The race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is very close. Over the first three months of 2024 the candidates were never more than three points apart in our average of national polls, with Mr Trump narrowly ahead for most of that time. That is new for Mr Trump: in his two previous presidential campaigns he never led a general-election polling average for a single day. More worrying still for Mr Biden, Mr Trump is ahead in several of the swing states that he lost in 2020. The outcome in half a dozen states— Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—is likely to prove decisive. A small but critical slice of voters who plumped for Mr Biden back then are now telling pollsters that they plan to defect. Who are they?
To find out, we built a statistical model to assess how a hypothetical voter might cast a ballot, based on their demographic traits. Our data come from YouGov, an online pollster, which every week surveys over a thousand people about their demographic profile, voting history and voting intentions. We combined all its survey results since January 2023 to get a detailed portrait of Americans’ voting preferences. Use the drop-down menus below to plug in any combination of attributes—age, sex, religion and more—to construct a hypothetical American and see our estimate of their vote. Or press shuffle to see a voter at random. Our model will continuously update to incorporate each week’s YouGov survey.
The voters propelling Mr Trump’s polling renaissance might come as a surprise. While white voters’ preferences have changed little since 2020, racial minorities—historically the bedrock of Democratic support—have lurched away from Mr Biden. Mr Trump has also sharply cut into his successor’s advantage among young voters, another core Democratic group. Mr Biden will hope these once-loyal Democrats return to the fold once the campaign heats up.
Latina women aged 25-34
Shifted towards Trump
Black people aged 35-54
Became less committed to Biden
Atheists
Remained loyal to Biden
White evangelicals
Remained loyal to Trump
Race is often cited as the central cleavage in American politics, yet the single most powerful predictor of voting intention is religion. A model that knows nothing save for respondents’ religious affiliations can correctly identify their preferred candidate 62% of the time, compared with 59% for race. Of Mormons and evangelical voters, 73% say they support Mr Trump. This compares with just 13% of avowed atheists.
Rather than the sharp realignment that took place in 2016 and 2020, when Mr Trump attracted working-class white voters while shedding college-educated ones, the voters swinging in either direction this year are more alike: they tend to be young; black or Hispanic; and live in cities. This suggests they have looser party alliances and pay less attention to politics.
So both sides will think they can win as the election approaches. And you can use this tool to explore the type of voter—a 40-year-old high-school-educated black man from rural Georgia, say—who might just swing it.■
Stay up to date on American politics with our new daily update, The US in brief. And explore how British voters may vote in the next election with our UK election trackers.
Methodology
Our model is based on survey data provided by YouGov, which obtains responses from a nationally representative sample of approximately 1,500 Americans each week. We gathered all results since the start of 2023, amounting to nearly 100,000 individual responses. We have removed people who did not say they planned to vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election.
To estimate voting intentions based on demographic profiles, we fit a logistic regression model using the LASSO method, a statistical technique that eliminates or reduces the impact of certain variables in order to maximise accuracy on unseen data. Our model accounts not just for the eight demographic features detailed above in isolation, but also for how they interact with each other. For example, switching the listed age group from 75+ to 18-24 sharply increases the chances that a white voter will support Mr Biden, but actually reduces this probability for a black voter. Our model also incorporates the national poll average for the two leading candidates in each week. As a result, if one of them gains or loses ground in the polls overall, the model will automatically shift vote-intention probabilities for each demographic profile in the same direction. We update the model every week to account for additional survey data and new national polling averages.
The Canary Wharf business district is seen in the distance behind autumnal leaves on October 09, 2024 in London, United Kingdom.
Dan Kitwood | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON — Inflation in the U.K. dropped sharply to 1.7% in September, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected the headline rate to come in at a higher 1.9% for the month, in the first dip of the print below the Bank of England’s 2% target since April 2021.
Inflation has been hovering around that level for the last four months, and came in at 2.2% in August.
Core inflation, which excludes energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, came in at 3.2% for the month, down from 3.6% in August and below the 3.4% forecast of a Reuters poll.
Price rises in the services sector, the dominant portion of the U.K. economy, eased significantly to 4.9% last month from 5.6% in August, now hitting its lowest rate since May 2022.
Core and services inflation are key watch points for Bank of England policymakers as they mull whether to cut interest rates again at their November meeting.
As of Wednesday morning, market pricing put an 80% probability on a November rate cut ahead of the latest inflation print. Analysts on Tuesday said lower wage growth reported by the ONS this week had supported the case for a cut. The BOE reduced its key rate by 25 basis points in August before holding in September.
Within the broader European region, inflation in the euro zone dipped below the European Central Bank’s 2% target last month, hitting 1.8%, according to the latest data.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated shortly.
FEW REPUBLICAN politicians differ more from Donald Trump than Larry Hogan, the GOP Senate candidate in Maryland. Consider the contrasts between a Trump rally and a Hogan event. Whereas Mr Trump prefers to take the stage and riff in front of packed arenas, Mr Hogan spent a recent Friday night chatting with locals at a waterfront wedding venue in Baltimore County. Mr Hogan’s stump speech, at around ten minutes, felt as long as a single off-script Trump tangent. Mr Trump delights in defying his advisers; Mr Hogan fastidiously sticks to talking points about bipartisanship, good governance and overcoming tough odds. Put another way, Mr Hogan’s campaign is something Mr Trump is rarely accused of being: boring. But it is intriguing.
DEPENDING ON where exactly you find yourself, western Pennsylvania can feel Appalachian, Midwestern, booming or downtrodden. No matter where, however, this part of the state feels like the centre of the American political universe. Since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has visited Western Pennsylvania six times—more often than Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. She will mark her seventh on a trip on October 14th, to the small city of Erie, where Donald Trump also held a rally recently. Democratic grandees flit through Pittsburgh regularly. It is where Ms Harris chose to unveil the details of her economic agenda, and it is where Barack Obama visited on October 10th to deliver encouragement and mild chastisement. “Do not just sit back and hope for the best,” he admonished. “Get off your couch and vote.”
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