The NY Times published a fun feature called “11 Data Points and Discoveries That Surprised Us in 2024.” I thought this one was particularly pertinent to Democratic navel gazing about the election:
Special elections really were all about turnout, and thus meant little for November
Why were Democrats doing so well in special elections, even though polls showed Joe Biden doing so poorly? I collected and analyzed data on who had been voting in special elections, and this chart was my “eureka” moment. On the y-axis: how well Democrats fared in a special election, compared with the 2020 election result. On the x-axis: our estimates for the 2020 vote choice of the same special electorates, based on exactly who voted and our previous estimates for the likelihood that registered voters backed Mr. Biden in 2020. As you can see, there’s a decent one-to-one relationship, implying that these election results were mostly a function of turnout, not persuasion.
The biggest surprise, for me, wasn’t simply that there was a decent correlation between turnout and results. The surprise was how clearly it could be detected, given the paucity of data on these idiosyncratic, ultra-low-turnout elections.
Separate data showed Donald J. Trump doing very well with infrequent voters, the kind who may show up for presidential races but rarely for special elections.
The answer on special elections was clear: The aggregate Democratic advantage in these elections was simply a turnout advantage, and they didn’t mean much for Mr. Biden’s (or Kamala Harris’s) chances in November. — Nate Cohn
That’s one way of looking at it. I would also question whether the turnout advantage in the presidential is specific to Donald Trump or would apply to any Republican. We won’t know until he takes his final bow but my suspicions is that those infrequent voters are participating in American Idol: The President! not politics. Unless they can come up with another celebrity demagogue with Trump’s peculiar talents I’m not sure these results tell us anything more meaningful about presidential turnout.
What is meaningful is that Democrats are getting higher turnout in off years and special elections which means that those college educated suburban voters who habitually turn out may have made the full transition to the Democrats. After all, if their switch was all about Trump there’s no reason they couldn’t vote for Republicans in those elections. So the big question is really whether those “infrequent” voters will show up for some stiff like DeSantis or Vance. I wonder…