The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn penned an analysis piece that, bucking conventional trends, said that there is an opportunity for higher voter turnout in 2020 to actually benefit President Trump’s odds of being reelected.
The UpShot analysis found that instead of the traditional wisdom that higher voter turnout just helps Democrats, there are opportunities and risks for both parties. The author based his findings on voter registration files, the validated turnout of 50,000 respondents to New York Times/Siena College pre-election surveys in 2018, polls of unregistered voters, and census data.
High voter turnout typically favors Democrats because younger, nonwhite, and less wealthy voters (who tend to vote more for Democrats) are underrepresented at the polls. But Trump has a base of support among less educated white voters, who are also underrepresented at the polls.
After the Democrats won the House in the 2018 midterm elections, flipping dozens of GOP-held seats, some saw that as a harbinger for 2020, although typically the party not in control fares better during midterm contests. Cohn found that Trump’s white working-class supporters from 2016 were likely to have not voted in 2018. Although, he contends that they are the likeliest to return and vote for Trump in 2020, which could hurt the Democrats’ shot at the White House.
Philip Bump, from the Washington Post, called Cohn’s work an “interesting analysis, but also pointed out an advantage that Democrats might have with voter turnout: 4.4 million people who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 didn’t vote at all during 2016.
“Those 4.4 million voters weren’t necessarily in the three states where Trump won a narrow majority, but it’s hard to imagine that turning out another 2.2 million nonwhite voters wouldn’t have potentially shifted the result in, say, Michigan, which Trump won by about 11,000 votes,” the piece reads.
Despite the speculation, both articles contend that predicting exactly which party will benefit from the higher turnout is a tricky business, although they also point out that turnout will likely be a key factor in who sits in the Oval Office come 2021.
