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naraburns  nihil supernum  17d ago (text post)   26895 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:

2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes

2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes

It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?

That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.

The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.

IIRC city turnout was up. I suppose the Democrats in the cities could have stayed home more while the Republicans in the cities turned out more, but it does look like swing voters to a reasonable extent.

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