The outcome of this November’s elections may hinge on which party can turn out its lower-propensity voters amid broad dissatisfaction with both their likely presidential nominees.
Democrats are worried that black, Hispanic, Arab American, Muslim, and younger voters may give a lackluster showing for President Joe Biden as he seeks a second term.
Some of these voting blocs have been hammered by inflation or think Biden has failed to keep his campaign promises. Others disapprove of Biden siding with Israel against Hamas in the Gaza war. Democrats aged 30 and under not excited by a president who would turn 82 shortly after winning reelection.
Republicans are perturbed by a series of special election defeats, most recently the New York race to replace expelled former Rep. George Santos, following a midterm election in which they underperformed and barely won the House.
ELECTION 2024: FOLLOW LATEST COVERAGE
The polls show Republicans have at least an even shot of retaining the House while recapturing the presidency and Senate. But dating back to 2022, Republicans haven’t always done as well as the polls have suggested.
One possible explanation for this is that since former President Donald Trump assumed leadership of the party, Republicans have traded some of their traditional suburban voters for increased working-class support.
This has improved Republicans’ chances of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin at the presidential level, which in turn means a clearer path to an Electoral College majority and the White House. But these non-college voters don’t turn out as reliably as their suburban, college-educated counterparts.
Under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Republicans scored big wins and made major congressional gains during the midterm elections. But both Clinton and Obama were reelected. With their new coalition, Republicans may have lost their midterm advantage while remaining competitive with Biden this fall.
That may explain why even as Trump lost in 2020, Republicans still gained House seats and came within two Georgia runoffs of holding the Senate. And Trump still outperformed his poll numbers despite coming up short.
“Whatever else you might say about Donald J. Trump (and there is much to say), his appeal is fundamentally different than previous Republican candidates,” writes RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende. “But it is not narrower.”
As we begin 2024, Trump narrowly leads Biden in the national polling averages. He is also beating the incumbent president in a number of battleground state polls, sometimes by surprising margins. The latest Fox News survey shows Trump up 50% to 45% in North Carolina.a state the former president carried by just 1.34% in 2020.
Win or lose, Trump’s coalition is more efficiently distributed for Electoral College purposes than Mitt Romney’s in 2012. In 2022, Republican congressional candidates won the popular vote, but that time it wasn’t as well distributed and it translated into a razor-thin majority.
Some say there is an easier explanation for the apparent discrepancy between the national polling environment and recent special election results: the polls are wrong. The Democrats’ won Santos’s House seat by a bigger margin than the public polling predicted, for example.
But not hugely so. “A three- or four-point miss isn’t perfect, but that’s pretty good for a House election — let alone a special election,” writes New York Times elections analyst Nate Cohn. “Historically, the average House poll is off by something like six points.”
Tom Suozzi, the once and future Democratic congressman from the district, looks likely to run ahead of Biden. “Last week, a Siena College poll — not a New York Times/Siena poll, to be clear — found Mr. Biden running a full nine percentage points behind Mr. Suozzi and trailing Donald J. Trump in the district,” Cohn noted.
Even polling errors are frequently about differing assumptions about what the electorate will look like. In 2012, pollsters who assumed Obama would be unable to replicate his 2008 levels of minority and millennial support and turnout gave Romney a better chance of winning. This also prompted a lot of Republicans to call for “unskewing” the polls.
It turned out Obama was able to reproduce enough of his turnout from the lower-propensity voters in his coalition to win a second term, nearly sweeping the battleground states.
A December New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump up 2 points over Biden among registered voters while Biden led by the same margin among likely voters. “Our polls have consistently shown Mr. Biden doing better among highly regular and engaged voters — especially those who voted in the last midterm election,” Cohn wrote. In those polls, the most heavily Republican voters have been those who voted in 2020, but not 2022.”
But Trump also has an advantage with people who sat out the last presidential contest, low-propensity voters by definition. “Mr. Biden leads by six points among voters who participated in the 2020 election, while Mr. Trump holds an overwhelming 22-point lead among those who did not vote in 2020,” Cohn added.
A September USA Today/Suffolk University poll found Trump defeating Biden by 20 points among non-likely voters, with a significant third-party vote. Biden had just 13% support among this group.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
One advantage Democrats retain is that they have been turning out their lower-propensity voters for years, including in the last presidential election. Trump remains unenthusiastic about, or outright opposed to, many of the practices Democrats use to do so. Rank-and-file Republicans are often skeptical of mail-in voting on ballot integrity grounds.
“It all comes down to turnout” is an old political cliche. This year, it might be truer than ever.