In the weeks following the 2022 midterm election, Charles Gaba, a self-described "numbers geek" and founder of the go-to Obamacare tracker site ACASignups.net, concluded that Arizona's Democratic attorney general candidate likely defeated her Republican rival due to disparities in COVID-19 death rates between blue and red voters.
Specifically, Democrat Kris Mayes beat Republican Abraham Hamadeh by a mere 280 votes statewide. According to Gaba, at least 900 and possibly as many as 4,100 more Donald Trump voters died of COVID than did Joe Biden voters in the state of Arizona—far exceeding the margin of victory between Mayes and Hamadeh. In other words, excess Republican deaths due to the pandemic may very well have been the reason for Mayes' narrow win.
Attorney General Mayes is currently mounting a criminal investigation into attempts to overturn the state's 2020 election, among other progressive priorities. If Mayes had lost, state resources would instead be fully dedicated to a Big Lie witch hunt to find "those who worked to rob" Trump of his 2020 win—an investigation Hamadeh repeatedly promised to launch if he won.
The Arizona attorney general contest is just one example of how a single race can define the political trajectory of a state and, indeed, a nation. But what if that scenario took place on a much broader scale across the country, with a massive death rate differential between the parties' voters taking place from 2020 to 2024, even as an influx of new voters—primarily aligned with the healthier party—replenishes the electorate?
That is exactly what is playing out nationwide as older GOP-aligned voters pass away, handing the generational baton to millions of younger Gen Z voters who are increasingly reshaping the electorate.
As Democratic Party strategist and pollster Celinda Lake pointed out in a recent Washington Post op-ed, roughly 4 million young people age into the electorate each year—amounting to about 32 million new eligible voters between 2016 and the 2024 contest.
At the same time, roughly 2.5 million elderly Americans die each year, reducing the number of older eligible voters by roughly 20 million since 2016.
Campaign Action
"Between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people," write Lake and co-columnist Mac Heller. "That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans."
Lake argues that even in a potential 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, the electorate that shows up to vote will be entirely different—and much more Democratically aligned.
"The candidates might not be changing — but the electorate has," they surmise of another contest where a veteran Democrat takes on Trump for a third straight cycle.
Naturally, the prospect of a potential windfall for Democrats comes with multiple caveats. A third-party candidate could attract many Gen Z voters, since they tend to be less aligned with parties and more motivated by a particular candidate's policies, according to Lake.
Turnout is also a question, though Gen Z voters have proven to be more reliable in the last several cycles than their predecessors were at a similar age.
But if policies, not candidates, are the drivers of turnout, Republicans have missed the memo.
As Kristen Soltis Anderson, a GOP pollster who studies younger voters, told Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic, Republicans aren't sweating the Gen Z factor in 2024.
“I don’t think there is a lot of focus in Republican world" on Gen Z voters, Anderson said, "in part because a lot of Republicans believe that there is just no way young voters will turn out for Joe Biden.”
John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, provided Brownstein with the counterpoint to that assertion. Biden's leadership of the Democratic Party "didn’t really dissuade the generation from coming out and voting for Democrats” in 2020 or 2022, Della Volpe noted. “They knew the stakes in the election. They knew what life was like under more Republican control versus more Democratic control.”
All that said, young voters in deep red states still favor Republican candidates. So while the upcoming election gives Democrats a massive opportunity to win battleground states and maybe even expand the map, Republicans will maintain control of a solid swath of House and Senate seats.
Still, 2024 could be a massive tipping-point election, especially if the combined forces of Gen Z and millennial voters finally overtake the Republican-aligned baby boomers-plus-elders coalition that has dominated the American electorate for decades.
Yes, that's entirely plausible, which could help ensure the elevation of more Kris Mayes-type Democrats to history-defining roles in critical swing states, safeguarding the republic for decades to come.