Polls are jumping around: Why I am not at all worried about Wisconsin and Michigan.

We can’t simply keep looking at the polls, we need a lot more than a single poll to understand what is going on. Let us cut through the Michigan and Wisconsin numbers.

Shankar Narayan
5 min readOct 10, 2024

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The number you see above, 74%, represents the voter turnout rate for the 2020 Presidential election in Michigan. This is a substantial 8% higher than the national average for that year.

Of the 13 states with above-average voter turnout, 11 are states that regularly vote for Democrats. There are several reasons for this, but two key factors significantly drive the higher turnout rates:

  1. Voting is made more convenient for voters.
  2. These states have a higher proportion of college-educated voters.

The national average for educational attainment, currently at 53.7%, is largely influenced by Democrat-run states. In fact, the top ten states in terms of educational attainment are all Democratic-leaning. The entire top ten list includes D.C., Massachusetts, Maryland…

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Shankar Narayan

He didn't care what he had or what he had left, he cared only about what he must do.