Even though the Republicans are losing at both ends of the political voter lifeline, there are multiple caveats worth keeping in mind. The first is that the popular vote is largely meaningless in the Electoral College system and states have voter demographics that don’t necessarily reflect the national numbers. Second, a larger percentage of young people stay at home in non-competitive states like California. Older citizens still tend to vote in big numbers in those states, so a large percentage of those that die between elections are in states that don’t really matter much on Election Day. The flipside is the youth vote is concentrated in the states that matter.

“The states have different voter populations based on age, and so the influence of having more of your voter base dying is not easy to extrapolate into meaningful numbers,” says Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. “That doesn’t mean having more of your voter base dying is a good thing, but it is hard to quantify.”

“And some of the studies indicate that the older people in Florida live longer because of their more active lifestyle,” she adds.

I decided to run some swing state numbers to see if the dead voter numbers might tip the balance one way or another. In Virginia and Ohio, it appears that the numbers of voters who died between 2012 and 2016 won’t be much of a factor. More Romney than Obama voters will have died in those states between 2012 and 2016 (about 7,000 in Virginia and about 30,000 in Ohio), but those totals are a very small speck in the big picture; the Ohio figure, for instance, represents only about a sixth of Obama’s 167,000-vote margin of victory. Not good numbers for Republicans, but not particularly significant either.

But in MacManus’s Florida, with its aging population—it’s ranked 47th among states in median age—there are not surprisingly a large numbers of voters who will have died between 2012 and 2016: About 244,000 Romney voters and 187,000 Obama voters. That’s a difference of 57,000—a total larger than the population of nearly 26 of the state’s 67 counties. What makes that number particularly significant, of course, is the narrowness of presidential victories in Florida: Obama won the state by only about 73,000 votes in 2012 and, as everyone remembers, George W. Bush only won the state by only 537 votes in 2000. In tight swing states in a nation that often seems close to 50-50, a few thousand votes here and there can matter.

Keep in mind there are major caveats with the Florida numbers. For starters, seniors are relocating to Florida all the time, so it’s not clear how much younger Florida will skew in 2016. Brookings Institution’s Frey says that, once again, Florida will be very complex this time around. “The Hispanic vote is not a monolithic group like in other states, because of the influence of the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and South Americans and the now growing Mexican population,” he explains. “The Republicans seem to be doing a better job of attracting young people in Florida, based on the midterm results. There is also some indication that Hillary Clinton might do well with older women. She might take a decent number of older women in Florida who voted for Romney.”

Regardless, political demographers are seeing this election as a watershed. Millennials now have higher numbers than Baby Boomers, and the mortality rates will expand that difference in coming elections. The very conservative Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1942, is declining at a rapid pace. The mortality rate for 70-to-74 year-olds is 6,058.4 per 100,000 each year, compared to 110.1 for the 30-to-34 age group. With each death, a little political power passes from one generation to the next.

If all this seems confusing, it is to a certain extent, because there are so many uncertainties about this 2016 election. But there is one certainty: Dead people don’t vote, at least not as much as they did in Chicago in 1960. When the political operatives start dissecting and predicting how the electorate is going to show in 2016, they should take into account not only the who and why of the ones that will vote, but also the ones who aren’t showing up this time around because they’ve kicked the bucket.

No carefully-crafted campaign message can change that.