Some Idiosyncratic Observations of the Elections So Far (Michael Barone)

[Valin]

Jewish World Review

Michael Barone

March 1, 2024

Herewith some idiosyncratic, perhaps eccentric, observations on the electoral contests so far in this presidential cycle.

1. Turnout is down. In the first five contests — the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan primaries — Republican turnout was down from 2016, the most recent cycle with serious contests. That's based on precincts currently reporting and the ace New York Times number crunchers' estimates of as-yet-uncounted votes.

This decline owes something to especially frigid weather on Iowa's caucus night and the fact that Donald Trump's only listed opponent in Nevada was Ryan Binkley. But even in South Carolina, whose population rose 10% in the eight intervening years, turnout was up only 2%. Democratic turnout, with no serious challenge to Joe Biden, was down by more than half this year.

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2. The Republican tilt of the Electoral College may have vanished. Trump won a majority of electoral votes in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and he came within 42,918 popular votes of doing so again in 2020. That's because Democrats piled up huge margins in California and New York (7,096,710 in 2020), which had 85 electoral votes then and will have 82 this year. Trump's much smaller (1,002,907) margins in Texas and Florida netted him 67 in 2020 and would give him 70 in 2024.

But increasing support for Trump outside major metropolitan areas and the significant increases in support for him among Blacks and Hispanics that I described recently point to reduced Biden margins in safe Democratic states and higher Trump margins in safe Republican states.

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3. Biden may have a problem on his left. In Michigan, 13% of primary voters chose "Uncommitted," including 17% in Wayne County (with 56% Uncommitted in heavily Arab-American Dearborn) and Washtenaw County (left-wing university town Ann Arbor). In eight metropolitan and university counties, 71,000 Democrats voted Uncommitted — almost half of Biden's 154,000-vote November 2020 margin in the state. And that's among a primary electorate less than half the size of the 2020 Democratic primary turnout.

Some have argued that the Undecided percentage is not much higher than in 2012, when Barack Obama was unopposed and 10.7% voted Undecided. But that was not a response to an articulated campaign on a specific issue, and in a year of much lower turnout.