How large are the various groups of potential voters?

[Awsi Dooger]

8. 5% of voters are truly non-partisan but swing voters are very real and decided 2016

Nothing has changed in that regard since I started following the math in 1992. Pew Research as always reported that only 7-8% of registered voters have absolutely zero allegiance to either side. They flow with the wind. They also don't vote dependably, which is the reason their actual percentage of the electorate drops closer to 5% instead of 7-8% raw percentage among registered.

The country is indeed becoming more partisan and that includes the vital midwestern swing states. Wisconsin, for example, always had 32% range for self-identified conservatives. Now that has jumped to 36%. Pennsylvania has gone from 30% to 33%. Michigan from 33% to 36%. And so forth. I can rattle all of this stuff from the top of my head. The closer any of those numbers reaches to 50%, then the percentage of a Democratic victory drops accordingly. Absolutely linear. I have the distribution charts to prove it. Years ago I used to post that stuff here but the response rate was so low it simply was not worth it. Flowery subjectivity is preferred.

Independents indeed decide this stuff. We can quibble and deny all we want but that category shifts more than anything else among the meaningful blocks. Hillary never led by as much as conventional wisdom preferred in 2016 because there were an unusually high number of undecided independent voters late in the game. I made that point repeatedly and how it contrasted to low number of undecideds in 2012. It is one of the reasons I have to laugh at this new insistence that swing voters don't exist. It is incomparable ignorance. Normally the most recent example is not the one that is forgotten or denied. The reason Nate Silver was always lower than other models on Hillary's win expectancy was that he picked up on the bizarre high number of undecided voters late in that race, specifically in the key midwestern states.

Unfortunately it was the worst imaginable situational scenario because the Comey letter was released just as those swing voters were deciding. They broke toward Trump is almost unimaginable percentage, given the otherwise polarized nature of that election.

Here is a related section from 538: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-invisible-undecided-voter/

"In 2012, President Obama’s advantage over Mitt Romney, although often paper-thin in national polls, was stronger than it appeared for two big reasons. One was that Obama, in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton, was outperforming his national polls in swing states, largely as a result of his popularity in the Midwest. The other is that 2012 featured remarkably few undecided voters: Only about 4 percent of voters went into Election Day not already committed to Obama or Romney. That reduced the chance of a potential last-minute swing. Even if most of the undecideds turned out for Romney, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to vault him past Obama in the swing states.

Just the opposite was true in 2016, and Clinton’s lead was considerably more fragile than it appeared from national polls. Not only was she underperforming in the Electoral College because of the way her demographic coalition was configured (see the first article in this series for more about that) but a much larger number of voters — about 13 percent on Election Day and as many as 20 percent at earlier stages of the campaign — were either undecided or said they planned to vote for third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Those undecided voters made Clinton’s lead much less safe and they broke strongly toward Donald Trump at the end of the race. Trump won voters who decided in the last week of the campaign by a 59-30 margin in Wisconsin, 55-38 in Florida, 54-37 in Pennsylvania and 50-39 in Michigan, according to exit polls, which was enough to flip the outcome of those four states and their 75 combined electoral votes."

***

The good news for our 2016 nominee -- whoever that may be -- is that late undecideds tend to break toward the challenger and not the incumbent. It is unlikely we'll be swamped late as Hillary was. Posters who were here in 2004 will remember that a poster named TruthIsAll bombarded this site with one thread after another insisting that John Kerry was 99.99% likely to win. He based that exclusively on adjusting state polls toward his bias while also assigning an absurd percentage of undecideds to the challenger. This was just when evidence was mounting that undecideds to the challenger was an overblown theory, and especially in high profile races where both candidates become well known to the electorate.

Let's see, in 2004 I was using my ideological percentages. I was winning every statewide wager. In 2020 I will be using my ideological percentages. I love foundational aspects that require as few variables and decisions as possible, while others scramble for thousands of variables and try to pretend everything is changing in our midst.

Simple wins. Preference wins.