Whenever Democrats lose an election, a debate inevitably arises as to whether they were done by a disaffected base or alienated swing voters.
No matter how many times this play has been restaged, the parts and screenplay remain largely the same. Center-left Democrats to force That their party must win over voters with moderation, while some progressives maintain That it is actually needed To unite its disaffected core constituencies with a more radical agenda.
Pramila Jaipal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, voiced the latter view a pair of X post This week, saying, “True swing voters don’t swing between Republicans and Democrats. They swing into the voting booth and if they are ignored or taken for granted.” He also argued that “the real swing voters are our multiracial, multigenerational base that will see us fighting for them.”
For some progressives, Jayapal’s argument is vindicated by a critical fact about the 2024 election: Kamala Harris received far fewer votes than Joe Biden — and the drop in support for the Democratic nominee was larger than the increase in support for Donald Trump. As of this writing, Trump’s vote total in 2024 is 2.6 million more than in 2020, while Harris has fallen 7 million ballots short of Biden’s vote total four years ago. (The latter margin is likely to narrow somewhat, since the slow-counting regions are disproportionately Democratic.)
What’s more, in the 47 states where vote counting is largely complete, the most Democratic counties delivered in 2020. 1.9 million fewer votes for Harris Even predominantly Republican counties produced 1.2 million more votes for Trump this year than in 2020, even as they had more than Biden.
Nevertheless, Jaipal is wrong to suggest that swing voters – meaning voters open to changing their party allegiance from election to election – are an extinct species. And the broader idea that Democrats need only worry about mobilizing their base, and can do so by putting forward a bold, progressive agenda, rests on a series of false assumptions.
If Democrats fall prey to such distractions, it will be more difficult for them to rebuild a strong, majority coalition in the coming years.
There are five fundamental problems with Jaipal’s view:
1) Democratic voting is not broken where it matters
At this point, it’s not possible to know for sure whether turnout or persuasion changed each party’s vote totals this year. That’s because we don’t yet know 1) how Americans last voted in 2024 or 2) who 2024 nonvoters would have supported, had they decided to cast a ballot.
For this reason, even in counties where the number of votes for the Democratic nominee fell more than Trump’s rose, it is possible that a large increase in support for the Republican nominee drove both changes: if voters and nonvoters alike turned pro-Trump in the area, the turnout might not matter.
That said, in counties like this one, the likely decline in Democratic turnout appears to have contributed to Harris’ disappointing showing. But the places where the number of votes for the Democratic nominee broke down have one thing in common: They are Most are located in safe blue or red states.
In the places that actually mattered, Harris did not garner dramatically fewer raw votes than Biden. By contrast, in four swing states — Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — he actually won more votes than Biden in 2020.
Nevertheless, despite apparently bringing together more Democratic voters in these states, Harris lost them all. Even if population growth partially explains Harris’ gains, especially in the Sun Belt, it’s highly unlikely we’d see this pattern of results without swing voters.
2) In the last four federal elections, millions of voters have switched their party allegiance
While we still don’t know how much party-switching has occurred in 2024, we have a clear picture from previous elections. And millions of voters switched sides in 2016, 2018 and 2020.
According to Analysis of high-quality survey data From the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, 6.7 to 9.2 million Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then for Trump in 2016.
Two years later, Democrats dominated the 2018 midterms, winning the House popular vote by 8.6 points (in 2016, Republicans actually won more House votes than Democrats). Although many assumed this was the result of a resistance-fueled increase in Democratic votes, 89 percent of the team improved According to the Democratic data firm Catalyst, voters derive from changing their partisan allegiances.
In 2020, 2.43 percent of voters reported voting for the major party they opposed in 2016, according to a 2023 study. This was an unusually low level of vote change but still suggests that 3.8 million voters supported the Democratic nominee after supporting the Republican or vice versa four years earlier.
Finally, in the 2022 midterms, the GOP gained ground with both rural And White working class votersAccording to Pew Research.
All this indicates that swing voters, as conventionally defined, very much exist. And while few in number, in a closely divided country, their willingness to change can be decisive (especially since winning over a swing voter is twice as valuable as turning out to be a base voter, since the former not only adds to your numbers but subtracts from you. opponent).
3) Pre-election polling indicated that a significant number of Biden 2020 voters were shifting to Trump.
at The New York Times/Siena College final vote Among battleground states, 6 percent of Trump supporters said they would support Biden in 2020, while 4 percent of Harris voters said they supported Trump. of pollsters Final national vote Biden showed more modest — but still significant — vote swings, with 4 percent of 2020 voters favoring Trump and 3 percent of Trump 2020 voters supporting Harris.
This indicates that the same basic pattern witnessed in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 — with a small but significant portion of voters changing their partisan choice — continued in 2024.
4) The realignment of working-class and college-educated voters since 2012 cannot be explained by changes in turnout.
In 2012, Democrats won 45 percent of white, college-educated voters, according to the catalyst. This number increased to 46 percent in 2016 and 54 percent in 2020 Democrats also did much better with white college graduates than Obama did between 2018 and 2022, winning 54 percent of the bloc’s vote in the first midterm and 50 percent in the second.
To believe that this is entirely attributable to turnout — rather than voters switching sides — one has to consider that white college-educated Republicans suddenly and sustainably became less likely to vote in the 2016 election, while white college-educated Democrats increased their turnout by the same amount. Voter turnout in a sudden and persistent fashion at times.
This does not seem reasonable. And much the same can be said about white changes Non-college-educated Americans Voting behavior since 2016. These changes are too large and persistent to reflect purely asymmetric changes in voting rates within this population.
5) Democratic-leaning nonvoters are not particularly progressive
Voting is still a key determinant of election results. Democrats almost certainly could have done better in 2024 if every Biden 2020 voter had appeared at the polls.
But there is little basis for the idea that Democratic-leaning voters would turn out to be larger if their party were more progressive.
In reality, swing voters and less inclined partisans tend to move in the same direction. Which is to say: When one party does better with swing voters, it usually mobilizes its base more than the other party. That’s partly because the forces that lead a party’s voters to switch sides—and the forces that lead them to drop out of the electorate—are often the same.
According to a research By Ohio State University political scientist John Green, Obama voters who agreed with Trump on some big issues — such as immigration, climate change, or gun control — were more likely to defect to the GOP than other Obama voters in 2016, even after controlling for other variables. . And the same is true of Obama voters who express sexist views in opinion polls.
None of these results are very surprising. More notable, however, Obama voters who were either sexist or conservative on some major issues were also more likely to sit out the 2016 election than other Obama voters. Thus, Trump’s positions on issues such as immigration, guns, and climate not only motivated a core of Obama voters, but also seemingly disengaged other Obama voters, who no longer felt a strong preference for the Democratic nominee. (Notably, Mitt Romney voters in 2012 who agreed with Hillary Clinton on some key issues were also more likely to support or vote for Clinton than other Romney voters. Unfortunately for Democrats, these voters were less numerous in key battleground states than Obama-to-Trump voters.) .
Consistent with Green’s research Other survey information It appears that low-propensity Democratic voters are significantly more moderate than Democrats who reliably show up for elections. In fact, most Americans want the Democratic Party to be more uniformly progressive Dependable Democratic voters It is in the country with the more heterogeneous views of Democrats — who are progressive on some issues and moderate or conservative on others — that the party is most at risk of losing to Republicans or living room sofas.
That said, ideologically extreme candidates do seem to influence voting, but only because they do Tendency to mobilize voters of other parties According to a 2018 study by political scientists at Stanford and UCLA.
None of this means that Democrats must embrace centrism across the board in order to run for president in 2028. A large portion of both Swing voter And Democratic nonvoters Share deep skepticism about the political system and widely progressive views Various economic problems. A certain version of economic populism can play well in both constituencies.
Further, Trump may implement many controversial policies over the next four years and may very well damage the economy’s performance with his trade and immigration agenda. So it’s possible that he will solve the Democrats’ short-term problems.
But if you believe Democrats should aim to build a large national majority, there’s no choice but to heed the concerns of swing voters — not least because your party’s target voters are likely to share their grievances.
