Turnout vs. Margins

Post #1055

A vote margin of victory is the spread between two vote shares. If one candidate won with 52% of the vote, and the other candidate got 48% of the vote, then the margin is (52-48 = ) 4%.

In the 7 swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), the median 2024 turnout was 1.9% higher than 2020, but the median margin gain for Trump was 3.1%:

[click to enlarge]

To add 2% and end up with a 3% greater spread, one way to achieve it is to cut former Democrat votes by 0.5% and then also add 2.5% new votes to Trump. The total turnout rises by 2%, and the margin by 3%. But that’s not a lot of movement in the numbers.

In the yellow-shaded cells above are those states where margin gain for Trump was really high, higher than the national average. But notice how turnout was generally way down. This indicates a lot less Democrat votes in those non-swing states. States with the highest swing toward Trump had a median drop in turnout of 8% from 2020.

That’s found in cell L21 of the spreadsheet above. A mean would not be a good measure at this point, because states like California aren’t even done counting votes.

The appearance is that the Democrat votes across the nation were sucked up as if in a sponge into the 7 swing states, which is a potential sign of election malfeasance. In other words, in all states but the crucial swing states, the Democrat vote was way down — or at least down much farther than it was in the swing states.

If the experience in the 43 non-swing states got repeated in the swing states themselves, then you would have a 1984-style landslide election blowout. But it is as if the swing states were artificially supported on the Democrat side.

Reference

[cool site with neat charts] — https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college