Data Viz | Politics | Demographics
REPRESENTING US:
White voter share declineD in 15 battleground states
Photo: Nicole Baster via Unsplash
by ANDI EGBERT | April 2, 2020
Come November, the 46th President of the United States will likely be decided by just 15 battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
And in each state, the power held by White voters has receded since 2016, making voters of color more influential in 2020 than in any prior election. Considering that two-thirds of all Latino votes and nearly 9 in 10 Black votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016, this is encouraging news for Democrats and their likely presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
I have 15 states on my watch list. Click to read why.
Given their pivotal place in our electoral politics, what do we know about how the voters in these 15 states have changed since 2016? By that, I don’t mean individuals changing their views or ideology, but how the collective electorate itself has changed. States don’t vote; (some of) their eligible voters do. And those voters are always undergoing demographic change—due to migration across state lines, deaths of former voters, and young people aging into voting eligibility for the first time. Newly naturalized citizens also join the pool of eligible voters. And many demographics are strongly predictive of election outcomes.
The composition of eligible voters is ever-shifting. If you want to read the political tea leaves, best to first steep with some demography.
Our usual political parlance of “How [fill in the blank state] voted last time…” doesn’t always consider the varying degrees of dynamism in the electorate. So, I set out to understand some key changes in eligible voter demographics between 2016 and 2018. Note that many of these changes have no doubt continued into 2020 to varying degrees, but I have not projected the changes forward, to err on the conservative side. (A doubling of the changes, however, would yield a simple projection to 2020.) Here’s what I found:
1. There are a lot of new voters in the battleground states. And 4 out of 5 new voters there are people of color.
Except for Pennsylvania and Iowa (whose changes were within the margin of error), 13 battleground states saw growth in their eligible voter population between 2016 and 2018. Florida alone tallied 592,000 more eligible voters, an unsurprising outcome for such a fast-growing state. Florida led all states in growth from domestic migration between 2017 and 2018. (Note: These changes do not account for other changes in voters due to Florida’s 2018 ballot initiative that restored voting rights for most felons. See Methodology section at bottom.)
Trailing Florida’s large gains were Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina, each of which netted more than 200,000 new voters in two years’ time. In Michigan, roughly 86,000 net new voters entered the voting pool. (Note that Michigan tied New Hampshire for the tightest presidential race in the country in 2016, a razor-thin 0.3 percentage point margin.) Among these 15 states, Maine saw the most modest net growth in voters, with 14,000 gained between 2016 and 2018.
Importantly, we need to remember these are net changes in the eligible voter population. Every state experience continuous changes among its voters, due to deaths and turning 18, migration and naturalization. But in some cases, those changes cancel one another out and thus do not change the pool of voters. In these 13 states, however, these net change figures are over and above other offsetting changes.
In these 15 battleground states, 2018 saw 1.96 million net new voters that weren’t present in 2016, and 4 out of 5 of them were people of color. Nationwide, there were an additional 4.56 million voters in 2018 over 2016. Across the U.S., only 6% of the growth was due to gains in non-Hispanic White voters, while 94% of all the growth was due to new voters of color.
2. White voters’ influence has waned in every battleground state.
In all 15 states we examined, the share of potential voters that White (non-Hispanic) voters constituted declined between 2016 and 2018. Nevada saw the greatest loss of White voter share, falling 2.3 percentage points, from 60.4% to 58.1% of all potential voters. White voters in Colorado, Arizona, and Florida also fell between 1.6 to 1.8 points each. Michigan saw the smallest decline in White voter share, down 0.4 points.
However, only two states saw net declines in the number of White voters: Pennsylvania contracted by about 63,000 White voters, while Iowa diminished by 8,000. In Virginia and Ohio, the population of White voters was statistically unchanged. All 11 other states saw net gains in White voters, led by Florida (+95,000) and North Carolina (+85,000). However, coupled with declining share in every state, this reveals that voters of color grew at a faster rate.
Nationwide, White voters made up about two-thirds of all eligible voters by 2018—receding 1.3 percentage points from 2016, when they comprised 68.7%. However, in numeric terms, there were about 277,000 additional White voters in the U.S. two years after the 2016 election, a modest rise. This brought White voters’ total number to about 157.3 million by 2018.
3. Latino voters’ power is greater in all but one state.
Fourteen of the 15 states in question saw Latinos adding to their percentage of the electorate between 2016 and 2018. (Wisconsin alone saw no significant change.) Leading the pack, Nevada, Florida, Arizona, and Colorado saw gains of 1.3 to 1.6 percentage points. Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania saw gains of half a percentage point or more in Latino voter share. Put another way, in these states, given every 200 eligible voters, an additional person was Latino in 2018 compared to 2016.
The number of Latino voters also grew all 15 states—from about 4,000 in Maine to 116,000 in Arizona and 337,000 in Florida, on the high end. Notably, Latinos accounted for 57% of all the net growth in new voters between 2016 and 2018 in the Sunshine State. Nationwide, eligible Latino voters swelled by nearly 2.5 million during those two years, approaching 29.9 million total. If the same pace continued to 2020, nearly 5 million Latinos will be newly eligible voters.
4. Black voters have grown in numbers in more than half of the battleground states. But they have gained voter share in only a handful of pivotal states.
Among the 15 states we examined, Black voters represented a larger share of the electorate in only four states: Nevada (+0.5 percentage points), New Hampshire (+0.4 points), Arizona (+0.3 points), and Minnesota (+0.1 points). These modest gains, however, represent new high-water marks for Black voter power in several of these states: In Virginia, Blacks now represent nearly 1 in 5 eligible voters; in Nevada, Blacks now account for 1 in 10 voters; and in Arizona and Minnesota, Blacks are now 1 out of 20 potential voters.
Ten states saw the share of Blacks among all eligible voters remain statistically unchanged between 2016 and 2018 (meaning the changes may have been too small to detect in the survey). Iowa was the only state to see a decline, with Black voters falling from 2.9% to 2.6% of the electorate over those two years. Although Georgia has the largest percentage of Black voters of any of the battleground states, at 32%, that figure remained unchanged between 2016 and 2018. Nationwide, the Black voter share increased just 0.1 percentage point, from 12.7% to 12.8%. In other words, for every 1,000 eligible voters, and additional one was Black in 2018 compared to 2016.
Numerically, both Florida and Georgia added 90,000+ net new Black voters to their eligible voter pools, leading the nation. North Carolina added nearly 50,000 and Virginia nearly 30,000, while Arizona, Nevada, and Minnesota added 10,000-26,000 apiece. However, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, Ohio, Maine and Michigan, the number of Black voters was statistically unchanged. Across the U.S., Black voters grew in numbers by 684,000 between 2016 and 2018, accounting for 15% of all net new voters.
What do these demographic changes mean for the 2020 presidential election?
On the whole, these changes amount to a weakening of White voter power in the states that will likely decide the 2020 presidential election and greater ascendancy for voters of color, especially for Latinos. This generally bodes well for the Democratic nominee, as Clinton garnered two-thirds of all Latino votes in 2016 (and Obama earned 7 in 10 Latino votes in 2012). Similarly, nearly 9 in 10 Black votes went to Clinton, with fewer than 1 in 10 Blacks choosing Trump.
In 2016, White voters as a whole chose Trump (57%) over Clinton (37%). But waning White power at the ballot box in battleground states could shake up the race. In particular, the loss of White voter share in Florida (-1.8 percentage points) in a state that Trump won by just 1.2 points could alter the 2020 outcome. In addition, significant growth in the number of net new voters in most of these states also means that a good deal of “new blood” has entered the voting pool, but these new voters will only sway the election outcomes if they choose to vote. With the exception of 2012, when Black voters’ turnout exceeded Whites, White voters have historically led all other race groups in turnout.
Nevertheless, politicians and pundits would be wise to remember that, for any given state, the composition of eligible voters is ever-shifting. In other words, if you want to read the political tea leaves, best to first steep with some demography.
Why did I pick these 15 states as “battleground” states?
Why do I have these 15 states on my watch list? Because 13 of them were decided by a margin of five percentage points (rounded) or less in 2016. President Donald Trump claimed the 141 collective electoral votes of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Hillary Clinton eked out wins by a similarly small margin in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Nevada, Maine, Colorado, and Virginia, grabbing 45 electoral votes. (Note: Maine assigns two of its electoral votes by congressional district. The other two are awarded to the candidate with the most votes in the state. In 2016, three went to Clinton, while one to Trump.)
Although Trump won Iowa (+9.4 percentage point margin) and Ohio (+8.1) with a more comfortable margin in 2016, the fact that each was claimed by President Obama in 2012 (by 6 and 3 points, respectively) makes them each a bit of a wild card. Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were also flipped red on Trump’s winning 2016 map, despite being in Obama’s tally four years prior.
All told, 12 of these 15 battleground states became “redder” between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, with Iowa’s 15+ point swing to crimson leading them all. However, as this analysis has shown, much can change in just a couple years.