It’s a long time until the 2020 general election, but there’s a good chance it will be competitive. After all, we live in a politically polarized era where most presidential elections are decided by relatively narrow margins (since 1988, in the single digits). Which means if the margins are as slim as they were in 2016, the race could come down to swing voters, or voters that tend to switch their support between the two major parties from year to year.
So we were curious: Just how many swing voters are there? A number of researchers have tried to tackle this question, and it turns out, there’s a pretty big range of answers. CONT.
Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight