Democrats need at least some swing voters in 2020
It looks like they have a head start with a substantial number of them
What to do when your base is not enough
The Takeaway: It is still unclear whether Democrats will have a turnout advantage—mainly meaning that their constituent black voters will cast ballots at higher rates than whites—in the 2020 election next year. Without a candidate that possesses Barack Obama’s unique ability to simultaneously talk about black issues and court working class whites, it seems unlikely that they will. Of course, this could change. If it does not, Democrats will need to win at least some votes among swing voters, especially in the Midwest. This means appealing to working class whites. Luckily for them, the results of the 2018 midterms and recent public opinion polling provide for cautious optimism for Democrats.
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Revisiting the whole persuasion-vs-turnout question is like beating a dead horse already and it’s not even election year yet. But I think there is something to say about the subject that people have mostly missed when asking the question: Democrats have already done a little bit of both, and the results on the persuasion front are promising.
Take the 2018 midterms as the prime example. In them, according to an analysis by researchers at Catalist, a progressive voter file firm, Democrats won the House mainly because they persuaded Trump voters to their side. Yair Ghitza, Chief Scientist at Catalist, writes that at least 89% of the final margin change from 2016 to 2018 was from people changing votes. Moreover, this was especially true in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire and Iowa. Going even one step further, much of this change occurred in rural areas:
It’s worth taking stock of who these swing voters are heading into 2020. Emily Guskin at The Washington Post suggests a few major points in a recent article. The one that resonated the most with me is that swing voters are less pro-Trump than the registered voter population. Guskin writes:
“A third of on-the-fence voters (33 percent) approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with 47 percent of registered voters overall. They are less likely to express intensely positive or negative views of Trump in general, but on-the-fencers who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber strong approvers, 40 percent to 10 percent.”
There is also some evidence that focusing on the turnout game and ignoring persuasion efforts (something that no campaigns do, btw; it is not either-or) is a bad bet. Nate Cohn writes in The Upshot today that higher turnout in 2020 might not benefit Democrats as much as people think. He presents this graphic:
Methodologically speaking, I don’t know exactly how Nate comes to his point, which is notably different than the number crunching I did for The Economist a few weeks ago (link). I believe that there are material gains for Democrats if turnout increases. But I agree with Nate that they likely aren’t as big as some people presume.
Swing voters will be crucial in the 2020 presidential election. Based on the results from the 2018 midterms and public polling, it looks like Democrats might have a head start with them. But this is not a guarantee that lead will last.