Every cycle, campaign pros and Twitter warriors argue over exit polls and vibes. But if you want to know what really happened in an election, there are two rigorous postmortem reports. The first came out last month, from the Democratic data firm Catalist.
The second gold standard report dropped this morning from Pew Research, whose ‘validated voters’ approach. Pew surveys tens of thousands of Americans before and after each election. But instead of stopping there, they go a critical step further: they match those survey respondents to official state voter files. That means they don’t just take someone’s word for it, but verify whether that person cast a ballot, where they voted, and in some cases, how they voted (in-person, by mail, early, etc.).
NPR’s story on the release leads with a key takeaway: “Trump still would have won in 2024 even if everyone had turned out to vote.”
Trump won in 2024 with just under 50% of the vote, 49.7%-48.2% over Democrat Kamala Harris.
Roughly 64% of the eligible-voting population turned out in 2024, the second highest since 1904. 2020 was the highest.
But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew's validated voters survey.
The survey of almost 9,000 voters was conducted in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election. Pew verified whether they had voted or not over the last five presidential elections using publicly available commercial voter files. For context, most well-conducted national polls include roughly 1,000 interviews.
From the Welcome perspective the most interesting finding from the Pew report was titled “Stability and Change”:
Roughly three-quarters of eligible adults did the same thing in 2024 as they did in 2020: voted for a candidate of the same party or did not turn out.
And about a quarter of eligible adults did something different in 2024 than in 2020: They switched their vote choice, voted in 2024 when they had not voted in 2020, or did not vote in 2024 after voting in 2020.
That is a ton of people voting differently in 2024 than in 2020!!!
We’ll have more takeaways in the coming weeks from the Pew data, which you can read here. So let’s sit with this big one.
Viva La Vol
There are a few core assumptions underlying the Welcome model, but one of the biggest is volatility. So much focus goes into polarization, and into how close national elections have been.
Last year, we encouraged readers to look at the inverse of the horserace. Look at all the uncommitted voters! Monmouth had a great visual breakdown showing 4 in 10 Americans not committed to a presidential nominee going into 2024:
Just 60% of voters were committed to either Biden or Trump.
Under Cross-Pressure
It is easy to get lost in macro themes. The special candidates that we’ve learned from treat these voters as individuals, recognizing the volatility not only across the general electorate but within individual voters.
In recent years, party switching among voters has been unusually high, as researchers reported in The Washington Post:
“We found that 70 percent of partisans — Democrats and Republicans alike — kept the same political identifications between 2016 and 2020. But that leaves a significant minority who did not. About 10 percent of Democrats and Republicans switched to the other party. An additional 15 percent of both Democrats and Republicans in 2016 identified as independents by 2020. The most volatile group was independents: Over 50 percent of independents in 2016 identified with either the Democratic or Republican party in 2020.”
The most beautiful thing about volatility is the potential to put more voters in play, and more districts in play. After WelcomePAC’s first election, we framed this as cashing the bet slips on volatility.
Pew confirms that volatility is alive and well. Let’s empower more leaders giving voters a reason to move.
956 days until the next presidential primary.
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"Volatility" in this context means people changing their voting behavior from cycle-to-cycle, and not the changes created by new voting co-horts? Or is it both?