The four types of voters that will decide the presidential election

These are just a few thoughts in the wake of the many interesting comments to this morning’s post about the CNN poll. First, it’s important to note that the poll is somewhat of an outlier. 538’s current curation of all polls on the 2024 presidential race, which adjusts for recency, sample size, methodology, and house effects, aka pollster bias, shows Trump with a one-point lead in a three-way race that includes Insane Clown Nepo Baby, who is getting 10.4%. The latter fact is significant in that I suspect more than half of those voters will end up voting for one of the two major candidates, and that considerably more than half of those votes will go to Biden.

And of course this kind of snapshot doesn’t take into account what I believe will be the very negative effects on Trump’s chances of his evident ongoing deterioration in the course of his current trial, and possibly another trial prior to the election, although the Sinister Six are doing their best to block that from happening. It also doesn’t account for the overwhelmingly critical factor that the race won’t be decided by the national vote at all, but by the separate and individual presidential elections in a half dozen states. In any event, the apparent status of the race as something of a statistical tossup at the moment (again, I think this is too pessimistic, as all sorts of structural factors are flowing in Biden’s favor) is completely astounding and terrifying.

I thought it might be useful to break down the potential electorate into six analytical categories:

(A) People who are going to vote for Biden

(B) People who are going to vote for Trump

(C) People who are going to vote third party

(D) People who are going to vote, but remain genuinely undecided between voting for Biden or Trump

(E) People who might or might not vote, but if they do they will vote for Biden

(F) People who might or might not vote, but if they do will vote for Trump

Media attention is wildly disproportionately focused on category (D). I suspect this is actually an extremely small category, to the point of being almost trivial. By contrast, the eventual size of categories (E) and (F) will almost certainly decide the election. This, among other reasons, is why the current obsession among some elements of the left with the Gaza invasion/crisis is something of a potential disaster, as warranted as it undoubtedly is as a moral matter. Because that obsession may possibly have a very strong marginal effect on the size of (E). As to what to do about that, I don’t know.