The State of the 2024 Election: One Week Out

Ratings Changes: None this week.

Weekly Recap: A Polling Drought and A Breakdown of American Voters

When Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race this July, some worried that the three-month campaign between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would be too short. As the election approaches, however, most Americans are exhausted from the onslaught of inflammatory statements and mildly unbelievable news stories, eagerly awaiting the end of a campaign that didn’t exactly feel shorter than usual. 

In any case, however, voters can now count the number of days left of the campaign on their hands. The candidates are making their last pitches to voters, campaigns are using up their funds on ad buys across the country, and pollsters are releasing the final numbers. In the post-pandemic era where early voting is easily accessible across the country, many Americans have already cast their ballots, and most who plan to vote on Election Day have firmly decided which candidate they will choose. The next few days will be a time of great uncertainty, as voters agonizingly seek out any signs that their chosen candidate might be favored. The most prominent of these signs, of course, is polling, but this election cycle has been remarkably lacking in polling, leaving voters even further in the dark over the next week.

The Great 2024 Polling Drought

If one paid attention to polling during the 2020 election, they might remember a live polling tracker created by the New York Times that encompassed every single credible poll that was released during the campaign season. Looking at the final iteration of the page from Election Day, it is clear that polling was abundant in 2020. Even states not considered to be competitive, such as Illinois and Massachusetts, were polled; on any given day, one could expect the release of something like half a dozen credible polls for the presidential race alone. 

Now, however, it seems that very few polls are being released at all. Each day, there are perhaps one or two national presidential polls, a couple statewide polls (occasionally of multiple states at once), and the occasional Senate poll. Worse, many of the polls filling the gap tend to be by lower-quality pollsters with a partisan lean (almost universally towards the Republican Party). FiveThirtyEight’s Pennsylvania polling average, for instance, has been polluted by firms such as the Trafalgar Group, a Republican-biased pollster infamous for its poor-quality polling in the 2022 midterms, which included a poll showing a single-digit race in Vermont (the Democrat ended up winning by 40 points; the Trafalgar poll was ultimately off by a whopping 34 points) and “Quantus Insights,” a polling firm sponsored by the partisan Republican magazine “TrendingPolitics” and whose illustrious record includes using its official Twitter account to openly admit to shifting polling averages in Trump’s favor and to call a political commentator a slur. 

To FiveThirtyEight’s credit, obscure pollsters such as Quantus Insights tend to be weighted fairly lightly in its averages, so their overall effect is fairly small compared to polls from more trusted institutions such as The New York Times and Quinnipiac. Of course, this is only true when these high-quality pollsters are consistently producing enough polls to cancel out the low-quality pollsters. If current trends continue, we may witness a phenomenon similar to polling in the 2022 midterms, where the polling averages were flooded by Republican-biased pollsters who helped contribute to the “Red Wave” narrative that dominated the cycle before the actual results came in. 

Why might there be so few polls released this cycle? Pollsters are not likely to directly disclose why their activity has decreased so much. I would guess that much like with the “herding” phenomenon discussed in a previous article, fear of overestimating Democrats for a third consecutive presidential cycle—and of the subsequent backlash (especially from Republicans) and loss of credibility—is the main factor. One might think that the relative underestimation of Democrats in certain elections in 2022 might temper this fear, but presidential results appear to loom larger in the minds of pollsters. It remains to be seen whether these decisions will negatively impact pollsters’ credibility after the election, but for now, playing it safe seems more harmful to voters than helpful. 

A Breakdown of American Voters

Pre-election pundits often dedicate a great deal of coverage to large shifts in certain segments of the American electorate: Black men, the white working class, Muslim Americans, Latinos, young voters, etc. It can be helpful to cast a spotlight on certain groups of voters—indeed, even a small portion of the population can determine the outcome of an election if the swing among them is large enough. The issue with this sort of analysis, however, is that it sometimes doesn’t see the forest for the trees. In other words, if one doesn’t look at the big picture of the American voter base, they can develop some misconceptions about what most voters look like. 

Using CNN’s exit poll from 2020, here are some data points that might be surprising:

• Young voters make up a relatively small portion of the electorate—in 2020, only 17% of voters were between ages 18-29, while 60% were over the age of 45. The youth vote is certainly important in any election, but the reality is that young people almost universally turn out at a significantly lower rate than older people. 

• The voting electorate is generally whiter than the nation at large—67% of 2020 voters were white, as opposed to roughly 60% of the US population; by contrast, while Latinos and Asians make up 19% and 6% of the population, they only made up 13% and 4% of voters, respectively.

• Women turn out at a slightly higher rate than men—since around 1980, slightly more women than men have voted in presidential elections; in 2020, for instance, women made up 52% of voters. Even a small shift in the female vote—one of the largest single voter categories in the electorate—could drastically change the 2024 results.

• Few voters are rural, while most are suburban—a slight majority of 2020 voters (51%) were from suburban areas, while only 19% were from rural areas. This is why, despite the opinions of some pundits, it is generally a better move (from a purely electoral standpoint) to target suburban voters, especially since they are more swingy in their preferences than rural or urban voters. 
• Most Americans do not have a college degree—Only 41% of Americans have a college degree, while 59% do not. This is particularly difficult for many students and graduates of UVA to comprehend, as in their day-to-day lives, college students (unsurprisingly) mostly associate with people who will graduate college, and college graduates tend to work with and befriend other college graduates after leaving college. 

The 2024 election may very well be decided by drastic shifts among a small part of the electorate, assuming larger groups shift very little. Once the results have come in, however, it might be best to conduct a big-picture analysis. To illustrate this, here’s a bit of math: it would take a whopping 55% shift among voters aged 18-24, who make up 9% of the voter base (and who, especially before Biden dropped out, some theorized would swing strongly to the right), to create a 5% shift among the general electorate, while it would take a much more realistic (especially considering the massive effects of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling in 2022) 10% shift among female voters to create the exact same effect. In an era of polarization where incremental changes seem to be the only ones happening, it might make more sense to look for the latter possibility happening in 2024. 

The opinions expressed within this piece represent the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Independent.