Washington

Analysis | Where 2024 voters moved since 2020 — and how they registered

Published

2 years ago

April 11, 2024

Analysis | Where 2024 voters moved since 2020 — and how they registered

Between any two presidential elections, there is an enormous amount of churn in the electorate, both nationally and at the state level. A lot of this is obvious: People die, young people turn 18 and register to vote (and then often don’t vote again for a decade or two), people lose or gain interest in candidates or issues.

There’s another factor, too, that often goes underrecognized. Over the course of four years, a lot of people simply pull up stakes and move. And that, at least in theory, can have an effect on the outcome of an election.

This is not easy to track. The Census Bureau collects data on interstate moves year over year, but in the aggregate. We can’t see, for example, whether someone moved from one state to another and then back. And we can only guess at what the political effects might be. Is someone moving from Ohio to Michigan adding a Republican vote to the latter state or is it a Democrat seeking slightly bluer climes?

We have another set of data that offers us a better lens into this question of partisan flow. L2, a political data vendor, tracks individual registrations over time, including after people move across state lines. An analysis of that data offers a picture — albeit an incomplete one — of the influx and outflow of state residents by party.

There are two caveats that are worth keeping in mind.

The first is that not every move is captured in this data, even among voters who were registered in both states. In many cases, of course, people moving across state lines will register to vote for the first time in the new state; they won’t be reflected in this data. Nor will people who couldn’t be matched to their prior registrations (generally because they didn’t complete a change of address form with the post office).

The other caveat is that this analysis includes partisanship data that’s modeled by L2. In some states, registration is nonpartisan. In those states, L2 uses other data — voting patterns or demographics — to estimate partisanship.

With those qualifiers in place, we can simply jump into the data. What we were interested in was less the numbers of people going from state to state (given the qualifier about those numbers) than the patterns of that movement. For each state, we calculated the number of Democrats, Republicans and third-party or nonpartisans that moved into a state since 2020 and the number of each group that moved out. Then we presented those totals as a percentage of the state’s total population.

This was the result. Thicker bars on the left side than the right indicate more arrivals than departures. The bars are generally ordered by size: If the Republican bar is on top, more Republicans than other groups were coming or going.

There are a lot of nuances to pick out of those charts; we’ll leave you to that.

Let’s drill down on the question we started with, though — considering how this might affect the presidential race. Comparing the net change among partisans (that is, those arriving minus those leaving) to the 2020 vote, we see that more-Democratic states were often those with bigger positive inflows of Democrats, though it’s cloudy. That partisan correlation was much stronger in more-Republican states.

In the middle there we see the swing states that flipped around in 2016 and 2020. We can pull the eight closest states in 2020 out and see that the net change by party varies. In Georgia, there’s been a bigger positive change for Democrats; in Florida, strongly for Republicans.

But what are the actual numbers, you demand. Well, in Georgia, the net advantage (comparing parties after subtracting outgoing voters from incoming ones) was a gain of about 18,000 Democrats. In Florida, it was 124,000 Republicans.

But again, this is just a sliver of movement. The Census Bureau’s data on moves from 2021 to 2022 shows 50 percent more inflow to Florida than there were new arrivals tracked by L2 over all four years. In Georgia, the Census Bureau’s one-year total is more than twice the L2 numbers. People are missed — including people registering for the first time.

There’s one other point worth making: People who have newly moved are less likely to vote. Here’s other data from the Census Bureau, looking at the 2020 election.

There are a lot of reasons for this: They haven’t registered yet, for one, or they may not know where they are supposed to cast their ballot. People who move frequently are less likely to own homes and skew younger, and younger people vote less often.

In other words, do not use these numbers to make bold predictions about how this consistently close presidential contest will end up. Use them, instead, as a reminder to register and vote.

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Washington

Week Ahead in Washington: March 1

Published

8 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) – Operation “Epic Fury” — the weekend military operations carried out by the U.S. and Israel against targets in Iran — tops the agenda for Congress as lawmakers return to Washington.

Sunday, President Donald Trump said the new leadership in Iran wants to talk to the Trump Administration.

Democrats in both chambers called for Congress to return as soon as possible for classified briefings on Iran, followed by a move to vote on the War Powers Act. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war on another country.

Congress’ return to Washington was originally delayed due to the start of the 2026 midterm elections cycle.

Tuesday, voters in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas head to the polls for primary elections.

North Carolina and Texas are drawing significant attention, as both states are facing congressional redistricting and competitive primary races for Senate seats.

In Texas, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R) is facing primary challenges from state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. On the Democratic side, Rep. Jasmine Crockett is facing state Rep. James Talarico.

In North Carolina, candidates are vying to replacing retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R) . They include former Governor Roy Cooper (D) and former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley.

Also this week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is laid to rest. He will be honored Wednesday in Washington before a final memorial service Saturday. Jackson died Feb. 17.

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Washington

Caps Fall in Montreal, 6-2 | Washington Capitals

Published

20 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Caps Fall in Montreal, 6-2 | Washington Capitals

Cole Caufield scored in the first minute of the first period and added another goal later in the frame, sparking the Montreal Canadiens to a 6-2 win over the Capitals on Saturday night at Bell Centre.

Washington entered the game with a modest three-game winning streak and six wins in its last seven games. Although they were able to briefly draw even with the Habs after Caufield’s opening salvo, Caufield and the Canadiens responded quickly and the Caps found themselves chasing the game for the remainder of the night.

“I didn’t mind some of the things that we did tonight,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “I thought we created enough offensively, we just made way too many catastrophic mistakes to be able to sustain that.”

In the first minute of the game, Caufield blocked a Jakob Chychrun point shot, tore off on the resulting breakaway and beat Charlie Lindgren for a 1-0 lead for the Canadiens, half a minute into the contest. Lindgren was making his first start since Jan. 29, following a short stint on injured reserve for a lower body injury he sustained in that game.

After the two teams traded unsuccessful power plays, the Caps pulled even in the back half of the first. With traffic in front, Declan Chisholm let a shot fly from the left point. The puck hit Anthony Beauvillier and bounded right to Alex Ovechkin, who had an easy tap-in for career goal No. 920 at 13:16 of the first.

But Montreal came right back to regain the lead 63 seconds later, scoring a goal similar to the one Ovechkin just scored.

From the left point, Canadiens defenseman Jayden Struble put a shot toward the net. It came to Nick Suzuki on the goal line, and the Habs captain pushed it cross crease for Caufield to tap it home from the opposite post at 14:19.

Less than two minutes later, Lindgren made a dazzling glove save to thwart Caufield’s hat trick bid.

Midway through the middle period, Montreal went on the power play again. Although the Caps were able to kill the penalty, the Habs added to their lead seconds after the kill was completed; Mike Matheson skated down a gaping lane in the middle of the ice and beat Lindgren from the slot to make it a 3-1 game at 12:22.

Minutes later, Montreal netminder Jakub Dobes made a big stop on Aliaksei Protas from the right circle, and Suzuki grabbed the puck and took off in the opposite direction. From down low on the right side, he fed Kirby Dach in the slot, and Dach’s one-timer made it 4-1 for the Canadiens at 16:34 of the second.

In the waning seconds of the second, Dobes made one of his best stops of the night on Beauvillier, enabling the Canadiens to carry a three-goal lead into the third.

Those two quick goals in the back half of the second took some wind out of the Caps, who were playing their third game in four nights following the three-week Olympic break.

“We kill off a penalty, and then we end up going down 3-1right after the penalty,” says Caps center Nic Dowd. “Those are challenging to give up, right? You do a good job [on the kill], it’s a 2-1 game, and then all of a sudden, before you blink, it’s 4-1 and then the game gets away from you.

“And they defended well tonight; It’s tough to score goals in this League, and you go into the third period, and you’ve got to score three. You saw that [Friday] night when we played Vegas; they were able to score two, but it’s tough to get that third one. I think we have to manage situations a little bit better. It’s a 2-1 game on a back-to-back, we just kill a penalty off, or maybe we just have a power play – whatever it is – we have to manage that, especially in an arena like this, where the crowd gets into it on nothing plays. They can really sway momentum – and in a good way – for their home team.

“We just have to understand that if we don’t have our legs in certain situations, because of travel, it’s back-to-back or whatever, we really have to key into the details of the game and not let things get away from us quickly.

With 7:28 left in the third, Ovechkin netted his second of the game – and the fifth goal he has scored in this building this season – on a nice feed from Dylan Strome to pull the Caps within two goals of the Habs, who have coughed up some late leads this season.

But Montreal salted the game away with a pair of late empty-net goals from Suzuki and Jake Evans, respectively.

In winning six of their previous seven games, the Caps had been playing with a lead most of the time. But playing from behind virtually all night against a good team in a tough building is a tall task under any circumstances. And it was exactly that for the Caps on this night.

“They score on the first shift,” says Strome. “Obviously, Saturday night in Montreal is as good and as loud as it gets. They just got a fortunate bounce; puck was off Caulfield’s leg, and a perfect bounce for a breakaway. It’s just one of those things where we got down early and now they kind of fed off the momentum of the crowd.

“But I still think our game is in a good spot, and we’ve just got to keep stacking wins. Obviously, we’ve played more games than everyone so we’re going to need some help, but we’ve just got to keep stacking wins. It’s tough on the back-to-back in Montreal, but we’ll find a way to bounce back on Tuesday [vs. Utah at home] and then go from there.”

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Washington

The Fallout From the Epstein Files

Published

1 day ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

The Department of Justice is facing scrutiny this week after it was revealed that records involving President Trump were missing from the public release of the Epstein files. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the ensuing political fallout for the Trump administration, and more.

“The key thing to remember about the Epstein story is that it is a case that has been mishandled for decades. The reason that we’re hearing about this now and why it’s exploding into public view is because, for the first time, Republicans in Congress and Democrats in Congress were willing to openly defy their leadership and call for the release of these files,” Sarah Fitzpatrick, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. “That has never been done before, and I think it really is changing the political landscape in ways that we’re still just starting to learn.”

“What’s been so striking is how many of those very same Republicans who were calling for the release of those files, who had promised to get to the bottom of them, are now saying things that are just the opposite,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, argued.

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Fitzpatrick; Hayes; and Tarini Parti, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

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