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We examined vote switching in the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape surveys since the start of the year, examining the answers of more than 85,000 nationally representative registered voters. These data are not quite ideal for analyzing vote switching from 2016 to 2020, since the surveys retrospectively asked who voters supported four years ago. But we believe our results offer important insights into the prevalence and characteristics of Trump-Biden voters, nonetheless.

Based on these data, we find that 9 percent of Trump 2016 voters are currently planning to vote for the former vice president. This group of Trump-Biden voters is twice as large as the percentage of Hillary Clinton voters from 2016 who this year say they plan to vote for Trump. That would give Biden a net advantage that could help decide the 2020 race.

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Our analysis of the 2,546 Trump-Biden registered voters from all Nationscape surveys since the beginning of January finds an interesting distribution along race and education lines. Approximately one-third are white and did not have a four-year college degree. One-third are white and did graduate from college. The final third are nonwhite voters across education lines.

Notably, a full 60 percent of Trump-Biden voters are male, and 55 percent of them are ages 45 or older. That’s consistent with other recent polling showing Biden currently performing much better than Clinton did in the 2016 election with older voters. About 4 in 10 Trump-Biden voters self-identify as Democrats; around 3 in 10 identify as either Republican or independent. Forty percent of Trump-Biden voters say they are ideologically moderate, and another one-quarter say they are ideologically conservative.


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