level of education: Biden won more than 90% support among those with and without degrees. And he won more than 60% support among Latino voters with and without degrees.
Black voters are one of the most loyal and important components of the Democratic coalition. Will they turn out this year? That question is particularly important in Georgia.
Biden won the state in 2020 by a closer margin than in any other battleground, partly because of a big increase in turnout among Black voters: 64% in 2020 compared with 59% in 2016. It was the first time a Democrat carried Georgia since Bill Clinton won it in 1992. If the turnout rate among these voters slips to the 2016 level this year, the state would flip back to Trump.
Nevada
In Nevada, Latino voters accounted for 16% of ballots cast in 2020, up 5 points from 2008, according to Catalist, a Democratic voter-data firm.
Democrats’ winning margin has shrunk in recent elections. Another big shift in Nevada would flip the state to the GOP.
Nevada also has one of the largest shares of young voters among the swing states, many of them Latino. Latino voters under the age of 30 swung 9 points away from Democrats in 2020 compared with 2016, Catalist found, while those over age 65 shifted by only 3 points.
It’s noteworthy that, six of these seven swing states went for Biden in 2020, giving him a 306-232 Electoral College win. Reapportionment pursuant to the 2020 Census would reduce the margin to 303-235, which is where the Dial is set by default. Similarly, the dials for turnout default to the 2020 numbers.
Simply reducing the turnout of voters under 30 OR that of Blacks and Hispanics by small percentages puts Georgia back into Trump’s column. And even a 1% uptick in the turnout of over-65s for Trump is then enough to give Trump Arizona and Wisconsin—and the win (272-266).
We don’t need a dramatic shift of Black and Hispanic support to Trump—which I deem extremely unlikely—for him to win. All it takes is a 3% or so decrease in their turnout.
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Author: James Joyner
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