White Flight or Black Boost: 3 Surprising Election Scenarios
White Flight or Black Boost: 3 Surprising Election Scenarios
If Democrats know they can't count on white voters rallying, why aren't Black voters who can save her candidacy getting more attention?
It’s 8pm ET on Election Day.
Polls close in Pennsylvania.
CNN immediately calls it…
Trump ✅The pollsters had undercounted his support (again). The Harris campaign lost ground among white voters where Biden prevailed.
The pundits are wringing their hands. “If only Josh Shapiro had been on the ticket,” one laments. “Maybe the guy from Scranton was the only one who could beat Trump after all?”
This is not how you wanted to start Election Night.
It’s a made up (though highly plausible) scenario that we decided to play out in this week’s Election Report. Our goal: to show how fear of losing in the rust belt keeps the media and some campaign operatives obsessed with a small segment of white voters, while underestimating the decisive role Black voters will play on November 5th.
Our team built a tool that pulls together data on swing state voters, broken out by race, to project how subtle shifts in voter behavior could impact the final result in the Electoral College. We used projections of 2024 state electorates, exit polls from 2020, and registration data from this year to show how even small shifts in Democratic turnout across key racial groups can have a decisive impact on who wins in November.
No Democratic candidate has won the White House with a majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson, the year Kamala Harris was born.
Exactly how decisive are voters of color? Just in time for National Black Voter Day, we popped some numbers in our fancy calculator and played out three election night scenarios in which Harris loses 1% of the White vote compared to Biden in 2020, and how the outcome of the election shifts based on Black voters’ enthusiasm.
The results were not what you’d expect and say a lot about where we should put our time and money – who we should bet on – in the next 45 days.
New World Election Day Scenarios
I’ll talk you through each scenario. Details on how we crunched the numbers below1.
Lets get into it!
Scenario 1: White Flight
Premise: There’s a 1% shift in white voters from Biden 2020 to Trump 2024.
Deciding state: Georgia
Outcome: Trump eeks out an electoral college victory with exactly 270 votes.
VP Harris wins Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin but it’s not enough. Not only does Trump win Pennsylvania but Georgia too – and he holds North Carolina. A negative shift of 1% of white voters, particularly in states like PA, GA, and NC is not a conservative forecast. It would track consistently within the range that Democratic candidates have performed across recent election cycles.
But of course, this election is not just about white voters. Which brings us to….
Scenario 2: A Black Boost
Premise: The 1% shift in white voters from Biden 2020 to Trump 2024 is counteracted by a 1% shift among Black voters towards Harris.
Deciding state: Georgia
Outcome: Harris squeaks by with a slim victory in Georgia to win the Presidency soundly with 284 electoral votes.
VP Harris wins Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin – and with a bolstered Black vote, Georgia as well. Trump wins Pennsylvania and holds North Carolina but it’s not enough to countervail the Georgia boost.
*Note: Our model does not account for surges in registration among particular groups. This is significant given the work of groups like Black Voters Matter, New Georgia Project, Georgia NAACP, and others who have significantly grown the number of Black registered voters in Georgia since 2020. TL;DR - even our Black Boost scenario could be undercounting the impact of an uptick in Black voters.
Scenario 3: A Black Surge
Premise: The 1% shift in white voters from Biden 2020 to Trump 2024 is counteracted by a 4% shift in Black voters in Georgia and Nevada.
Deciding states: Georgia, Nevada
Outcome: Harris wins again with 284 electoral votes, but runs up the margins of victory in these critical sun belt states, insurance against well laid plans to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color.
VP Harris wins Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin – and with a bolstered Black vote in Nevada and Georgia as well. Trump wins Pennsylvania and holds North Carolina but it’s not enough to contain the surge in Black voters.
We don’t need to hammer it home to you, our informed and engaged readers, but the conclusion here is: we can keep pouring billions of ad dollars into Pennsylvania to win over white rural and suburban voters in a handful of critical counties OR we could spend that money on getting voters of color who consistently show they believe VP Harris to be the more competent candidate across all or nearly all of their top issues, mobilized.
Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden taught us the lesson: when Black voters have enthusiasm and surge for a Democrat, they win the White House.
And this isn’t an empty choice or some academic exercise for political nerds.
There are dozens of groups working right now in swing states including Working Families Party, Care in Action, Black Feminist Futures and Fair Fight Georgia to name a few friends. These organizations are prioritizing knocking on doors, organizing community meetings, and showing up in grocery stores, delivering (as always) an influential electorate to the polls in November.
Across the next few weeks, the NewWorld Election Report will share a path for how we can invest in THEM – identifying the messages that work with Black voters, the vibes that are inspiring us, and opportunities to elevate the leaders on the ground who can deliver an election night worth waiting up for.
Until then, are any other scenarios we can run? What drops or surges do you think would be interesting to track?
Drop us a note and we’ll share a few in the comments section.
Our election scenario methodology
The NewWorld Election Report used New York Times’ Exit Polls to estimate 2020 Biden-Trump vote margins in each of our target voting blocs. (For Arizona, these polls lacked sufficient data for Black, Asian and the “other” racial category, so we applied national Trump-Biden splits.) We then modeled two 2024 election scenarios based on hypothetical shifts in those margins across key swing states. This model does not account for shifts in ethnic makeup of registered voters from 2020 to 2024. Also, this model does not intend to predict the 2024 election or specific state-level results, but rather to demonstrate the potential for small shifts in key BIPOC voting blocs to prove decisive in an extremely close election.