Disengaged voters swung right in 2024

Back in November, I featured this graphic in my round-up of interesting post-election graphs and charts:

The map imagines how electoral votes would have been awarded if "didn't vote" was a candidate. Images of this sort have been generated after past presidential elections and they serve to emphasize that a sizable chunk of registered voters don't participate in U.S. elections (actually, 2024 was the second highest turnout election ever with about 64% of registered voters participating).

Graphics like this one used to signal opportunity to Democratic strategists who built electoral strategies around getting out the vote. It has been a truism in recent electoral cycles that higher voter turnout would redound to Democratic gains, as certain disengaged voting age people (especially young people) were thought to lean Democratic.

A new picture of the disengaged voter

Democratic pollster David Shor's recently released slide deck highlights many cracks in electoral orthodoxy and his data on disengaged voters is especially interesting. These graphics are from his deck, produced by his polling firm Blue Rose Research:

People who did not vote in 2020 overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024. These voters were actually closer to D+10 in 2020, meaning they swung an incredible 20+ points from 2020 to 2024. The discouraging takeaway from this data is that if more people had voted in 2024, Trump would have likely won by more.

This graphic, also from Shor's deck, quantifies a related phenomenon: some voters cast votes only for Trump and did not even participate in other races such as senate contests.

While driving turnout may still be a viable approach for midterm contests (which traditionally draw a highly politically engaged electorate), it seems clear that Democrats will need to drastically change their communication strategy in order to have any hope of succeeding in future presidential elections. Articles, interviews, and advertising in traditional media cannot be the major part of the future Democratic presidential candidate's campaign. The successful national Democratic candidate of the future will need to be an expert at reaching disengaged voters through whatever mediums they consume. Currently, many Democrats seem unwilling to even show up in these spaces. Participation alone will not be sufficient: even a whiff of "politician speak" will be enough to turn off these voters. Democrats will need to cultivate the sort concise, engaging, and relatable communication necessary to reach these voters in a way that doesn't push them further away.

Shor talks more about how this data must change Democratic strategy in this conversation.

You can see Shor's full slide deck here.