Split Ticket

With six months to go in the 2024 presidential election cycle and both nominees set, it’s worth re-examining the state of the race. Polls are now more relevant, given increasing proximity to the election. While the fundamentals of the race, which include the issue landscape, campaign cash levels, and candidate vulnerabilities, continue to favor Joe Biden, polling now gives Donald Trump a slight edge.

Given this, we are updating our presidential ratings to better reflect the current state of play. These changes account for an environment that has become considerably more Republican than the last presidential cycle’s; in fact, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has Trump currently leading Biden by about a point, which is well to the right of Biden’s 4.5-point victory in 2020.

We stress that these ratings should not be taken as a definitive signal on how these states will end up in November. Polling is capable of systematic error, and a considerable amount of the campaign has yet to be conducted, so there is a lot of room for movement. However, our new ratings reflect current data, which points to a more Republican environment than the one we got in 2020. With six months to go, Biden is in worse shape than a lot of Democrats would have liked him to be.

On a state level, Biden’s issues begin in the Sun Belt, where a combination of strong minority support and large gains with white, college-educated voters powered him to wins in 2020. Current polling indicates that this coalition is now at risk of fraying. This is especially clear in Georgia, where the FiveThirtyEight polling average sits at R+6, as defections among core Democratic groups threaten to upend the Democratic path to victory.

In recent times, Democrats have relied on the “90/30/30” rule for victories in the Peach State, where in order to win, they need to get 90% of the Black vote and 30% of the white vote, with an electorate that is at least 30% Black. This time around, though, not a single poll suggests that Biden is anywhere near this level of support with either group. In fact, the May 2024 Times/Siena poll found Biden up just 66-20 with Black voters.

While that poll is likely an outlier, virtually all surveys of the 2024 election suggest that Biden is losing ground with this constituency. Adam Carlson’s national crosstab aggregation project has a much larger sample size and shows Biden winning Black voters by just 60 points, compared to 2020’s D+83 margin.

Although we expect the losses to be much more muted than what current polling suggests, even the slightest bit of slippage could tip the state back towards Donald Trump — for instance, a 5% swing right with Black voters would see Biden lose Georgia by a point, even if he managed to not lose any of his margins with whites. Voter file data shows that a significantly higher share of new Black registrants are registering as Republican Given the current evidence, and given that we do expect the president to lose some ground with Black voters at the moment in both vote share and turnout, we are shifting Georgia to Leans Republican.

For similar reasons, we’re shifting North Carolina to Leans Republican as well. The Tar Heel State already went for Trump by a point in 2020, and any erosion in Black support would make flipping this state even harder in 2024. While we do not rule out Biden victories in either of these states at the moment, the bulk of the current evidence suggests that he is running well behind his 2020 margins with both Black and white voters alike.

It’s critical to note that in both southern states, the Dobbs effect that has acted as a bulwark for the party in other regions is much more muted. The South is far more religious and conservative, and this limits the potential gains Democrats can make as a result. This is part of the reason that we are skeptical of Biden making significant gains with southern whites in this election cycle; although we do expect abortion to play a big role in this election, the flip side of the boost it provides Democrats in the Midwest is that it makes the South a bit more difficult for them.

Another constituency that Biden has consistently struggled with in polling is Hispanic voters. Given that they swung massively to the right in 2020, there is more historical grounding for taking the current polling picture at face value here, and Carlson’s crosstab aggregator finds Biden losing 13 points of support from his 2020 margins with this demographic.

This is perhaps why Trump leads Biden by 7 points in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of Nevada. Slippage with urban and Hispanic voters alike has greatly endangered the president’s standing in this Biden +2 state. It may bode well for Biden that much of this slippage has come among constituencies that have consistently backed Democrats in recent years — given how early it is, it is very easy to envision him consolidating support as the election’s salience begins to rise.

But while we do think Biden will recover much of the ground he has lost in polling as partisans “come home”, it is far from a guarantee, and our ratings should reflect this uncertainty. Our previous rating for Nevada was Leans Democratic, and at the moment, the current evidence does not give any reason to say that he is favored. As a result, we are shifting our rating for the Silver State to Tossup.

We’re keeping Arizona at Tossup, however. Trump and Biden are currently polling within the margin of error in this state, and its college-educated core seems to have a strong repulsion for MAGA candidates — Martha McSally, Donald Trump, Kari Lake, and Blake Masters are four candidates of a very similar ideological and rhetorical bent, and they have collectively lost each of the last four statewide elections at the top of the ticket, across a variety of national environments.

Arizona also has a very large retiree community, as nearly 20% of its population is over the age of 65. Given that Biden’s current losses among young voters seem to be partially stemmed by some gains with seniors (though they are also likely more muted than what polling suggests), this could help him.

Lastly, the court ruling that temporarily allowed for the enforcement of the state’s draconian abortion law from 1864 has thrust Dobbs back into the state’s spotlight, likely shifting the issue environment towards one that favors Democrats in a state that is fairly pro-choice. Due to a combination of these factors, we think that this is one state where Biden is likely to hold up well as the election progresses, even if his current polling is slightly subpar.

The picture in the Rust Belt is not nearly as rosy for Republicans as the one in the Sun Belt, but it is also not as good for Biden as our previous ratings suggested.

Of the region’s three core swing states, Michigan is currently the one that Biden is faring best in. This is not too surprising, as it voted to the left of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in both 2016 and 2020. After narrowly losing it to Republicans in 2016 for the first time in a generation, Democrats rebounded in 2020, with Biden winning the state by nearly 3 points.

538’s latest polling average, however, shows Trump currently ahead of Biden in this state, and though it is by less than 1 percent, it does suggest a tougher picture for Democrats than the ones they faced in 2020 or 2022. We do think that there is some opportunity for Democrats to make gains here — the state is very pro-choice, and the party rode the Dobbs backlash to a landslide win in 2022, sweeping all chambers of government and comfortably winning every statewide office on the ballot.

But each cycle poses new challenges, and the evidence this time around suggests a very close race at the moment, with no clear edge for either party. Given this, we believe Tossup is the most prudent rating.

While the presidential race is currently highly competitive in Michigan, it is anything but this in Ohio, a state that Trump won by 8 points in 2020. Given Biden’s low approval rating and Trump’s 10-point lead in 538’s Ohio polling average, we cannot see Biden carrying the Buckeye State in the current political climate. 

Additionally, as we’ve written multiple times before, the state’s fundamentals are not on Biden’s side. Even after the collapse of the Obama coalition, Democrats still have more room to fall in Ohio than they have to gain, especially in the Appalachian portion of eastern Ohio. While this dynamic could change in the long run, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a sea change in 2024.

We don’t expect the Senate race to make the presidential race considerably closer either — the evidence for reverse coattails is very flimsy, and it has never been strong enough to suggest that the Democrats could make up a 10 point gap. Thus, for now, we are moving Ohio to Safe Republican.

Alaska was initially a state that we felt could be in play during a strong Democratic year, which once looked much more possible in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterms. Early polls from Alaska Survey Research also found Trump leading by just 7 points in July of 2023, giving credence to the idea that it was on the board. But the national environment has deteriorated for Democrats since then.

Under the current polling picture, it is difficult to credibly argue that the state is flippable at the moment (a notion reinforced by the fact that the Biden campaign has spent virtually no money at all in this Trump +10 state). For this reason, we’re moving Alaska to Safe Republican at the moment — until Democrats improve significantly in polling, this state is not remotely likely to be in play for 2024 at the presidential level.

Finally, we have two minor changes in Trump’s favor in Maine and Nebraska, both of which allocate some of the electoral votes by congressional district. ME-02 and NE-01 are both being moved to Safe Republican.

In Maine’s 2nd district, which flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016 and has continued to move right, we have difficulty seeing Biden with any realistic shot at winning. Democrats have not carried this district at the gubernatorial or presidential levels since 2012, despite a variety of statewide landslides. We don’t expect Biden to outperform Janet Mills’ 2022 13-point landslide in a state that he carried by 9 points in 2020, and the heavily non-college educated characteristics of the district mean that a rebound is unlikely for him here.

Nebraska’s 1st, meanwhile, is simply too red to consider a potential flip for this cycle. This (rather educated) iteration of the district would have backed Trump by 18 in 2016, and by 11 in 2020, and we believe that this makes it a bit too tough for Biden to credibly target in this cycle. While we do expect white, college-educated voters to continue trending to the left, it would likely take at least a couple cycles to turn this district blue.

Given Biden’s current struggles, though, his campaign is unlikely to be focusing much on those “reach” targets. Because the data makes it really difficult to argue that Joe Biden is currently in better shape than he was on election day in 2020, and as a result, there are a host of critical swing states for Democrats to worry about first.