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October 21, 2024 
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  | By Quoctrung Bui and John Guida Deputy editor, Opinion graphics, and senior staff editor, Opinion politics |
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With Election Day approaching, polling shows a very close race, particularly in the battleground states where the outcome will be determined.
In Opinion, we continue to look at innovative ways of telling the story of the 2024 election. Patrick Ruffini’s series of granular, data-heavy reports from swing states offered the potential for something different, so we invited him to collaborate.
The resulting guest essay argues that we need to get down to precinct levels to grasp what’s going on in the race and how Donald Trump or Kamala Harris might win it. In it, Ruffini guides us through 21 microcommunities in four swing states that could hold the key to the race.
In a brief Q. and A., we dug into this distinct approach to political geography with him a bit further.
Q: What is the value of using microcommunities as a lens for the presidential race?
A: I think of these as a better unit of analysis than counties because they give you a pure distillation of a certain kind of place, a high-income suburb or a rural working-class community. Inside these communities, different precincts tend to behave the same way, either in their partisan loyalties or their shifts from election to election. And when you group like communities together, you get a clearer sense of how powerful different voting blocs are in a state and what the candidates need to do as a result to win the state.
Q: Of these, which one or two represent the most important demographic shifts since 2020?
A: There’s a big question mark right now of whether we’ll actually see a racial realignment with nonwhite voters moving in the direction of Trump. If so, that’ll be felt most acutely in the Sun Belt states, and especially among Phoenix-area Latinos and among rural African Americans in North Carolina’s Black Belt.
Q: Beyond the states we cover in the piece, are there one or two microcommunities that you find particularly critical to understanding the race?
A: Trump looks like he’s ahead by a point or two in Georgia, but I wouldn’t count Harris out completely because of the dramatic demographic change that’s happened with African Americans moving into the Atlanta area. In Michigan, Arab communities in places like Dearborn will cast about 1 percent of the state’s vote, but could shift pretty substantially and move the state’s margin by almost a half point.
Read the guest essay:
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 | | Sebastian Siadecki for The New York Times |
Forget Swing States. It’s These 21 Microcommunities That Could Decide the Election.A look at the political microcommunities that could decide the 2024 presidential election. By Patrick Ruffini |
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