2024 elections could hinge on tiny shifts in electorate

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It’s still possible that the polls are all wrong and that Donald Trump or Kamala Harris are poised for a decisive victory on November 5. On the one hand, the seven battleground states are close enough that either candidate could win them all. But make no mistake: This seemingly close presidential election reflects a deeply divided electorate where the potential swings in one direction or the other that we constantly talk about are glacial and arguably self-negating. Ron Brownstein highlights how very small demographic changes since 2020 could turn out to be very significant:

Continuing a decades-old trend, white voters without a college degree, a cornerstone of the modern Republican coalition, have declined by just over 2 percentage points as a percentage of eligible voters since 2020, falling in below 40% of eligible voters. pool for the first time ever, according to a new analysis of the latest Census Bureau data by demographer William Frey shared exclusively with CNN.

While working-class whites are declining, Frey found that both whites with at least a four-year college degree and voters of color have each increased since 2020 by about one percentage point as a percentage of voters eligible. These increases are also a continuation of long-term trends that have seen well-educated whites make up more than one in four eligible voters and people of color exceed the proportion of one in three voters.

A vote is a vote, but these small changes help explain why Kamala Harris is focused on consolidating and extending recent Democratic gains among college-educated white voters — particularly women who support reproductive rights — while that Donald Trump is working hard to expand his own party’s beachheads among uneducated black and Latino voters, especially men open to his macho, highly gendered message.

Demographic developments vary from state to state, of course, and that could also have an impact on Election Day, Brownstein notes:

In such a close race, small changes in the makeup of the electorate in the most competitive states could make a difference. For example, the fact that the share of non-college whites, according to Frey’s analysis, has declined since 2020 as a share of the eligible electorate since 2020 is considerably greater in Michigan and Wisconsin than in Pennsylvania, may help explain why most analysts view the Keystone State as more difficult than the Keystone State. two more for Harris…

In the battlegrounds of the Sunbelt, blue-collar whites make up a smaller share of eligible voters: about 1 in 3 in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and just over 2 in 5 in North Carolina. Arizona and Georgia have seen large increases since 2020 in the minority share of their eligible voting population, Frey found, while non-whites actually declined somewhat in North Carolina and remained almost unchanged in Nevada . The share of college-educated whites increased as a share of eligible voters in Nevada and Arizona, while it declined slightly in Georgia and remained essentially stable in North Carolina.

It’s as if all of these trends are conspiring to produce the closest election since 2000. Yet, thanks to our winner-take-all electoral machine, we won’t have the kind of coalition government that some other type of system would. policy would likely require in such circumstances. Instead, we will have a Harris or Trump administration with a strongly partisan character (and in the case of a Trump administration, a particularly radical character) and a strong interest in aggressive use of executive powers. If Trump wins, there’s a good chance he’ll also be part of a governing trio that could very well run roughshod over Democrats and independents through power-building measures like budget reconciliation bills at the ordeal of the systematic obstruction, encouraged by a conservative federal government. judicial. And this will be true even though it is highly likely that whatever happens in the Electoral College, Trump will be on the losing side of the national popular vote (Nate Silver currently gives Trump a 53 percent chance of winning the presidency, but only 27 percent). probability of winning the popular vote).

Very large differences in the direction of the country will arise from tiny shifts one way or the other in a narrowly divided electorate. This is why anxiety levels are so high right now among those who pay a lot of attention to politics, even though the outcome may depend on whether “low-propensity voters” are barely paying attention.