United States elections 2024
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Yommie
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The next president may be chosen by indifference
Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
April 22, 2024 at 10:54 a.m. EDT
Signs direct people to an Atlanta polling station on March 12. (Megan Varner/For The Washington Post )
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Those born in 1995 or after have never been able to vote in a presidential general election for any Republican besides Donald Trump. If you were born four years after that, your choices between the two major parties have only been Trump and Joe Biden.
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It’s a small sample size, certainly, but the point is useful to consider: For all of the buildup of presidential politics and the years-long conversation centered on the determination of the most powerful person in politics, that conversation has been awfully repetitive recently. And, as polling from NBC News suggests, Americans are not enthusiastic about engaging in it once again.
On Sunday, the network published the results of a national poll that asked respondents, among other things, to evaluate how interested they were in the election on a scale from 1 to 10. Fewer than 2 in 3 selected 9 or 10 — lower than any similar measurement by NBC’s pollsters this late in a presidential election year since at least 2008.
Among Republicans, 70 percent indicated they were very interested in the election. Among Democrats, only 65 percent. Among independents? Fewer than half.
This isn’t terribly surprising. It is consistently the case that independents — generally meaning independents who tend to vote for one party or the other and independents who don’t — are less politically engaged and less likely to vote. Comparisons of national polling conducted by the Pew Research Center with Census Bureau estimates of the electorate show how much of the nonvoter pool in each recent election has been made up of independents.
In 2016 and 2020, at least two-thirds of partisans voted, according to this analysis. About 6 in 10 independents who lean toward a party did, while about half of non-leaning independents cast ballots.
But there’s an important asterisk this year: Those less likely to vote are also much more likely to support Trump.
You can see it in the NBC News data. Biden leads by nine points with those who voted in 2020 and 2022. Among those who voted in neither of those elections? Trump leads by 22 points.
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It shows up elsewhere, too. The Harvard Youth Poll released last week found a single-digit gap between Trump and Biden among all Americans under 30 — but a nearly 20-point lead for Biden among those most likely to vote.
The youth vote is interesting in part because it overlaps with independent voter identification. Lots of independent voters are young voters and vice versa, so apathy among independents correlates to apathy among younger voters. It’s also interesting because — revisiting the point made at the start of this article — voters 29 and younger have never been able to vote for a non-Trump Republican for president.
Research by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Dan Hopkins published by 538 earlier this month used an Associated Press poll conducted by NORC, previously the National Opinion Research Center, to compare support in the general election with voting frequency. The same pattern prevailed: Those who vote less often are more likely to back Trump — including among the Black and Hispanic voter pools that have been a focus of attention since 2020.
This suggests that Gallup’s finding that young and non-White voters were shifting right over the past few years might be a function of less politically engaged people.
Viewing the same point through a different lens: Pew’s analysis of recent voting habits shows that Black and Hispanic voters are also more likely to have not voted in recent elections.
This sets up a weird dynamic. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that some Democratic groups were balking at registering younger voters — usually a solid party constituency — out of fears they might be adding Trump voters to the pool. The expected pattern in which Democrats benefited from higher turnout might, this year, be inverted.
The result might be an election in which the president is determined by who stays home. This, too, isn’t unprecedented (see 2016) — but it’s not a great sign for democracy.
Yommie
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