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How infrequent voters, GOP defectors could tip battlegrounds for Trump or Harris — CBS News Battleground Tracker scenarios
With such a close presidential race estimated in the battleground races, a host of factors could tip the 2024 election. We focus on two that have the potential to cause the key states to break toward Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The first has to do with infrequent voters, and the second depends on how successful the Harris campaign is at peeling off Trump’s previous supporters.
In order to see how these scenarios could play out, we tweak specific parameters in our Battleground Tracker model that is trained on tens of thousands of survey responses collected during the campaign. The resultant estimates below illustrate a range of possibilities to be on the lookout for this week…
Scenario 1: Infrequent voters show up big, driven by Trump-leaning men
The swingiest segment of the electorate — and most challenging to estimate in polling — consists of infrequent voters. We define them here as registered voters who didn’t cast a ballot four years ago.
This group is “swingy” in two ways — their vote choice and whether they turn out at all. They report being more persuadable, in that more of them are unsure of their decision or say they might at least consider the other candidate. And they are disproportionately young, without a history of voting every two to four years.
Infrequent voters are also more likely to be men than women. Notably, we have found that more men overestimate their likelihood of turning out than women. Administrative data indicates that in fact, women vote at slightly higher rates than men do.
Before President Biden dropped out of the race this summer, 2020 non-voters were leaning toward Trump nationally. Since Harris became the Democratic nominee, they have looked very closely divided between her and Trump.
In the battleground states, specifically, this group often still leans toward Trump — if his campaign is successful in turning out these lower-propensity voters, Trump’s vote margins would improve in these states, flipping some Mr. Biden carried four years ago.
How many 2020 non-voters are expected to show up this year? Well, that also depends on the state, but our estimates suggest roughly one in five voters will not have voted in the previous presidential election. In 2020, this number looked higher than that in Arizona and Nevada, and lower in Wisconsin, for example.
Let’s imagine that the Trump campaign boosts the turnout rate of this group in all seven battleground states. Specifically, in this scenario, their share of the electorate grows by five points over baseline estimates, e.g., from 20% to 25% in Pennsylvania.
In this scenario, Trump would flip Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — states he won in 2016 but lost to Mr. Biden in 2020 — and hold North Carolina. He would lose the other battlegrounds to Harris but end up with more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. (Scroll to the bottom of this page to see state-specific estimates under different scenarios.)
Map of scenario 1: Shows 2020 non-voters and men giving Trump a boost
Scenario 2: Harris peels off more Trump ’20 voters, driven by GOP women
The 2024 race is marked by a sizable gender gap, with the Harris campaign emphasizing reproductive rights and the state of U.S. democracy. Related to this, the Harris campaign has been deploying messengers like former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney to persuade moderate Republicans to back Harris this year. That includes the millions of GOP primary voters who cast votes for Nikki Haley, even after Trump had clinched the party nomination. Most of these voters backed Trump in the 2020 general election.
Persuading supporters of the other party to switch to your side is a difficult task in an era of calcified partisanship. How many Trump 2020 voters might the Harris campaign realistically expect to flip?
A couple of suggestive data points:
- In our polling this year, about 1 in 10 Trump 2020 voters profile as persuadable nationwide and in battleground states. This means they tell us they aren’t firmly committed to Trump. That’s a tough target for the Harris campaign, because some of these voters are leaning Trump’s way and won’t actually change their mind, even if they say they might.
- For context, our 2020 exit polls indicated that only 7% of previous Trump voters flipped to Biden. That defection rate ranged from 6-7% across four battlegrounds that Biden won that year. That’s a more achievable target for the campaign.
In this scenario, imagine that the Harris campaign successfully flips 7% of Trump’s 2020 voters in the battlegrounds. It’s a departure from our baseline estimates, which suggest both a lower defection rate and a roughly equal number of Mr. Biden’s 2020 voters flipping to Trump this year. It amounts to a favorable scenario for Harris, with Democrats netting votes from vote switching in critical states.
Under this set of assumptions, Harris would hold all the states Mr. Biden won four years ago, except Arizona, and also add North Carolina to her column. She would end up with more than 300 electoral votes, securing her place in history as the first woman elected U.S. president.
Map of scenario 2: Shows Harris gaining with Republicans and women
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday repeated a false claim that officials in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania found 2,600 fraudulent ballots written by the same person.
Trump is referencing a review of about 2,500 voter registration applications flagged for potential fraud in Lancaster County. Preliminary findings indicate that detectives identified hundreds of fraudulent applications and hundreds more that they were unable to verify.
The applications were connected to a large canvassing effort to register voters, officials said. As of Nov. 4, no suspects have been identified.
Voter registration forms are not the same as ballots and the forms were identified before processing, officials said.
Trump has repeatedly and falsely alleged that the voter registration applications were ballots as he argued that it was proof of widespread voter fraud in the crucial battleground state.
At least six counties in Pennsylvania have announced investigations into possibly fraudulent voter registration or mail-in ballot applications.
CBS News election law contributor David Becker told CBS News Philadelphia that this shows the vetting system in the commonwealth is working, and that there are “checks and balances to ensure there is no widespread fraud.”
“The election officials were diligent. They found some voter registration forms that did not look right. They flagged them. Some of them were legitimate…others they did not process. So no fraudulent voters are going to vote as a result of that,” Becker said.
Here’s what we know about the investigation.
Lancaster County
Officials said about 2,500 voter registration applications were identified as potentially fraudulent due to identical handwriting on some applications, same-day submissions, and suspicious signatures. Of that figure, officials say just over 400 of those applications were fraudulent.
DA Heather Adams reported some forms had forged or false information. Commissioner Ray D’Agostino said 57% of flagged applications were verified, with 17% confirmed as fraudulent, and 26% are still under review, mostly suspected as being fraudulent.
York County
The DA’s office is investigating a quarter of 3,087 suspicious voter registration forms. The York County Board of Election said so far, 47% have been found to be legitimate, 29% have incomplete information, and 24% remain under investigation. Of those, 85% are duplicate requests.
York County Chief Clerk Greg Monskie told CBS News on Friday that the forms were submitted by Field + Media Corps, an Arizona based voter outreach firm, and that the forms were all received in one batch.
The news outlet Votebeat previously reported Monskie as saying that Field + Media Corps had submitted the forms on behalf of the Everybody Votes campaign, a national voter registration organization.
The Everybody Votes campaign told CBS News on Friday that it had “not been contacted by officials in Lancaster, York, or Monroe counties about any ongoing investigations and have no additional information on the forms in question. Our partners work diligently to ensure all forms collected comply with all rules and regulations.”
Monroe County
Monroe County DA Mike Mancuso said the County Board of Elections identified 30 voter registration and mail-in ballot request forms as “irregular.”
The DA’s office is investigating the ballots as they were not authorized by the person named as the applicant. In one case, a named applicant is dead, he said. Several forms have been traced to a specific person, he said.
Mancuso said 21 forms were submitted by a Lancaster-based subsidiary of Field + Media Corps. Of those, 16 have been found to be fraudulent, he said on Nov 2.
Cambria County
Cambria County president commissioner Scott Hunt said 21 voter registration requests were flagged as fraudulent because information like social security numbers or addresses was inconsistent, and the people named did not respond to letters sent automatically by the system.
When no one responded, investigators went to the addresses listed on the forms and were told either that the person named did not live there, or did not submit the form, he said.
Lehigh County
The Lehigh County District Attorney’s office said it is investigating suspicious voter registration applications.
DA Gavin Holihan told CBS News that around 40% of applications received around the deadline were invalid, and that number was likely to increase.
The county received between 2,500 and 3,000, he said. Around 1,500 were from one organization, local media reported.
Berks County
The Pennsylvania AG Michelle Henry said Berks County was among the counties where there had been “apparent attempts to submit fraudulent voter registration forms.”
County officials had flagged around 1,300 registrations as suspicious, according to local reporting from WFMZ-TV.
“I want to be clear, these are voter registration forms — people’s applications to vote,” District Attorney John Adams reportedly said Friday in a phone call interview with local Pennsylvania news outlet Daily Voice. “These are not ballots.”
Taylor Swift Eras Tour concerts tickets don’t come easy, or cheap. For fans of the superstar who manage to snag tickets, the thought of losing them never crosses their mind. But that’s exactly what’s happening to Swifties nationwide as hackers target Ticketmaster accounts, stealing customers’ tickets for resale on other sites.
“It was like that gut punch,” Morgen Bernius, a Maryland mom, told CBS News national consumer correspondent Usher Qurashi in describing the moment she discovered the Taylor Swift tickets she purchased for her daughter had suddenly disappeared from her Ticketmaster account.
“The tickets are gone — gone,” said Bernius, adding that she could cry just thinking about it. “It was devastating,” she added.
Ticketmaster won’t say how many people have had their tickets stolen, reported Qurashi, but accounts of ticket theft similar to Bernius’ have rippled throughout social media over the past month. “I woke up and my tickets had been ‘successfully’ transferred,” said another theft victim, using air quotes.
“The No.1 tip I could give to fans to protect themselves is to make sure they have a secure, unique password, that they are not using on other platforms,” Kaitlyn Henrich, head of global at Live Nation Entertainment, parent company of Ticketmaster, told Qurashi.
Asked if the company has failed its customers, Henrich added, “We are constantly striving to look at what’s going on and improve the experience.”
For now, that experience includes a 48-hour average wait for fans to have their tickets restored after notifying the company of their disappearance. As an added precaution, Ticketmaster is limiting ticket transfers to 72 hours before Eras Tour concerts and requiring two-factor authentication for some transactions.
“It’s a very small percent, less than a tenth of one percent,” said Henrich, “but obviously for that one fan who’s going through that, it’s a really stressful situation.”
Online ticket thefts also hurt those who unknowingly purchase tickets that had been stolen.
Karen Perry, who paid more than $4,000 for two seats on StubHub to see the Eras Tour in New Orleans, got an email from TicketMaster just weeks before the show informing her that her tickets were stolen and would be returned to the original buyer.
“The tickets that were transferred to you were acquired by someone who was attempting to steal tickets. As a result, they have been cancelled and returned to the original ticket holder,” the letter read.
“My heart dropped, like, my stomach sank,” Perry told Qurashi. “Like, I was at work and I instantly started crying.”
StubHub says Ticketmaster never informed them about the customer thefts, which it only found out about through media reports.
“I think that if there was a world where, for example, we would see Ticketmaster be more collaborative, or more transparent, about the problems they’re having, and how they’re attempting to solve those problems, we could be a partner in that effort,” Laura Dooley of StubHub told Qurashi.
What you can do to protect yourself
Experts say there are several steps ticket buyers can take to reduce the odds of getting ripped off.
- Check early and often that your tickets are still in your account and haven’t been transferred.
- Buy from sellers who offer replacement or refund guarantees.
- Take screenshots of all of your purchases.
As for Perry, who unknowingly purchased stolen tickets off of StubHub, she was able to find new seats with the help of the company, and was able to catch Swift in action in mid-October.
“We just had the best night of our entire lives,” Perry said. “Hands down. It was better than our wedding. It was so good.”
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