Members of the audience wait for the start of a campaign rally for U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at Girard College on May 29, in Philadelphia.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Political commentators are talking about the swing states in November’s U.S. presidential election. Political professionals have turned their attention to the swing constituencies.
In a campaign this close – and in an election this critical – small oscillations in the political world are significant. So when an unexpected event intrudes on a campaign, or when growing worries congeal to affect how a specific voting group views the economy, new perceptions of the candidates take hold, often moving from tentative to fixed, and new issues edge onto the agenda, often overshadowing earlier topics.
And, as a result, the composition of the campaign is transformed, adjustments are made, and the ultimate outcome can be affected.
Right now, the Joe Biden and Donald Trump teams are focusing on several voter groups where there are faint, sometimes nearly imperceptible, signs of movement: older Americans, younger Americans and Black Americans.
Befitting the times, this is a political form of chaos theory: Small perturbations in one area can have major implications for the broader state of affairs.
“It’s complicated enough that there are 50 states making separate choices for president,” said Thomas Devine, a Democratic strategist who has worked on seven White House campaigns. “But when there are movements within constituencies, and often constituencies within individual states, an American election becomes even more complex.”
Campaigns, he said, “can’t think of voters en masse. They have to think of them as members of groups – and they have to target them when they move, or when they calculate that they could be moved by steps the campaign takes.”
The focus is even sharper in specific swing states, especially the states that sided with Mr. Biden four years ago. The campaigns are narrowing in on Jewish voters, for example, in Pennsylvania, and on Arab-American voters in Michigan.
“Because of the war in Gaza, you have a fracture in Michigan among Democrats,” said Michael DuHaime, a former Republican National Committee political director. “A small change there is a big complicating factor for Biden. We are talking about a very tight race – and seemingly minor moves of three or four percentage points inside one group may not seem like a lot but can be the difference between winning and losing.”
Political professionals sometimes cite the discovery made by senator Edward Kennedy’s strategists in the Massachusetts Democrat’s bitter 1994 re-election fight against Mitt Romney, then known primarily as a private-equity executive. They determined that the key to the election was working women earning less than US$35,000.
The Kennedy campaign turned its advertising effort to appeal to that group, first on abortion rights and then on economic issues, and finally focused on an even smaller group: pregnant women with blue-collar jobs. Two September polls showed Mr. Romney slightly ahead. In the end, Mr. Kennedy prevailed with a near landslide – 58 per cent of the vote.
The analogues in the 2024 election may be generational.
Older voters historically have tended to lean farther to the right than the rest of the electorate. This time, however, there are signs that Mr. Biden is building momentum among voters over 65.
In Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican presidential nominee finished ahead of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden among seniors in the last three contests, with Mr. Biden falling behind Mr. Trump by seven percentage points in 2020. This time, three separate polls have Mr. Biden holding a slight lead among these voters.
“This is significant,” said Berwood Yost, director of the respected Franklin & Marshall Poll, which since 1992 has been examining public opinion in Pennsylvania and now puts Mr. Biden ahead of Mr. Trump among seniors by three percentage points. “One of the things that is clear in the polling is that a lot of the support for president Trump comes from less-attentive voters who are less likely to turn out. We know people over the age of 65 are more likely to vote, so that is a good group for Biden to be winning.”
A swing of even a few points away from Mr. Trump among seniors could help offset problems Mr. Biden is having with racialized and younger voters.
Mr. Biden won the Gen-Z and millennial vote by about 20 percentage points in the last election, according to the Pew Research Center. Now pollsters believe Mr. Trump has made vast inroads among these voters.
One of the fiercest fights is over the Black vote, especially in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia.
Last month, Mr. Biden travelled within a single day to a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People dinner in Detroit, then to Atlanta, where he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically Black college. He is running 17 percentage points behind his 2020 election performance among Black voters in Michigan, according to a CBS News poll, and six percentage points behind his 2020 performance in Georgia.
“It is possible that, if just enough Black people in a really competitive swing state don’t go to the polls or vote for Trump, it could produce a shift in a really close election to make a difference and swing a state’s electoral votes,” said Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University.
In his speech in Detroit, Mr. Biden noted that his rival had said he would consider pardons for those involved in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He asked the group, “What do you think he would have done on Jan. 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol?”
One constant in U.S. political life is change. Voters move out of one generational group and into another as they age. That is why the drift into senior-citizen status of the baby boomers, whose lives were marked by the causes of the 1960s, may explain the change in their political profile.
The ascendancy of millennials and Gen Z may transform U.S. politics even further. While only 32 per cent of Americans over the age of 65 consider themselves moderates, some 40 per cent of 18-to-49-year-olds do, according to a Gallup poll. There is, moreover, broad agreement among young people on the very issues – abortion, immigration, gender – that are tearing their elders apart.
The good news is that the future may produce less political tumult than the present.