Are There Any Persuadable Voters Left?

“You want me to name them individually? Because I probably could at this point.”

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Voters listening to Nikki Haley speak at a campaign event in Aiken, S.C.

With every election cycle, the notion of genuine swing voters seems to grow more remote. We live in an era of intense partisanship, and only a handful of states are truly competitive in the Electoral College.

To make matters even more stark, the 2024 presidential race is shaping up to be a contest between a current and a former president who have been in public life for decades. Like them or not — and many voters fall into the latter category — most people made up their minds about President Biden and former President Donald Trump years ago.

When I asked Patrick Murray, the director of the polling institute at Monmouth University, about who the persuadable voters of 2024 might be, he quipped: “You want me to name them individually? Because I probably could at this point.”

And yet, even in a likely rematch, and at a moment of deep political tribalism, a few constituencies — a slice of a slice of a slice of the electorate — remain up for grabs. You can be certain that both campaigns will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to reach them.

In interviews with pollsters and political strategists this week, some raised familiar questions about groups of voters who have been closely studied in the last several election cycles.

Can Republicans make inroads with the suburban women who have pivoted sharply away from the party in the Trump era? Can Democrats win back Latino men, especially those without college degrees? What do those Trump 2016-Biden 2020 voters do now?

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