"Turnout or persuasion" is not an either/or, precisely because persuasion (or at least vote-switching) exists, and therefore voters are not constant units. So it makes decomposing electoral changes very very tricky.
https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1426215359074418695
And it might matter a lot what your baseline/counterfactual is. Is it "the exact same voters show up as Election X", is it "all the voters we hoped show up (and not the ones the other side was hoping for)", is it "literal 100% turnout".
If a county's raw vote drops by exactly 1000, and the Democratic margin drops by exactly 1000, it's easy to say "oh, 1000 Democrats didn't show up". But you don't actually know that.
(And moreover, even if that were true, you don't know how they'd have voted if they did show up.)
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