Back by popular demand, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter is pleased to introduce our 2024 Demographic Swingometer — an interactive tool that allows anyone to simulate how fluctuations in turnout and partisan support among unique components of the electorate could alter this year’s outcome in the Electoral College.
Ever wondered what the 2024 election map would look like if:
- Kamala Harris improves upon Democrats’ 2020 performance with seniors?
- Donald Trump makes inroads with Black and Hispanic voters?
- College-educated white voters make up a larger share of the electorate than in 2020?
- Trump performs better among non-college white voters than polls currently indicate?
Our interactive starts with the results of the 2020 election and allows you to choose your own adventure, estimating how shifts in voting patterns would impact all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. (Democrats’ starting point is 303 Electoral votes rather than the 306 Joe Biden and Kamala Harris carried four years ago, owing to reapportionment).
For example, what if turnout among 18-29-year-old voters drops from 50% to 42% but every other group remains steady? Trump would flip Arizona. What if Harris improves from 54% to 56% of college-educated white voters? She would flip North Carolina.
As in 2020, users can choose to break down the electorate by either five race/education categories (white college graduates, white non-college graduates, Black voters, Hispanic voters and Asian/other voters) or four age categories (18-29, 30-44, 45-64 and 65+). Although these broad categories are imperfect and there are infinite ways to slice and dice the electorate, distinct changes in turnout and voting patterns within these groups explained Trump’s upset win in 2016 and the Biden/Harris defeat of Trump in 2020.
To arrive at baseline estimates of 2020 support and turnout levels for each featured demographic, we blended data compiled by Catalist — a Democratic data vendor widely respected for its number-crunching by strategists in both parties — with Census data on the citizen voting-age population and state and county-level results compiled from official sources. To bring the interactive to life, The Cook Political Report once again teamed up with data visualization prodigy Sophie Andrews and the web development team at Vardot.
This year’s edition of the interactive features two exciting new features:
- Adjust third-party vote share: moving beyond simply the major-party vote, we’ve introduced a three-way slider that allows users to adjust each demographic’s breakdown between Democrats, Republicans and independent/third party candidates. (We began designing this innovation when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was still in the race and taking a sizable share of the vote; now, of course, the third-party vote share is likely to be much closer in line with the 2020 “preset” values).
- Isolate key swing states: Our national Swingometer allows users to simulate proportional swings among demographic groups in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. (plus district-level Electoral College votes in Maine and Nebraska). But swings from year to year are never perfectly uniform. For example, between 2016 and 2020, Trump made much greater strides with Hispanic voters in Texas and Florida than in Arizona, where the Hispanic electorate is more urban and less culturally conservative.
So this year, the interactive gives users the ability to isolate seven key battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. By adjusting the party preference and turnout sliders within each state, users can not only simulate the statewide result but the result/margin in each county as well. For example, a two-point increase in Trump’s support among non-college whites would flip bellwether Sauk County, Wisconsin — and the entire state — to Trump.
The CPR Demographic Swingometer was designed as an interactive election outcome modeling tool for website users and third parties and do not represent the analysis or projections of The Cook Political Report. Users may share their election projections by using this tool and agree that they are solely responsible for their use in accordance with the terms & conditions of this website.
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