Dem
47
GOP
53
For decades, "swing voter" meant someone who sometimes voted for Democrats and sometimes Republicans, depending on the individual candidates, the national environment, the voter's mood, and the phase of the moon. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, has calculated that of the 126 million people who voted for president in both 2020 and 2024, only 6-12 million switched parties in 2024. But these numbers are dwarfed by the 60 million voters who either skipped 2020 and voted for the first time in 2024 or sat out the election after having voted in the previous presidential election. According to CNN's Ronald Brownstein, the new swing voters are those voters who may or may not vote in any given election, not the party switchers.
In 2024, this churn helped Donald Trump. Most voters who voted in 2024 but not in 2020 backed Trump while most of the 2020 voters who skipped 2024 had voted for Joe Biden in 2020. These data suggest that many of Trump's 2024 voters are fickle and might not vote in 2026. They are not hard-core Republicans and could surprise everyone next year.
Campaigns always have to consider two things: (1) getting your own base to vote and (2) getting some of the other party's voters to switch teams. Different candidates make different choices. In 2000, George W. Bush tried to claw back affluent suburban women who fell for Bill Clinton's charms by emphasizing "compassionate conservatism." But in 2004, Bush's brain (Karl Rove) took the radical approach of abandoning efforts to pick up stray Democrats and concentrated on getting marginal Republican-leaning voters to the polls. It was a radical shift, but Rove was right.
In 2024, Trump won by making big gains among low-propensity, low-information, working-class voters, both white and nonwhite. He won a lot of them over by suggesting that he would make their lives better (in part, by making other people's lives much worse), so he was "uplifting" in his own way. Anyhow, this changed how professionals now think about swing voters. They now focus on the to-vote-or-not-to-vote-that-is-the-question voters. The ones who swing between voting and not voting but when they vote, tend to vote for the same party most of the time.
Demographics play a big role here. A study from Pew Research showed that what doomed Kamala Harris was not the small number of 2020 Biden voters who switched to Trump, but the much larger number of 2020 Biden voters who decided not to vote at all in 2024. They opted out of the electorate rather than supporting either candidate. This effect was most pronounced among minority voters. Also important were the voters who did not cast ballots for anyone in 2020 but went for Trump in 2024. So it is the swinging in and out of the electorate that defines the modern swing voter.
For 2026, the Republicans have two tasks. First is to get these swing-in, swing-out voters who showed up for Trump personally to show up for House candidates they know nothing about. Second is to get those who do vote to vote for Republicans, since they are not loyal partisans. If these new swing voters are unhappy with Trump (for example because he failed to deliver on his promise to get prices down), they may opt for not voting instead of voting for Democrats. That is not as bad as switching sides, but losing votes to the couch still hurts.
Part of the problem of getting the swing-in, swing-out voters to the polls is that they are not motivated by seeing horrible negative ads about the other side. That just makes them not vote at all. To get them to vote a candidate needs a positive, uplifting campaign, like Barack Obama's in 2008. Those sorts of campaigns are few and far between these days so 2026 turnout might be quite low. (V)