The swing voter is back — but in a new form.
Earlier in the 21st century, the dominant view among experts was that swing voters — those who might switch their party preference between elections — were all but extinct. Even today, the number of people who reliably turn out to vote but also regularly flip their votes between parties remains very modest by historical standards.
Yet strategists in both parties believe a new kind of swing voter has emerged as the total number of voters has dramatically increased in the past decade. Today’s key swing voters are the many Americans who cycle in and out of the electorate, casting a ballot in some elections but not others.
“A swing voter today is (one) who does or does not show up to vote,” says Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster.
These intermittent (or “low-propensity”) voters are also more likely to switch their vote between parties than those who routinely show up at the polls, experts believe. But the principal way these irregular voters express their shifting sentiments is by whether they vote at all.
Catalist, a Democratic data and analytics firm, has calculated that 126 million people voted in both the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. Of that total, Catalist estimates that only about 6 to 12 million switched from supporting one party to another across those two races (including those who switched to a third-party candidate). Those party-switchers were dwarfed by the number of people who moved in and out of the electorate itself: In each of those two elections, about 60 million either voted for the first time or sat out the contest after voting four years earlier, according to Catalist’s calculations.
The large number of these low-propensity voters is creating a more fluid and unstable electoral environment. In 2024, this churn clearly benefited President Donald Trump: Catalist found that most people who voted in 2024 but not in 2020 backed him, while most of those who sat out 2024 after voting in 2020 had supported Democrat Joe Biden.
But it’s far from clear that Trump has cemented the loyalty of his new intermittent voters, who tend to be younger and less well-educated and are more likely to be Black, Hispanic or Asian American than the people who turn out more regularly. Polls now consistently show Trump’s approval rating running well below his 2024 vote share with each of those groups.
“I would remind (Republicans) that the rule of coalitions is the last ones in are the first ones out,” said Dan Kanninen, the 2024 battleground states director for both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “They did get some new folks into the coalition in 2024, but nothing they are doing today seems to me designed to keep those folks in the coalition.”
Which means that the intermittent voters who contributed so much to Trump’s victory in 2024 could power more surprises in 2026 and 2028.
Successful national campaigns have always sought a balance between mobilizing their core supporters and persuading swing voters. But the relative emphasis on those two goals has varied over time.
In the 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton aimed his governing agenda and political strategy primarily at swing voters, such as suburban White women, who had drifted away from the Democratic Party. In his victorious 2000 campaign, Republican George W. Bush largely followed that playbook, emphasizing his “compassionate conservative” agenda and looking to claw back suburban moderates.
But heading into Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, his top advisers made a revolutionary decision. Bush’s campaign team — led by chief strategist Karl Rove and senior advisers Matthew Dowd and Mark McKinnon — concluded that campaigns were spending too much money trying to persuade the dwindling number of voters who were truly open to supporting either candidate. They concluded they could earn more votes per dollar by shifting their efforts toward mobilizing Republican-leaning voters who had not turned out in recent elections.
That set a template the winning presidential candidates in both parties largely followed over the next decade. Democrat Barack Obama, in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, targeted working-class and white-collar White swing voters, but he also placed heavy emphasis on mobilizing African American and young voters, who at the time were solidly Democratic constituencies. In 2012, Obama generated enough Democratic turnout that he won reelection even though he lost self-identified independent voters, the exit polls found.
Trump’s 2016 victory represented another triumph of the mobilization strategy: His win pivoted on expanding turnout and GOP margins among Republican-leaning groups, particularly White voters without a four-year college degree. In 2020, Trump again massively mobilized Republicans, but Biden and Democrats matched that surge with huge turnout of their own partisans. Trump lost largely because he ran more poorly than any Republican in modern times among college-educated voters, many of whom identified as independents.
While Clinton in the 1990s emphasized persuading moderate voters, and the winning presidential candidates of the early 21st century focused on mobilizing partisans, Biden in 2020 needed a strong performance on both fronts to beat Trump.
Though the lesson was obscured by Trump’s defeat, the 2020 election showed that he was no longer relying solely on mobilizing core Republican constituencies; he also succeeded at persuading more voters who didn’t historically favor the GOP, particularly young people and racial minorities. In 2024, Trump pushed those inroads further, to the point that they became arguably the decisive factor in his return to the White House.
All the major data sources about 2024 voter behavior show that Trump made larger gains among Hispanic, Asian American and even Black voters than he did among White Americans. He also improved more among younger than older voters. Across all those groups, Trump consistently ran best among those who were the least engaged with the political system and least likely to follow news about it, according to the polling McInturff conducted for NBC, with a Democratic partner, throughout 2020. Trump’s success had always depended on his ability to motivate low-propensity working-class White voters to turn out; in 2024, he proved he could do the same with working-class non-Whites.
The results of the 2020 and especially 2024 presidential elections changed the dominant view across the political system about swing voters in two important respects.
First, when targeting swing voters a generation ago, both parties largely envisioned cross-pressured White moderates — for example, college-educated White men who were economically conservative but culturally liberal.
Those traditional swing voters remain important for campaigns because they are so numerous, but increasingly, each side sees working-class Hispanic, Asian-American and to some extent Black voters — as well as younger men — as pivotal swing constituencies.
Ten or 15 years ago, when political strategists talked about younger and non-White voters, “It was all about how could we mobilize them to vote, because…you think that based on their demography they are going to vote Democratic,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of “Party of the People,” a book analyzing the GOP’s gains with minority voters. “Now they are very much up for grabs. Literally, both sides have a chance to win them. And there are a lot more of them.”
The second important shift has been broadening the definition of swing voters beyond the relatively modest number of people who vote regularly but shift from party to party. Instead, strategists on both sides have come to believe swing voters are expressing their preferences not only by oscillating between Democrats and Republicans, but to an even greater extent by cycling in and out of the electorate.
Results from the Validated Voters study conducted by the Pew Research Center quantify both these changes. According to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN, Pew found that voters of color who supported Biden in 2020 were much more likely than White Biden voters to move away from Harris in 2024. Pew found that the share of Biden 2020 voters who voted for Trump in 2024 was relatively modest for White (6%), Black (5%), Hispanic (7%) and Asian (9%) Americans alike. But while just 12% of Biden’s 2020 White voters didn’t vote at all in 2024, Pew found, that number rose to 19% for his Black and Asian American supporters and 23% among Hispanics. Taken together, those results indicate that a much higher share of Biden’s 2020 minority voters swung in 2024 than his previous White backers — and that the swing was expressed more by staying home than crossing over to Trump.
The decision by so many of Biden’s 2020 minority supporters to skip 2024 suggests that not voting expressed disillusionment with his performance. Ruffini, the Republican pollster, spoke for many strategists in both parties when he said Democrats were mistaken to assume that Biden’s 2020 minority supporters would have stuck with Harris if they had voted. “If they had shown up, did you want them to actually show up? Is it actually in your interest to have them show up?” Ruffini said. “That was the whole thing — it’s (now) a swing bloc. Nobody really owns them.”
The recognition that voting or staying home constitutes a form of swing behavior is erasing the distinction between persuading and mobilizing, Kanninen said. “Every modern campaign has to think about it this way: Turnout is persuasion,” he told me. “We stopped talking about turnout as one tactic and persuasion as another tactic. But rather turnout was a category of persuasion. We would call it ‘persuade to participate.’ … You had to convince (swing voters) that it was worth their time and effort to (vote) in the first place.”
For the 2026 midterm elections, Republicans face a dual challenge in holding support from the new swing voters who lifted Trump in 2024. The first is persuading them to turn out at all. Historically, these intermittent younger and non-White voters have been much less likely to participate in midterm than presidential elections. Though Republicans will mount “enormous” efforts to mobilize them, McInturff said, “There is a less well-educated downscale Trump vote that has been very difficult to get to vote when Trump is not on the ballot.”
The second problem Republicans face in 2026 is the mirror of the dilemma Democrats confronted in 2024: Even if they can turn out these intermittent voters, can they count on their support?
Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican consultant who has become a staunch Trump critic, thinks the answer is no for many of the low-propensity Hispanic voters Trump attracted last year.
Citing polls showing Trump’s dwindling approval ratings among Hispanics, Madrid believes the president is both failing to meet the top priority of his new Hispanic supporters — making their lives more affordable — and exceeding their tolerance for harsh immigration enforcement. “There’s been a lot of people suggesting a racial realignment has been happening,” Madrid said. “What I see is a dealignment. I don’t think they are so much a swing voter as a spurned voter” who is disenchanted with both parties.
John Della Volpe, an expert on youth politics at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics who has also consulted for Democrats, sees a similar risk among Trump’s younger supporters. Della Volpe says his continuing surveys have found that young people, including many who backed Trump last year, “are somewhere between exceedingly and somewhat disappointed so far” in his record on inflation. “They are still willing to cut him some slack,” Della Volpe added, “but he is not cementing them.”
These early signs suggest Republicans may end up facing the same problem Democrats did during Biden’s term, when many of the casual voters the former president attracted in 2020 grew so disenchanted with his performance that they chose not to vote again in 2024.
David Axelrod, a senior CNN political commentator and former chief strategist for Obama’s campaigns, says both parties may struggle to lock down intermittent voters as long as they rely primarily on negative messages — Trump by promising to confront “elites,” “the deep state,” undocumented immigrants and other targets; and Democrats by promising to oppose Trump. “Right now, the motivation in our politics is very much a reaction to the things we hate,” he said. “It’s not an aspirational politics in any way.”
That’s very different, he said, from the message Obama employed to surge turnout in his day. “As I think back to 2008 versus now, there’s no doubt that it was motivated by disaffection with status quo politics,” Axelrod said. “But it was also motivated by hope and a real belief that it could change. A whole lot of people came out in the belief that things could be better. The question is: Could you do that in this environment today?”
As long as the answer is no, the new swing voters may remain untethered to either party, preventing either side from having much confidence about whom they will support — or whether they will vote at all — in each election.
