A high voter turnout is directly correlated to a Democratic victory, according to a long-held belief among Democrats’ election strategists. When it comes to President Joe Biden in 2024, though, that old formula might not work.
According to the surveys conducted this year, Biden is doing better than his opponent among Americans who have voted consistently in the past, while former president Donald Trump is often doing better among those who have voted the least.
Every side is facing new difficulties as a result of these emerging trends. It’s making Democrats reevaluate their long-standing strategy of trying to rally as many young people and people of color as possible, regardless of their political affiliation, in light of Trump’s apparent appeal to more irregular voters, especially younger Black and Latino men. Building an organization that can reach out to irregular voters, especially in minority communities, will be a problem for Republicans.
According to Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who has examined the growing party divide between regular voters and those who have never cast a ballot in an election before, “What all this means is this election has volatility.”. We used to think that the next voter who showed up if an election was highly engaging didn’t appear different from those who actually cast their ballots. Here, the unengaged group appears drastically different.
Example: among 2020 and 2022 voters, Biden has a 4-point edge over Trump, according to a combination of data from the three most recent national NBC polls, which were carried out by a non-partisan group of notable Republican and Democratic pollsters. With regard to individuals who cast ballots in 2020 but not in 2022, Trump had a 12-point lead over Biden. Among individuals who did not cast a ballot in either the 2020 or 2022 elections, Trump’s edge expanded to 20 percentage points. A whopping 65% of non-voters in the last two elections voiced their disapproval of Biden’s administration.
According to recent national surveys conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, Biden is in a close race for the 2024 presidential election among people who voted in 2020 but are undecided among those who did not cast a ballot in the previous election.
Among the many attempts to measure the gap between Americans who have and have not cast ballots, Hopkins’s may be the most audacious. With the help of NORC at the University of Chicago, he and a colleague surveyed more than 2,400 persons earlier this year to find out their views for the 2024 campaign. Only those who were of voting age in the most recent three elections (the 2020 presidential race, the 2018 midterms, and the 2022 midterms) were included in the survey.
Impressive findings were obtained. Biden had an 11-point lead over Trump among those who had cast a ballot in all three of the previous federal elections, and he had a razor-thin margin among those who had cast ballots in two of the previous three contests. Trump, according to the survey, had a 12-point lead over Biden among individuals who had cast ballots in at least one of the previous three elections, and an overwhelming 18-point lead among those who had cast ballots in zero of those elections.
Importantly, the pattern was consistent across different races. When looking at Latinos who voted in two, one, or none of the last three elections, Trump tied Biden for the lead. However, among those who voted in all three, Biden had a roughly 20-point advantage. In the last three elections, Biden’s lead among Black voters was 80 points for those who participated in all three, but it was just 10 points among those who did not.
Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, came to similar conclusions using data from Catalist, a prominent Democratic voter targeting business. Regardless of race, he discovered that in 2020, Biden had wider margins over Trump among individuals who had voted in all three of the prior elections (2018), (2016), and (2014) than among those who had voted in only a few or none of those years.
According to Hopkins, the disparity between regular and irregular voters in his most recent survey was significantly larger than what he discovered in a comparable study early in the 2016 contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Another factor, he thinks, may be crucial to this growing divide: Adults who are less inclined to vote also tend to be less inclined to keep up with political news.
When asked about people who vote less frequently, Hopkins explained that it’s usually because they don’t pay much attention to politics and instead use questions like “how is my family doing economically?” and “how does the country seem to be doing” as their political yardstick. “These people don’t see Donald Trump as particularly unusual.” A “sizable sliver” of regular voters, according to Hopkins, “have a sense that Trump may be qualitatively different than other political candidates with respect to norm violations and January 6.” Meanwhile, “They don’t love what they see with Joe Biden, and if Donald Trump is the person running against Joe Biden, they want change.” He went on to say that this may be the easy equation for fewer regular voters.
That finding is supported by the polling data from NBC, which show that Trump has a two-to-one lead over Biden among the approximately 16% of people who claim not to follow political news.
It is too soon to tell whether this divergence between high- and low-frequency voters will endure through Election Day, according to some observers, even though it is appearing consistently in polls today.
As Republican pollster Bill McInturff put it, “It’s May.” His firm partners with a Democratic firm to conduct the NBC poll. “This information will be crucial when voting becomes mandatory.” Public opinion surveys already have problems adequately gauging the attitudes of minorities and young people, as Democratic strategist Tom Bonier pointed out. It’s even more difficult to capture the opinions of the politically disengaged.
Despite the apparent trend toward Trump among infrequent voters, Melissa Morales, president and creator of the Latino voter mobilization organizations Somos Votantes and Somos PAC, stated that their outreach efforts this year have not seen this trend. She mentioned that in 2022, they noticed that Latino voters who had a low tendency were receptive to Trump, particularly on economic issues. But, she continued, “at the moment, we are not receiving that message from the field.” Instead, “what we are hearing is a great deal of anxiety regarding the cost of living, increasing costs, and a significant need to understand the way ahead.”
Despite these caveats, there are good reasons to think that a very high turnout this year would help Trump more than Biden.