We explore how turnout and persuasion scenarios could play out in the critical states for Trump and Harris in the final weekend leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
With such a close presidential race estimated in the , a host of factors could tip the 2024 election. We focus on two that have the potential to cause the to break toward Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The first has to do with infrequent voters, and the second depends on how successful the Harris campaign is at peeling off Trump’s previous supporters.
In order to see how these scenarios could play out, we tweak specific parameters in our that is trained on tens of thousands of survey responses collected during the campaign. The resultant estimates below illustrate a range of possibilities to be on the lookout for this week.Scenario 1: Infrequent voters show up big, driven by Trump-leaning men
The swingiest segment of the electorate — and most challenging to estimate in polling — consists of infrequent voters. We define them here as registered voters who didn’t cast a ballot four years ago.
Infrequent voters are also more likely to be men than women. Notably, we have found that more men overestimate their likelihood of turning out than women. Administrative data indicates that in fact, women vote at slightly higher rates than men do.
of the race this summer, 2020 non-voters were leaning toward Trump nationally. Since Harris became the Democratic nominee, they have looked very closely divided between her and Trump.
In the battleground states, specifically, this group often still leans toward Trump — if his campaign is successful in turning out these lower-propensity voters, Trump’s vote margins would improve in these states, flipping some Mr.
