How rare voters and GOP defectors could make up the battleground for Trump or Harris – scenarios from the CBS News Battleground Tracker

With such a close presidential race, estimates are made Battlefield racingA variety of factors could tip the balance in the 2024 election. We're focusing on two that have the potential to cause that Key states to break out in the direction of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The first has to do with rare voters, and the second depends on how successful the Harris campaign is at poaching Trump's former supporters.

To see how these scenarios might play out, we tweak certain parameters in our Battleground Tracker model which is trained on tens of thousands of survey responses collected during the campaign. The resulting estimates below illustrate a number of possibilities to look out for this week…

Scenario 1: Low voters make it big, driven by men close to Trump

The most dynamic part of the electorate – and the most difficult to assess in surveys – consists of low voters. We define them here as registered voters who did not cast a ballot four years ago.

This group is “vibrant” in two ways – how they vote and whether they vote at all. They report being more persuasive as more of them are unsure of their decision or at least say they can hold the other candidate. And they are disproportionately young, with no history of voting every two to four years.

Even rare voters are more likely to be men than women. In particular, we found that more men overestimate their chances of successful participation than women. Administrative data suggests that women actually vote slightly more often than men.

Before President Biden dropped out During the race this summer, 2020 non-voters nationwide leaned toward Trump. Since Harris became the Democratic nominee, she and Trump appear to be very divided.

Particularly in battleground states, this group often still leans toward Trump — if his campaign succeeds in drawing out these lower-propensity voters, Mr. Trump's vote margins in those states would improve, eclipsing some of Mr. Biden's four years ago.

How many 2020 non-voters are expected to show up this year? Well, it also depends on the state, but our estimates are that about one in five voters didn't vote in the last presidential election. In 2020, that number appeared to be higher than in Arizona and Nevada and lower in Wisconsin, for example.

Let's imagine that the Trump campaign increases turnout among this group in all seven battleground states. Specifically, in this scenario, their share of the electorate increases by five percentage points compared to the baseline estimates, e.g. B. from 20% to 25% in Pennsylvania.

In this scenario, Trump would flip Arizona, Georgia, etc Pennsylvania — says he won in 2016 but lost to Mr. Biden in 2020 — and holds North Carolina. He would lose the other battlegrounds to Harris, but would end up with more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. (Scroll to the bottom of this page to view country-specific estimates for various scenarios.)

Map of Scenario 1: Shows 2020 non-voters and men boosting Trump

Scenario 2: Harris rips off more Trump 20 voters, driven by GOP women

The 2024 race is characterized by a significant gender gapwith the Harris campaign Emphasis on reproductive rights and the state of US democracy. In that context, the Harris campaign has used messengers like former Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney to persuade moderate Republicans to support Harris this year. That includes the millions of Republican primary voters who voted for Nikki Haley even after Trump won the party nomination. Most of these voters supported Trump in the 2020 general election.

In a time of entrenched partisanship, convincing supporters of the other party to switch to your own side is a difficult task. How many Trump 2020 voters could the Harris campaign realistically expect?

A few meaningful data points:

• In our survey this year, about one in ten Trump 2020 voters nationwide and in battleground states prove persuasive. This means they are telling us they are not firmly committed to Trump. That's a difficult target for the Harris campaign because some of these voters lean toward Trump and won't really change their minds even if they say so.
• By comparison, our exit polls in 2020 showed that only 7% of former Trump voters switched to Biden. That attrition rate was between 6% and 7% in four battlegrounds Biden won this year. This is a more achievable goal for the campaign.

In this scenario, imagine that the Harris campaign manages to flip 7% of Trump voters in the battleground in 2020. It is a departure from ours Baseline estimatessuggesting both a lower attrition rate and that roughly the same number of Biden's 2020 voters are switching to Trump this year. It's a favorable scenario for Harris as Democrats win swing votes in critical states.

Under those assumptions, Harris would hold all the states that Mr. Biden won four years ago, except Arizona, and would also add North Carolina to her column. In the end, she would receive over 300 electoral votes, securing her place in history as the first woman elected U.S. President.

Scenario 2 map: Shows Harris winning among Republicans and women