A look at white women voting in PA, and what demographic buckets alone won't tell you

What you need to know

Voter segments aren’t monoliths. In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking more closely at audience segments getting a lot of attention right now, starting with white women in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.

Candidate support for white women in Pennsylvania was heavily impacted by issue importance. Looking at the prioritization of the economy and abortion, we see a swing as high as 21.1% depending on whether voters believe an issue is a key priority or not.

Combining issue-priority data shows even more insights. Harris saw slightly less strong support among white women voters in Pennsylvania who cared about both the economy and abortion than she did on average overall.

The bad news: everything you think you know about why white women in swing states voted the way they did last week is wrong.

The good news: everything you think you know is also right. (Well, it might be.)

That’s because voters aren’t monoliths. We at INTRVL believe it’s a mistake to try to define voters by surface-level characteristics alone. These paint an incomplete picture and are of limited use if you’re trying to find people whose opinions can be swayed or who can be inspired to take action.

Within these groups, values and priorities are what drive changes in outcome. In the coming weeks, we’ll analyze groups of people being discussed right now (young people, Hispanic voters, conservatives for Kamala). And we’ll start by looking at white women in Pennsylvania.

There are 3.2 million white women registered to vote in the Keystone State. INTRVL modeled that 39% are strong supporters of Donald Trump while 45% were strong supporters of Harris (with about 16% somewhere between):

Now let’s break this down by two issues: abortion and the economy, grouping voters by whether they cared about the issues far more than average.?

As soon as beliefs about issue importance are introduced, we suddenly see huge differences open up. Among those white women in Pennsylvania who don’t see the economy as a major issue, Harris opens a 26.1% lead – while among those who do, she falls behind Trump by nearly 14%.?

What about when we look at this same group of voters on the topic of abortion?

Again, about half of white, female voters consider abortion a strong issue priority. And among those who do not prioritize abortion as an issue, Harris strong support trails Trump’s by 13.3%, while she is ahead by a full 24.2% among those who do. Same race, same gender, same geography, but a 19.1% swing in strong support based on whether this issue is important.

And we can go even further! What happens when we look at both issues together? First, let’s just see what percentage of white women in Pennsylvania disproportionally prioritize each issue:

Two-thirds of this audience prioritizes the economy or abortion issues but not both, while about one in six prioritizes neither and roughly the same number prioritizes both. And when we translate this into strong candidate support, here is Harris’s lead (or lack thereof) with each group:

Harris leads strongly among those who only prioritize abortion and not the economy, and has small leads with those who prioritize neither or both. But her strong support trails by 22.3% among those in the largest subgroup: those who considered the economy a strong priority but not abortion. The issues these voters care about are what swing their support, not demographic top lines.

As we’ll show in the coming weeks and months, this is not at all unusual. Understanding voter behavior–and how to persuade them to support a candidate or cause–requires understanding what they believe, prioritize, and value, all factors INTRVL has used billions of data points to map across the American public.

What do you want to learn more about? Which issues and groups should we take a deeper dive into understanding so we can share a more complete picture? Let us know in the comments.