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Meanwhile, an FAU PolCom Lab/Mainstreet Research poll found that Trump and Biden are tied in key battleground states including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Trump leads Biden by one point among all voters and one point among likely voters. This is a massive jump from the 2020 election where Biden sailed to victory in the states, causing the president’s administration to panic with little to no time for the president to recover from these dismal polling numbers.

With recent polls showing President Joe Biden has gained ground on former President Donald Trump in Michigan, both candidates are working to move the needle in the battleground state.

Both candidates have visited Michigan in the past few months to campaign for the election, and Trump is scheduled to make a stop in Grand Rapids on Tuesday, April 2.

Kaja Braziel has historically voted Democrat. The 30-year-old Detroit native remembers casting her first-ever vote for Barack Obama, which eventually factored into her support for President Joe Biden.

Four years later, Braziel says she's apprehensive about voting for Biden again. The Wayne State University senior, who also works full time, is upset that Biden hasn't done more to address student loans. She acknowledges he's not solely responsible for falling short of his promises, but says it's an issue nonetheless.

Labor groups helped Democrats retake the Michigan Legislature earlier this month — and now they want the party to pay its dues.

After languishing in the statehouse minority for decades, Democrats are moving to recapture the state’s reputation as a union stronghold after flipping both chambers this fall, holding onto the governorship and winning every statewide office. It’ll mark the first time the party has held a trifecta in Lansing in nearly 40 years and comes after unions ran large-scale organizing drives to get their members to the polls.

Voters in November will choose the next president of the United States, with the end result expected to be either a second term for President Joe Biden or a return to the White House for former President Donald Trump. Every vote matters, but the electoral results in a handful of key swing states will play major roles in determining the ultimate outcome.

What exactly is a swing state? There’s a literal by-the-book – or dictionary – definition: “A U.S. state in which Republican and Democratic candidates have similar levels of support and which is considered to play a key role in the outcome of presidential elections.”

Politics weren't "really on the radar" for Kimberly Fasking's suburban community.

It was rare you saw yard signs while driving in the neighborhood, and political commentary on the local Facebook page was scarce, Fasking, a 48-year-old resident of the Birmingham suburb, Mountainbrook, Alabama, told Business Insider.

"It will all come down to turnout" is an oft-ridiculed cliche in election circles. But there's some truth to it: In a highly polarized political environment like the one we're in, election results may be determined more by changes in turnout patterns than by changes in partisan preference. In other words, political parties not only need to convince voters to agree with them, but also to convince voters who already agree with them to vote.

In light of this, political strategists on both sides of the aisle had their eyes on the November 2023 elections as an indicator of who might vote in the 2024 presidential race. So, now that those elections are in the books, what can we take away from them?

Researchers from the Population Health Institute say that lack of access to infrastructure like broadband, recreation facilities, and public libraries hurts voter turnout in rural places.

The lowest voter turnout in the U.S. is in rural counties and small metropolitan areas, according to new data from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, an annual report published by the Population Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

After making gains in recent years among suburban voters, Democrats are losing that support, according to the findings of a recent poll.

Many analysts said they believed suburbanites were an important factor in President Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. A new survey from Harvard University's Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) and the Harris Poll indicates that not only is that support dwindling, but suburban voters said they are also more likely to support a Republican candidate in the upcoming midterm elections.

Republicans spent every election of the Trump era hemorrhaging suburban voters. Next month’s Virginia elections will be a big, early test of whether they can stop the bleeding.

It’s the GOP’s best chance in years to arrest their streak of new lows in the rapidly growing suburban counties that ring Washington, D.C., Richmond and Virginia Beach. Gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin and a down-ballot slate packed with female recruits believe they’ve found the right formula, leaning into an issue set made for battle in the suburbs — education and the role of parents in public schools, taxes and the rising cost of living — while President Joe Biden’s approval ratings sag and congressional Democrats struggle to implement his agenda.

People often talk about politics as though the business of electing candidates is shrouded in nearly infinite complexity. The reality is that for most of the 40 years I have been in and around campaigns, winning has often come down to just three factors -- the racial composition of a district or state, its median income, and the percentage of its voters who graduated college.

Recent years, however, have upended old assumptions. These days, the first thing I want to know about a district or state is its population density. In other words, is it primarily rural, urban,or suburban? If it's in the last category, how far do these voters live from downtown – i.e., is it more of an inner suburb or an outer one?

The biggest question in Tuesday’s elections may be whether Democrats can maintain their advantages in the nation’s biggest population centers – despite all the headwinds buffeting the party.

Geographic polarization has been one of the most powerful trends in American politics for roughly the past two decades, with Democrats gaining ground in the most populous metropolitan areas almost everywhere, and Republicans growing stronger in the smaller places beyond them. That trend notably accelerated after Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016 and has ratcheted up since the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion last year.

The fight for votes in the upcoming US presidential election is likely to be particularly focused on suburbia. Historically, Republicans win most support in rural areas and Democrats have larger vote shares in cities. But the suburbs have long been a political battleground .

Voters in these areas have swung in favour of candidates of both parties in recent elections , making them a key target for political advertising in 2024. But there are a few key factors that could make the suburban vote slightly different this year.

They say elections are decided by those who show up to vote. There are many inequalities that affect turnout and therefore shift voting power from some groups and to others. Age is one of the strongest of these factors, and it has been since we’ve been able to measure it well. There have been some changes over time, but the basic result, that the young vote less than the old and that turnout climbs with each additional year of life, is one of the most robust findings in political science. In a presidential year, the youngest voters, 18–29, turn out at a 47–65 percent rate, while those in their 60s exceed an 80 percent turnout rate. In midterms, those under 30 turn out at 17–35 percent while those in their 60s vote at a 70 percent rate. (These are self-reported rates among U.S. citizens. See note at bottom for more details on the data.) That sharp rise with age, which is also very regular in its increase with each year of age, means that those under 30 are always underrepresented among the voting population while those older than about 45 are over represented [overrepresented]. The gap between presidential and midterm elections is particularly notable as we approach the 2018 midterm. Relative to presidential years, the younger a person is the lower their likelihood of voting in a midterm compared to a presidential election. To the extent the young are underrepresented in presidential years, they are even more underrepresented in midterm electorates. The tipping point of representation comes at about 36 years old, when share of population and share of voters becomes about equal. After 45, the share of voters exceeds share of population. (I use 2016 data only here to avoid changes in the age distribution.) There has been some variation in turnout over time, especially among the younger voters. Turnout among the youngest citizens bumped up substantially between 2000 and 2004, perhaps reflecting the closeness of the 2000 election result. Turnout rose again in 2008 before falling back a bit in 2012 and 2016. While there is some varation by year among those over 50 it is more modest compared to the year-to-year changes we see below age 30 or 35. Younger citizens appear to respond more to short-term, election specific presidential campaign forces than do their elders. It is worth noting as well that the increase in voting among those under 35 has sustained its overall increase compared to 1996 and 2000. That increase, obviously, has not erased the age gradient, though it has flattened it somewhat. Midterm turnout however has not seen any increase among the young. Not only is turnout quite low among those under 30, the increase we see in presidential elections after 2000 are much smaller in midterms. If the last 5 midterms are a guide, we’d expect fewer than 1 in 3 people under 30 to cast a ballot this November. There are many reasons why the young are less likely to vote. These include level of political interest, overcoming the initial barrier of registration to vote, a busy life of many changes, geographic mobility and simply not yet having developed the habit of voting. Some of these factors can be influenced by campaigns and efforts at mobilization. The increase in turnout after 2000 in presidential elections shows that some change can occur. The lack of substantial change in midterm turnout raises doubts as to how much mobilization can be effective in 2018.

Everyone knows that older people are the most reliable voters. But no one knows why. In the united states [United States], where voting is optional, the people who vote get to influence the country's direction. And the groups who vote more reliably tend to get their interests served by the government. And in this country, that's the elderly. Americans over 60 years old are 15 percent more likely to be registered to vote than those between 18 to 30. And registration strongly predicts voting - 90 percent of registered voters voted in 2008, and obviously none of the non-registered voters voted. Why else would Social Security, which hands out money to Americans over 65, be called the third rail of American Politics? Older voters tend to be more conservative than the population, meaning that the conservative agenda is disproportionately weighted on the national political stage. Whether this is good or bad depends on your political attitude, but it seems to be anti-democratic in practice, if not in intent. Given this bias, it's strange that we don't know why the elderly are more likely to vote. In my own totally unscientific survey, there is a sense that older people were raised in an era of greater civic virtue, when children loved the flag and the president instead of ipods [iPods] and Spongebob. But people always think civic virtue is declining, ever since ancient Greece at least. Other respondents suggest the elderly have more free time. Political scientists have speculated that the elderly have more "social capital" or "civic resources." A new study by Ansolabehre, Hersh, and Shepsle suggests the answer is much simpler. They point out two facts. First, Americans are mobile. Second, when you move to a new place, you have to re-register to vote. Since registering to vote is never first on people's list of things to do, it tends to get put off. But once you are registered, you stay registered. This type of one way effect on behavior is known to psychologists as a ratchet. And it means the longer you have lived in one place, the more likely you are to be registered there. And the older you are, the more likely you are to have been in your place for a while. This mathematical fact is true if moving occurs at random times, without regard to age. Since younger people are more mobile than older people, the effect is even stronger. That's it. Those assumptions alone provide a remarkably close prediction for actual registration levels. The authors obtained an amazing dataset - the registration information for all Americans - and analyzed it to confirm their hypothesis. This means that older people are no more civic than young people. It means that today's youth aren't particularly self-centered, or lazy, or cynical. We just haven't gotten around to registering yet. And we're not lazier: When older people move, they procrastinate just as much as we do.

In the U.S., citizens are more likely to vote as they age. With the U.S. in another presidential election year, the demographic with the highest turnout will have the most sway over results. According to research from the Pew Foundation, voter turnout in the 2020 general election climbed to decades-high levels. More than 158.4 million people, or 62.8% of U.S. citizens aged 18 and older, cast a vote in the 2020 presidential election, Pew found. Here's a breakdown of how that turnout looked by age:

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Over hot coffee at a Long Island diner, Frank Piccola and his friends do not shy away from offering their hot takes on the day’s politics — including the 2024 presidential contest. Piccola, an ardent backer of Donald Trump, is a father of eight, grandfather of 14, and great-grandfather of six. “I feel sorry for them if [Joe] Biden gets in because of what’s happening to the country. He talks about the border — the border is wide open,” he said. At another diner an hour away, Susan Matenson and her husband “love” Biden’s record and cannot fathom Trump back in the Oval Office. “Biden has accomplished a lot. He’s bringing down drug prices,” she said. As older Americans, both Piccola and Matenson are part of a demographic of voters considered the most reliable, which is why candidates covet their support. And in a tight election like this November, their choices at the ballot box could be make or break for two candidates who themselves are seniors. In the last presidential election, roughly 52% of voters 65 years and older backed Donald Trump. But recent polling suggests the loyalties of older voters may shift, with Biden stronger with that bloc than the last cycle. Some polls show Biden may even hold a slight edge. A New York Times-Siena College poll released last month, for example, found Biden leading Trump with voters 65 and older, 48% to 45%. Political analyst Todd Belt, who leads the political management program at The George Washington University, notes that with months to go before election day, things are volatile and could change. “One of the things that we know about older voters is they are genuinely afraid of big changes. And usually that has come from Democrats, not Republicans. But of course, when you have Donald Trump in the mix, he’s always a wildcard,” he said explaining recent trends in polling. The Biden campaign is labeling Trump a risk to the future of social security and Medicare, pointing to his inconsistent statements about the programs, including a suggestion he is open to cuts. At the same time, they are touting the Biden administration’s work capping out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and insulin. Looking to build momentum, just this week the campaign launched a new “Seniors for Biden-Harris” initiative, complete with phone banks and some uniquely senior-focused activities, like pickleball tournaments and bingo nights. Explaining the strategy, former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who is serving as a surrogate for the Biden campaign, says “you’ve got to go where voters are.” “You got to talk to people about where they are in life these days and what they depend on. And in the case of seniors, it’s getting out and staying active, but it’s also Medicare, Social Security,” he continued. Spectrum News reached out to the Trump campaign repeatedly, asking to talk about why they believe they are a better fit for older voters. They did not respond by deadline, though a campaign spokesperson has previously walked back the possibility of entitlement cuts while arguing Trump would put the programs on a stronger footing by building a better economy.

Up to the 1960s, party choice was generally viewed as a result of stable party identifications and social class (“Michigan school”). Party preferences and political attitudes were assumed to be shaped during an individual's ‘formative’ or ‘impressionable’ years in adolescence and early adulthood, and to remain highly stable thereafter. Subsequent literature has criticized this view based on the recognition that citizens may well change their partisan preferences and ideological positioning over the life cycle. Consistent with the latter view, our analysis shows that people shift to more left-leaning parties up to midlife and then become more likely to swing back towards rightist political parties. These results are obtained using four decades of high-quality Norwegian Election Studies, which feature individual-level rotating panels that allow us to track party shifts over a fixed four-year election cycle.

Something weird is happening beneath the overall stability of the early 2024 polling — and it’s either a sign of a massive electoral realignment, or that the polls are wrong again. Polls show former President Donald Trump is ascendant with the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some surveys, as less-engaged young voters spurn Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with seniors than he was four years ago, even as his personal image is significantly diminished since he was elected last time. A drop in youth support for President Joe Biden keeps showing up in polls using different ways of reaching respondents, a sign that it may not just be methodological error. That would be a generational shift: For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have overwhelmingly won young voters, and Republicans have done the same with the other end of the electorate. Poll after poll is showing that’s flipped this year. If these changes are real, it would have profound effects on the coalitions both campaigns are building for November. No Republican has won young voters since George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and no Democrat has carried the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on Social Security in 2000. Or something’s wrong in the polls — and the mirage of an “age inversion” is really a warning sign of a structural problem in the 2024 election polling. That would be a signal that the polls are once again struggling to measure the presidential race accurately after underestimating Trump in the previous two presidential elections. Maybe the young-voter numbers are wrong, and the polls are understating Biden; or maybe the older-voter numbers are wrong, and Trump is even stronger than he appears; or both. “Seems like we know how to poll white, middle-aged people really well,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and an expert on polling young voters. “But if they’re younger, older, Black, Hispanic — there seems to be no consensus about what’s the best practice these days.” Is there a fundamental realignment underway of the American electorate? A systemic error in polling? A little bit of both? The implications are enormous, but so much could change before then. Here’s what we know right now. What the polls show Just last week, a new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College national poll showed Trump 2 points ahead of Biden among Millennial and Gen-Z voters, while Biden led overall among voters 45 years and older, including those in the Silent and Greatest generations. A Fox News poll last month showed Trump leading Biden among voters under 30 by a whopping 18 points in a head-to-head matchup — and by 21 points with independent and third-party candidates included. Not every poll shows a perfect age inversion. Biden is at just 50 percent among voters under 30 in the Wall Street Journal’s national and swing-state polling. While that’s still about 10 points ahead of Trump, it’s a significant decline compared to the 2020 election — and roughly equal to his vote share among seniors, 48 percent. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Biden 20 points ahead of Trump among voters under age 35, close to the president’s margin in 2020 according to exit polls and other estimates of voting subgroups. But that survey also had Biden ahead by 8 points among voters 65 and older, which would be a significant reversal from recent elections, when Republicans won older voters. On paper, it might seem like a good trade-off for Biden: Young people turn out to vote at significantly lower rates than seniors. According to census data, 48 percent of voters under age 25 participated in the 2020 election, compared to 73 percent of those between the ages of 65 and 74, and 70 percent of those 75 and older. But winning over older voters doesn’t appear to be boosting Biden in the polls, which show him essentially neck-and-neck with Trump, with the Republican narrowly ahead in most swing states. Trump’s youth-voter surge? Some polls show Trump actually pulling even with — or slightly ahead of — Biden among young voters. But is that a shift or an outlier? The evidence is mixed, and polls of the overall electorate contain only a small sample of young voters. And because it’s become increasingly difficult for pollsters to interview young people, that increases the chances of errors. Traditional phone polling — which some media outlets and academic institutions still employ — could be difficult for capturing young voters. “Even if they’re on a cell phone, they’re much less likely to answer it,” said Abby Kiesa, the deputy director of CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research institute on youth engagement based at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “That makes it hard when people are trying to use phone surveys to reach a representative sample of young people.” But a drop in youth support for Biden keeps showing up in polls using different ways of reaching respondents, a sign that it may not just be methodological error. The electoral analysis website Split Ticket recently conducted a survey of young voters using text-message interviews — a mode more familiar to people in that age group. It found Biden (35 percent) ahead of Trump (25 percent) and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (23 percent), but well short of the 20-plus-point margin the current president enjoyed over Trump in the 2020 election. The gap between Biden and Trump narrows particularly when pollsters also ask about independent and third-party candidates, like Kennedy, Cornel West or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, suggesting young voters leaving Biden aren’t necessarily flocking to Trump instead. In those polls, young voters are far more likely than other age groups to say they would vote for candidates other than Biden and Trump. Young Americans have voted overwhelmingly Democratic since 2000, peaking with Barack Obama’s first election in 2008. There’s no one perfect source of estimates of how subgroups have voted, but exit polls and other surveys generally show Biden beat Trump by more than 20 percentage points in 2020. But they have also voted for third-party candidates at higher rates, including in 2016, when Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. According to estimates from Catalist, the Democratic data firm, 10 percent of voters under 30 chose a third-party candidate eight years ago, compared to 8 percent of voters 30-44, 5 percent of those 45-64 and 3 percent of voters 65 and older. This year’s polls are clearly picking up broad dissatisfaction with Biden among young voters, even if they don’t uniformly show Trump gaining ground. The Split Ticket poll shows both Biden (68 percent) and Trump (70 percent) are viewed unfavorably by more than two-thirds of young voters — but, notably, Trump’s “very unfavorable” figure of 61 percent is significantly higher than Biden’s 44 percent. The young voters Biden needs to win include the 24 percent who have a “somewhat unfavorable” view of him.

A truism of American politics is that older voters prefer the Republican and younger voters prefer the Democrat. That’s what happened in 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden won voters under 50 and Republican Donald Trump won voters over 50, according to exit polls. Biden’s margin among younger voters — he got 65% of voters ages 18-24 — helped him overcome the fact that Trump got 52% of older voters, who accounted for more than half the electorate. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College even though she got more votes than him, but the pattern of younger voters supporting the Democrat held. Clinton got more votes among voters ages 18-44, and Trump got more votes among voters ages 45 and older, according to exit polls. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney lost the election, but he did better than Democrat Barack Obama among voters 45 and older. Voters under 30 haven’t preferred the Republican since 1988, when George H.W. Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis in a landslide. Voters over the age of 65 haven’t preferred the Democrat since 2000, when Al Gore lost the election despite getting more votes than Republican George W. Bush. , But the old rules don’t seem to apply in this year’s presidential election, where both candidates are old men and their fitness to serve is a top issue. Older voters are gravitating to Biden, and younger voters are taking a look at Trump. A new Marist poll in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, for instance, showed a tight race overall with Trump at 47% and Biden at 45%, a within-the-margin-of-error difference. Trump is making inroads with voters of color and is nearly even with Biden among voters under 45 in that poll. But older voters have gone in the opposite direction, and instead of favoring Trump, are nearly split in the Marist poll. It’s a trend that extends to other states. In a nationwide Quinnipiac University poll released in May, Biden and Trump split younger voters, but Biden has an edge among voters 65 and older. Not every poll shows the same level of shift, but the general movement among both younger and older voters is a departure from past results. Biden is now leaning into questions about his age that have dogged his reelection campaign and worry voters in opinion polls. “Joe isn’t one of the most effective presidents of our lives in spite of his age, but because of it,” first lady Jill Biden said at a campaign stop in Wisconsin this week, part of a three-day swing designed to boost his support among older voters. Older voters are essentially Biden’s and Trump’s peers. Both men were born in the 1940s. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Eric Bradner note that older voters were “alive in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War, a period Biden has attempted to tap into as he casts Trump as a threat to democracy.”

The 2022 midterm election results made plain that the predicted “red wave”—in which Republicans were expected to win by huge margins in the House of Representatives and take over the Senate—did not occur. In fact, Democrats gained an additional Senate seat, and while Republicans took control of the House, it was by a modest nine seats rather than the 30-plus some pundits predicted. Although each state’s election results drew from different demographic components, analyses of exit polls underscored that young voters showed strong Democratic preferences, which contributed to the party’s better-than-expected performance in House, Senate, and select gubernatorial races. Strong Democratic preferences by other groups—including Black Americans, Latino or Hispanic Americans, women, and white female college graduates—also contributed. What these analyses did not provide, however, was a detailed examination of turnout rates—the percent of eligible voters who voted—associated with these groups. But now, new Census Bureau data from the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration supplement provides this information for the 2022 election, and can be analyzed along with a similar data product from earlier elections. Perhaps the most notable finding with respect to voter turnout is that 2022 turnout rates were nearly as high as the record-setting 2018 midterm turnout rates. Yet unlike the previous midterm elections, the groups with the highest Democratic voting margins—in particular, young people, Black Americans, women, and white female college graduates—did not show greater turnout increases than other groups, and often displayed lower turnout rates than in the 2018 midterms. These groups displayed higher turnout rates than in the low-turnout 2014 midterms, but either did not match or did not improve on their 2018 turnout levels. And only a minority of states registered turnout increases between 2018 and 2022, while an even smaller number showed increases among young and nonwhite voters. The new data also provides information on the demographics of the voting population both nationally and across states. As in the 2018 midterms, less than two-fifths of voters in the 2022 midterms were non-college-educated white voters—down from well over 40% in elections prior to 2018. The share of these voters has declined over time in almost all states, while since 2010, the share of white college graduates and nonwhite voters increased nationally and in most states. Overall, the data places a somewhat new lens on the results of last November’s midterms. The stronger-than-expected Democratic performance was largely due to the voting preferences of the party’s favored demographic blocs that turned out to vote. But the turnout rates for these blocs—while still higher than most pre-2018 elections—either declined or did not rise since the previous midterms. Overall turnout in 2022 out was high, but with unexpected shifts The national election rate (actual voters per 100 eligible voters) in 2022 was 52.2%—the second-highest that the Census Bureau has recorded for a midterm in four decades. The highest was in 2018, at 53.4%. (The 2020 presidential election, meanwhile, recorded a very high rate of 66.3%.) This, along with the fact that the 2022 midterms also saw the highest rate of voter registration recorded by the Census Bureau, suggests that the nation has entered an era of a highly energized electorate, perhaps spurred by a rising level of partisanship.

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