2020 turnout patterns and what they can tell us about 2024.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is a chart I made that shows 2016-->2020 swing on the x axis and turnout increase as a % on the y-axis. I think there are a few interesting takeaways from this chart that could tell us some things about 2024:

1. Most of the seats that saw the smallest turnout increases (or in the case of OH-11 turnout declines) are seats with large black populations - even though swings in these seats were generally pretty small in either direction. For 2024, this tells me low black turnout is a much greater risk for Biden than black voters swinging right. It also tells me that lack of in-person campaigning on Democrats part disproportionately hurt them turnout-wise in black communities where turnout operations via local churches and organizations tend to have a lot of influence. It could also be a consequence of the Obama years wearing off.

2. Almost all of the seats that saw the largest turnout increases from 2016-->2020 were in western states (CA, TX, AZ, UT, NV, ect). There is a pretty wide spread as to how these seats swung but generally Hispanic population seems to be a confounding variable that explains whether these seats swung hard left or hard right (seats with higher Hispanic populations were more likely to swing hard right - which supports the narrative that lower propensity Hispanics are more likely to vote R than their voting peers).

I think why the western states generally saw larger turnout jumps 2016-->2020 is for a combination of factors. For one in general western states are growing faster than eastern states. Also western states have historically been a bit more politically disconnected so turnout was starting from a lower baseline.

3. There are few examples of seats that swung hard towards Biden but barely saw turnout increases - this tells me that there weren't communities where Biden was flipping tons of voters and that he heavily relied on new voters (young voters aging into electorate, transplants, ect) to get these favorable swings).

Overall I think it's very interesting how this graph is skewed. Even though the country at large swung to Biden and saw ~16% turnout increase, there are far more outliers of places where Trump got over 20% swings and saw massive turnout increase than for Biden.