It’s clearer than ever after months of close polling and years of intense polarization: Who wins the 2024 presidential election could come down to tiny differences in who votes and who stays home.
The final NBC News poll of the election found Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied at 49%, using demographic benchmarks agreed upon by the bipartisan team of pollsters trying to best estimate what the electorate will look like this week.
But an analysis of the poll also shows how the composition of the electorate and small changes in who decides to vote could lead to small but important swings in the election. In a close race, that could decide who wins.
The polling team that conducts NBC News’ national surveys, Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research Associates, looked at how subtly different projections of the electorate, one favoring Republicans and one favoring Democrats, would change the result.
A more Republican-leaning turnout model would bump Trump up to 50% and Harris down to 48%, while a more Democratic-leaning model brings Harris to 50% and Trump down to 47%.
Although all those movements are well within the margin of error, the broader point of the exercise is to show how even slight changes in who shows up to vote could have an outsize effect on the election, if the margins in the battleground states are as close as they were in 2020.
The more Democratic-leaning turnout universe is one that sees more women, nonwhite voters and higher-educated voters turning out, as well as those from the cities and suburbs.
And the one favoring Republicans relies on the opposite: more white people, more men, more voters without college degrees and more from rural communities.
The truth is that in the compressed time frame of an election, a lot of differences from poll to poll can come down to different ideas of what the electorate might look like rather than major, systemic changes in voter thinking.
Simple random chance can also affect one poll or another based on who gets contacted or chooses to answer the survey, though pollsters try to correct for this by weighting their surveys. Indeed, simple and reasonable weighting decisions can move poll results up to 8 points, demonstrating how different decisions and assumptions can affect the picture painted by a survey.
We’ll know what the 2024 electorate looks like soon enough. But in the meantime, the analysis shows how small changes can have a big effect on a close election.
