The 2024 Swing Electorate

“Every Election Has Big Swings, Even in a Polarized Country. This One Will Too.” is how Nate Cohn headlined his New York Times twice-weekly newsletter, The Tilt, on Friday, which does a deep dive into the world of political data. 

This should hit home with voters and even more so with political practitioners building audiences to persuade and turn out voters in the final stretch. 

Despite the 2024 general election being framed as a tribal contest, polling and modeling of the American electorate show an undercurrent of inconsistent ideologies.  Nate provides some examples of issues that have led people to reconsider their loyalties…

“There’s been a pandemic; a debate over vaccine mandates; the war in Gaza; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; rising housing prices and homelessness; the “woke” left and the conservative backlash against it, from trans rights to critical race theory.”

At L2, we work with HaystaqDNA to build nationwide issue, candidate, and behavior models that highlight the complexity of the electorate. Thousands of organizations use these models through our DataMapping tool, and the most used model in the past six months from over 150 choices has been “Likely Ticket Splitters.” 

The interest in and spending behind the Ticket Splitter model shows that practitioners have picked up on what polling is telling them. There are many persuadable voters in critical states and districts. These voters are not ideologically pure, nor does party registration perfectly define who they are and how they will vote.  Learning who they are and reaching them down to the individual level is critical (report on the 50MM+ L2/HaystaqDNA swing voters) as they are those voters most likely to impact your race in an unexpected way.

Nate caps off the piece by saying that while much will likely remain the same from the 2020 cycle and many of those swing voters will offset each other in their shifts, there is still the potential for larger-than-expected swings and surprises as we come down to election day, 

“The warning signs are everywhere, from Republican gains among young and nonwhite voters to the unusual state-by-state patterns in the midterm election. And if the result is different from the past, it won’t be hard to explain. From inflation and the debate over “woke” to Jan. 6 and the end of Roe, the last four years have brought a new set of issues that few people even imagined a decade ago.”Three Key Takeaways: 

• G2024 is not simply a tribal GOTV contest but rather a battle to find swing/undecided voters
• Campaigns at all levels using data should incorporate survey-based modeling for planning/analysis and to reach voters
• Sign up for “The Tilt”