What is the new "Bannon Line" for 2024?

In 2020 we established the Bannon Line as the needed GOP defection rate to ensure a Biden victory over Trump. What is it now?

Andrew Harnik Getty Images via Agence France-Presse

So many of the people that got to know me and my data team at The Lincoln Project are familiar with the term “The Bannon Line”. It was the line we needed of Republican defections to pass if Trump were going to lose his re-election effort - but more importantly, it was the line Steve Bannon himself agreed was the number Trump could not fall below - so we in honor of Steve we named it after him.

That range was 4-6% and it proved to be accurate because as loyal as MAGA and Trump's voters were, even a small defection of the GOP base spelled doom for Trump in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin where the Bannon Line numbers were surpassed.

in 2024 the shifting coalitions are making a specific Bannon Line number harder to nail down. Kamala Harris losing Black and Brown men at a historic rate but she’s also coalescing white women at a historic rate as the diploma divide continues to reshape American politics.

Many of you will recall that in 2020, I raised the alarm bells that Biden was going to lose a significant share of Latino voters - so many that it might offset all of the work we were doing to win Republicans over to Biden’s side.

The Latino consultants in Biden’s campaign denied it was happening.

They were, of course, wrong. Not only did it happen it happened massively with an 8% shift to Trump, a remarkable number that was a full 13% above what Biden’s team was showing in their Latino tracking polls at exactly this time four years ago.

But because every election cycle is different we do have to take into account the growing shift that has grown in both directions - US-born Hispanic men to the right and college-educated women to the Left. As I’ve written about extensively the math behind this shift benefits Democrats simply because there are more white college-educated women than non-college US-born Hispanic men.

Moreover, the turnout rates of these demographics are considerable. Non-college-educated Latino men are among the lowest propensity demographics in the country - meaning they have the lowest likelihood of actually turning out to vote, while college-educated white women have among the highest rates of voting. So the structural advantage isn’t just math - it’s also a function of historical voting tendencies.

Much rather be the Democrats in this time of shifting alliances…for the moment at least.

I have also pointed out something that I think has gotten far less attention than it should - the fact that despite polling showing Trump consolidating his GOP base his performance in most of the primaries was atrocious with Republican voters. He regularly lost 17-21% of Republican voters in the primary. Make no mistake, this was fueled by anti-Trump sentiment. There is no such thing as a Nikki Haley voter - these are anti-Trump voters of varying sentiment and that’s an important distinction when developing a strategy to make sure these voters keep voting against Trump.

There’s a world of difference between the 7% of GOP voters we were able to convince to defect from Trump to Biden in 2020 and the 20% of anti-Trump voters in 2024. Understanding their motivation is key to determining if we can grow the GOP defection rate and by how much.

First, it’s important to know that most of these voters were not driven by a “permission structure” or a Republican leader telling them it’s OK to vote for a Democrat. That’s not going to move the numbers you want to get to where you need to go. This isn’t to disparage the courage of these political leaders - God knows I get the cost that comes with speaking out - but lets be clear about something….very few, if any, Republican voters are looking to Washington leaders and politicians to give them permission to do anything, let alone defect to vote for a Democrat. The talk of a “permission structure” is beltway talk for giving people a platform in a system that is built on the relevance of having a platform.

Most important to keeping these voters off of Trump is three new pieces of information that Republicans (and all Americans) have learned since last November and they are overwhelmingly, if not unanimously cited by these voters as the reason for defection - The Big Lie of stolen elections, the January 6th Insurrection and the Dobbs decision. None of these were on the minds of Republican voters as they entered the voting booth last November.

How do I know they work? Well beyond all the ads you see on social media with average people stating that on testimonial videos, notice that nearly everyone in the Never Trump movement that joined the resistance since the last election was motivated by one, two, or all three of these reasons.

Those are the reasons. That’s the message. Stay disciplined and focused on them. Don’t let personalities or politicians step on their saliency. We know they work. Stick with them.

While there are smart minds on both sides of whether there should be an investment in Republican defectors (people like Matthew Dowd believe it’s a waste of time, for example) I believe it is central to Harris winning the race.

Even a one-point increase in the defection rate will have enormous electoral impacts.

I’ve invited Lucas Holtz from my data team back to write again on how he sees the strategy playing out and the possibility of expanding beyond the Bannon Line in a strategy the Harris team believes, as I do, that this voting bloc is central to a winning strategy. As always, please leave us your thoughts and questions.

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Back in 2020, Mike and our team at the Lincoln Project argued that the clearest path to defeating Donald Trump was mapped out by Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Bannon admitted that if just 4% of Republican voters moved away from Trump his path to victory would be decimated. We named this threshold the Bannon Line – the threshold where by converting a critical number of would-be Trump voters to Biden-Harris voters, Trump fell short in razor-thin states like Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The anti-Trump coalition surpassed this and pushed 7.5% of Republicans to Biden, according to 2020 AP Votecast data.

MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans alike are coming home to Trump, so the question remains: are there soft Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are still on the fence? Absolutely. And they’re likely to make the difference in who wins the election – I dig into some of the data below.

Going into the final weeks of this campaign, Kamala Harris is attempting to expand her reach into the soft Republican camp. Harris is campaigning with stalwart Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and her campaign has released a barrage of ads with Trump administration officials backing her candidacy, criticizing Donald Trump’s character, and warning of the danger of a second Trump presidency. But this appears to be the prelude to Harris’s Fox News interview with Bret Baier where Harris will likely have her biggest platform since the presidential debate to directly make an appeal to Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. This is key to Harris pushing the Bannon Line further and reducing Trump’s share of the Republican vote. Here’s why: