It’s more clear than ever after months of close voting and years of intense polarization: Who wins the 2024 presidential election, who gets to vote and who stays home, could make a difference.
The latest NBC News poll of the election showed Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied at 49%, using demographic criteria agreed upon by a bipartisan group of pollsters who try to best predict how voters will look this week.
But the survey analysis also shows that small changes in the composition of the electorate and who decides to vote can lead to small but important changes in the election. It can decide who wins a close race.
NBC News, Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research Associates, a national polling team, looked at how the different projections of Republican-leaning voters and Democratic-leaning voters would change the outcome.
A more Republican-leaning turnout model would drop Trump to 50% and Harris to 48%, and a more Democratic-leaning model would drop Harris to 50% and Trump to 47%.
While all of these moves are within the margin of error, the larger point of the exercise is to show how small changes in who turns out to vote can have a big impact on an election, even if the margins are close in battleground states. As in 2020.
A more Democratic-leaning turnout sees more women, non-white voters, and higher-educated voters turn out, as well as voters from cities and suburbs.
Those who prefer Republicans rely on the opposite: more white people, more men, more voters without a college degree, and more from rural communities.
The truth is that many of the differences from poll to poll in the compressed time frame of an election can come down to different ideas about what a voter might look like, rather than fundamental, systemic changes in voter thinking.
Simple random chance can also affect one survey or another based on who is contacted or chooses to answer the survey, although survey respondents try to correct for this by weighting their surveys. Really simple and reasonable weight decisions survey results can carry up to 8 pointsdemonstrating how different decisions and assumptions can affect the picture captured by the survey.
We will soon know what the electorate of 2024 looks like. But in the meantime, the analysis shows how small changes can have a big impact on the upcoming election.