In today’s polarized era, it’s easy to assume that nothing ever matters in American politics — that every four years, the same election happens over and over, with the same demographic groups lining up behind the same candidates in the same states.
In this view, any signs of change are to be met with skepticism. A diminished gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College? Ridiculous. Polls showing Donald J. Trump making big gains among young or nonwhite voters? Absurd.
I have a different perspective.
In every election I’ve covered, election night has brought enormous shifts that have often gone well beyond what was previously imagined.
Here’s one way to see it in the numbers: Over the last 16 years, every presidential election has featured at least one congressional district that swung at least 20 points from the last presidential race. At the state level, that would be enough to turn Rhode Island “red” or Montana “blue.”
Usually, there are warning signs. The polls in 2020, for instance, showed Mr. Trump doing much better among Hispanic voters than he had in 2016. Two years earlier, in the 2018 midterms, Miami-Dade County and South Texas were rare bright spots for Republicans. And yet despite these warnings, no one anticipated 30- to 50-point Trump gains across a Cuban enclave like Hialeah, Fla., or along the Rio Grande.
You can tell a story like this for every election since 2004. And every year, analysts have perfectly reasonable doubts about whether big shifts in the polls could possibly be real. These doubts get more credible every year, as increasing polarization makes it harder to imagine big changes, while the very real difficulties in polling make it easier to dismiss unexpected findings.
Nonetheless, the big shifts keep happening.
How are these shifts still possible in such a polarized country? The most important reason: Many voters don’t have ideologically consistent views on the issues.
You, dear reader, may have coherent and consistent left-right views across the board, but many voters don’t. There are a lot of people who support Obamacare and want mass deportations, or who want lower taxes and abortion rights. Lots of voters don’t have strongly held views on many policy issues at all.
The second reason is that the issues change a lot from cycle to cycle. If you’re an ideologically consistent partisan, you might think our elections present more or less the same choice every four years. To the extent anything ever changes, those developments may have even reinforced your political allegiances.
You might be a liberal whose determination to defeat Mr. Trump was only deepened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade or his conduct on Jan. 6. Or you might be a MAGA Republican who has never been more convinced of Mr. Trump’s economic stewardship after a few years of rising prices.
For millions of less ideologically consistent voters, these developments complicated their previous political allegiances.
A Black or Hispanic voter who had voted for Democrats as the party for working people might have very different feelings after grocery prices surged for the first time in a generation. And a relatively moderate Republican woman might have finally said her party had gone too far with Jan. 6 and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
In just the last few years, any number of issues might have led people to reconsider their loyalties: There’s been a pandemic; a debate over vaccine mandates; the war in Gaza; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; rising housing prices and homelessness; the “woke” left and the conservative backlash against it, from trans rights to critical race theory.
All of this can play out in reverse, too. As older issues fade, a voter’s previous basis for partisanship might fade with them. It’s quite plausible, for example, that many voters cast ballots in 2020 based on their views of the pandemic or the Black Lives Matter movement. What will they do now?
These changes will affect the thinking of millions of Americans. This is clear in the data and you can see it in the real world. Elon Musk’s fortune was built in part on large federal subsidies to address climate change, but the constellation of issues around the “woke mind virus” now make him a Trump supporter. Many Arab and Muslim Americans became Democrats in the wake of the war in Iraq; now the signs of Democratic defections among Muslim and Arab Americans are visible everywhere. These include marches against policies on Israel and Gaza and a decision by the mayor of America’s only city with an all-Muslim city council (Hamtramck, Mich.) to endorse Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, the Cheneys who backed the war in Iraq are now behind Ms. Harris.
Of course, most things probably won’t shift from the last election. We are a polarized country. And in the aggregate, many of the swings that do occur will cancel out: For every vaccine skeptic that Democrats lose over mandates, they gain a Republican aghast at MAGA skepticism of the lifesaving capacity of vaccines. This phenomenon obscures just how much churn occurs beneath the surface from one election to the next, and it’s a major reason people have the impression that nothing ever changes. But these countervailing forces rarely cancel out exactly. When they do not, there can be enormous swings in particular demographic groups, regions or even states.
This November, something will be different. If recent history is any indication, it could easily be a bigger shift than the polls or your imagination suggest. The warning signs are everywhere, from Republican gains among young and nonwhite voters to the unusual state-by-state patterns in the midterm election. And if the result is different from the past, it won’t be hard to explain. From inflation and the debate over “woke” to Jan. 6 and the end of Roe, the last four years have brought a new set of issues that few people even imagined a decade ago.
Of course, if the result turns out to be a 2020 repeat, who could be surprised? It is another election about Mr. Trump, after all. But whether the election result brings a 2020 repeat, a 2022 repeat or something else entirely, I won’t be surprised if things don’t go according to expectations. You shouldn’t be, either.
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