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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.
That’s because defining who is and isn’t a swing voter isn’t easy, as it’s a small group. But estimates I previously made based on a couple of data sets suggest that there were around 10 million voters who shifted from voting for one major party in 2012 to the other in 2016, which accounted for roughly 7 percent of all votes cast. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of people, but these voters probably did play a role in helping President Trump get elected because around three-quarters of those voters swung toward him rather than Hillary Clinton.
