Dead People May Make the Difference In 2020

Philip Bump: “Look, the GOP isn’t going to literally die off anytime soon. But when you’re a political party that sneaked into the White House on the strength of 78,000 votes in three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — having a significant portion of your voter base in that 65-and-older group has to be somewhat worrisome. Younger voters are overwhelmingly Democratic but also tend to be lackadaisical about casting ballots. That foundation of older, conservative voters is essential to the GOP.”

“We wondered, then, how much death had reshaped the electorate since the 2016 election. Was it the case, for example, that the Grim Reaper is conducting the Final Get-Out-The-Vote in red states more than blue ones? What does that mean for 2020?”

“Thanks to data from L2, a nonpartisan voter data firm, we can report that in nearly every state, the number of new voters added since the 2016 election is larger than the number of voters removed from the voting rolls due to being dead. But the variation in the relationship between those two groups of voters (living, dead) is itself not even — nor is the partisan composition of the new-voter pool.”