New Tools Show Which Voting Blocs Actually Deliver Votes in U.S. Elections

Why Vote Counts from Blocs Matter

Political scientists and the media routinely ask how many votes particular groups—“voting blocs”—contributed to a candidate’s total. Justin Grimmer, William Marble, and Cole Tanigawa-Lau argue that the standard approach—regressing vote choice on voter characteristics—identifies correlates of support but cannot answer how many votes a group supplied. Determining vote contributions requires combining support levels with a group’s size and turnout rates; without that, claims about blocs swinging elections can be misleading.

New Measurement Tools

The authors introduce a set of measurement tools that convert patterns of vote choice and turnout into estimates of how many votes each bloc contributed to a candidate. These tools also allow researchers to (1) compare bloc vote contributions across elections and (2) simulate counterfactuals that ask how outcomes would change if bloc size, turnout, or support shifted. The approach emphasizes combining individual-level vote choice patterns with information on group population shares and participation to produce vote-count estimates rather than only shares or regression coefficients.

Application: U.S. Presidential Elections

Grimmer, Marble, and Tanigawa-Lau apply these tools to recent U.S. presidential contests to test claims about shifting partisan support among racial and ethnic blocs and to identify where a candidate’s support was concentrated. Their empirical work translates observed support and turnout patterns into concrete counts of votes attributable to demographic groups.

Key Findings

• There is little evidence, in these analyses, that Black and Latino voters have meaningfully shifted toward Republican presidential candidates in recent elections.
• Donald Trump’s vote gains were concentrated among voters who held moderate (rather than extreme) attitudes toward racial outgroups, according to the bloc-contribution estimates.
• The authors show how accounting for bloc size and turnout changes interpretations that rely only on vote shares or regressions.

Implications for Reporting and Research

These tools give scholars and journalists a clearer way to assess which groups actually delivered votes and why. By focusing on vote counts tied to group size and turnout, the approach can sharpen debates about electoral change, challenge overstated claims about bloc realignment, and provide a transparent framework for counterfactual analysis of election outcomes.