All elections swing, even in a polarized country. In 2024 it will happen again

In these polarized times, it is easy to assume that nothing matters in American politics, that every four years the same elections are repeated over and over again, with the same demographic groups supporting the same candidates in the same states.

From this point of view, any hint of change should be met with skepticism.

A smaller difference between the popular vote and the Electoral College?

According to the surveys, Donald Trump gains ground among young or non-white voters?

I have a different perspective.

In every election I have covered, election night has brought huge changes which have often gone far beyond what was imagined.

This is one way to look at it in numbers:

In the last 16 years, in every presidential election there has been at least one electoral district that has changed by minimum of 20 points regarding the last presidential elections. At the state level, that would be enough to turn Rhode Island “red” or Montana “blue.”

There are usually warning signs.

Polls in 2020, for example, showed that Trump was doing much better among Hispanic voters than in 2016.

Two years earlier, in the 2018 midterm elections, Miami-Dade County and South Texas were rare bright spots for Republicans.

And, despite these warnings,adie anticipated that Trump would win 30 to 50 points in a Cuban enclave like Hialeah, Florida, or along the Rio Grande.

A story like that can be told in every election since 2004.

And every year, analysts have perfectly reasonable doubts about whether big swings in the polls could be real.

These doubts are more credible each year because growing polarization makes it harder to imagine big changes, while real difficulties in polling make it easier to dismiss unexpected results.

However, the big changes they continue to be produced.

The most important reason:

many voters do not have ideologically coherent opinions on the various topics.

You, dear reader, may have consistent opinions between left and right, but many voters do not.

There are many people who support the Obamacare and he wants mass deportations, or he wants lower taxes and the right to abortion.

Many voters do not have very strong views on many political issues.

The second reason is that the topics change a lot from one cycle to the next.

If you are a supporter ideologically coherente, you can think that our elections present more or less the same choice every four years.

To the extent that anything changes, those changes may even have reinforced your political allegiances.

You may be a liberal whose determination to defeat Trump was only strengthened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the case. Roe contra Wade or for his conduct on January 6.

Or you might be a Republican. MAGA (Make America Great Again) which, after a few years of rising prices, has never been more convinced of Trump’s economic management.

For millions of less ideologically consistent voters, these events complicated their previous political allegiances.

A black or Hispanic voter who had voted for Democrats as the party of workers might have very different feelings after grocery prices rose for the first time in a generation.

And a relatively moderate Republican woman could have finally said that her party had gone too far with January 6 and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

In recent years, many issues may have caused people to reconsider their allegiances:

there has been a pandemic; a debate on the mandatory nature of vaccines; the war in Gaza; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; rising housing prices and homelessness; the conscious left and the conservative backlash against it, from trans rights to critical race theory.

All this can also happen in reverse.

As older issues fade, a voter’s previous partisan base can fade with them.

It’s quite plausible, for example, that, in 2020, many voters chose based on their opinions about the pandemic or the movement Black Lives Matter.

These changes will affect the thinking of millions of Americans.

This is clear in the data and can be seen in the real world.

The fortune of Elon Musk was built in part thanks to large federal grants to address climate change, but the constellation of issues around the “conscious mind virus” now make him a Trump supporter.

Many Arab and Muslim Americans became Democrats in the wake of the Iraq War; Now the signs of Democratic defections among Muslim and Arab Americans are visible everywhere.

These include marches against policies on Israel and Gaza and the decision of the mayor of the only city in the United States with an all-Muslim city council (Hamtramck, Michigan) to support Trump.

Meanwhile, the Cheneyswho supported the Iraq war, now support Harris.

Of course, most things probably won’t change from the last election.

We are a polarized country.

And overall, many of the oscillations that occur will cancel each other out:

for every vaccine skeptic Democrats lose to vaccine mandates, they gain a Republican horrified by MAGA skepticism about vaccines’ ability to save lives.

This phenomenon hides how much turmoil goes on beneath the surface from one election to the next, and is one of the main reasons people get the impression that nothing changes.

But these countervailing forces rarely exactly cancel each other out.

When they don’t, huge swings can occur in certain demographic groups, regions, or even states.

This November, something will be different.

If recent history is any precedent, it could easily be a bigger change than the polls or your imagination suggest.

The warning signs are everywhere, from the surge in Republican votes among young and nonwhite voters to the unusual patterns of state-by-state midterm elections.

And if the result is different from the past, it will not be difficult to explain.

From inflation and the consciousness debate to January 6 and the end of Roe, the last four years have brought up a new set of issues that few imagined a decade ago.

Of course, if the result is a repeat of 2020, who could be surprised?

At the end of the day, this is another election around Trump.

But whether the election result brings a repeat of 2020, a repeat of 2022, or something else entirely, I won’t be surprised if things don’t go as expected.

It shouldn’t surprise you either.

Nate Cohn is The Times’ chief political analyst. It deals with elections, public opinion, demographics and polls.