Trump Has Huge Lead With Those Who Won’t Vote
Oh, the irony.
USA Today’s Susan Page and Ken Tran parse a poll commissioned to generate news.
Donald Trump’s argument that the 2020 election was rigged has reinforced the views of Americans who are already disenchanted about politics, one factor in their inclination not to cast a vote next year − that is, a vote they would probably cast for him.
An exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of unlikely voters − those who are eligible to vote but say they probably won’t − give Trump a lopsided edge over President Joe Biden among Americans who are deeply skeptical of politics and government.
Registered voters who say they aren’t likely to go to the polls back Trump over Biden by nearly 20 percentage points, 32%-13%, with 27% supporting a third-party or other candidate. Citizens who are eligible to vote but haven’t registered also favor Trump by close to 2-1, 28%-15%; 27% prefer another candidate.
If they participated in the election, Trump’s advantage among them is so wide that they could shift the political landscape to his advantage. His standing among unlikely voters is much stronger than in surveys of registered or likely voters, which generally show a presidential race that is effectively tied. The latest realclearpolitics.com average of national polls gives Biden a 1-point edge.
So, commissioning a poll of unlikely voters is novel! I’ve heard of polling adults, registered voters, and likely* voters. But never unlikely voters.
Regardless, they’ve found something interesting here: previous voters who have become disaffected from the process are simultaneously considerably more supportive of Trump than Biden but unlikely to go to the polls. Why?
Glad you asked.
“It’s just a game; it’s not even serious,” said Phillip Benjamin, 40, an engineer from Atlanta who was among those called in the poll. The last time he cast a ballot was for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, but he said that if he voted in 2024 it would be for Trump, a Republican. Benjamin, a registered voter who leans conservative, agrees with Trump’s unsubstantiated complaints that there were serious problems with the integrity of the election in 2020.
That makes him less likely to bother voting next time, he said. “If they can push an election the way they pushed that last one, they can do anything.”
I mean, we’re going on one dude’s response? Probably not. More on that later.
“Be careful what you wish for,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “In a year of major political ironies, this is the irony of ironies with some turned-off Trump voters disgusted with voting and the election process.”
The findings reflect a tidal change from a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll of unlikely voters in the summer of 2012. Then, unlikely voters overwhelmingly favored the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, over GOP challenger Mitt Romney, 43%-18%.
In 2020, two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots, the highest turnout since 1900. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 40 million didn’t vote, including 12.8 million who were registered and another 25.8 million who weren’t registered.
Some analysts predict that broad dissatisfaction with the potential rematch between Biden and Trump could mean lower turnout in 2024.
An open-ended question about why they don’t plan to vote prompted a litany of grievances about the candidates, the elections that put them in office, and the government they lead if they win.
“My vote doesn’t matter” was one of the most frequent responses among those who aren’t registered. Other top reasons included “don’t care,” “don’t believe in the voting/political system” and “system is rigged/corrupt.” Nearly 1 in 10 cited “poor candidate choices.”
Among those who are registered, more than a third, 37%, said they didn’t like any of the candidates. Others said that their vote didn’t matter, that the election was rigged and that the system was corrupt.
“It’s just because, you know, which poison do you like better?” said Steve Rawson, 53, an airport cargo agent from Warwick, Rhode Island. A self-described liberal, he last voted in 2016, casting a ballot for Trump in his solidly Democratic state as a joke. “It’s just like nothing changes, and it’s how it’s been for how long I’ve been voting.”
Three of 4 accuse politicians of offering “a bunch of empty promises,” that “nothing ever gets done” in Washington. Two-thirds call the system was corrupt. They split evenly, 47%-46%, about whether “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between Democrats and Republicans.
Nonvoters recognize the impact the federal government has on their lives. Three of 4 say it has an important impact; 40% call it “very important.”
Even so, a 53% majority say they pay attention to what’s going on in government and public affairs “only now and then” or “hardly at all.” Many report feeling financially pressed and, in some cases, overwhelmed by demands in their life other than voting.
“I just feel like everything is going downhill,” said Khandra Azzan, 30, a preschool teacher from Paramount, California. She voted for Obama in 2012, Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Republican Trump in 2020. She said no one in either party has changed her life for the better.
“I just feel like the price of everything is out of this world,” she said. Her wages have “increased a few bucks while groceries doubled in price; my rent has skyrocketed.” These days, “I just feel like we’re all running right now like chickens without a head.”
One in 4, or 26%, say the most important issue facing the country is the economy. (Far behind as No. 2 was political gridlock in Washington, at 9%.) Seven in 10 say the country is on the wrong track, a higher level of dissatisfaction than in recent polls of registered voters. Forty-one percent describe their household finances as “fair”; another 16% say their finances are “poor.”
They are disproportionately people of color. While exit polls of voters found that whites comprised 67% of the electorate in 2020, they are only 51% of the nonvoters in this survey. Black voters made up 13% of the 2020 electorate but 15% of the nonvoters. Latinos were 13% of those who voted in the last presidential election but 18% of nonvoters.
While 41% of those who voted in 2020 have at least a college degree, just 26% of the nonvoters are college graduates.
More than 1 in 4, or 28%, volunteered that it would take “better choices” and an “honest candidate that I like” to get them to vote. But nearly half couldn’t come up with the name of anyone whose candidacy would inspire them. Eight percent said Trump; no one else was cited by more than a handful of those surveyed.
The second-most frequent response to the question of what would get them to vote: “A miracle” or “nothing.”
There was one reason that resonated with most nonvoters. Seventy percent of Trump supporters said they would vote if they knew their vote would help swing a close election to their candidate; a nearly equal 68% of Biden supporters said the same thing.
But some expressed skepticism about whether their views on the value of voting − or its lack of value − were going to change anytime soon.
“I’ve been voting since I was 18,” said Wesley Wilson, 52, a conservative from Pittsburgh. In 2020, he cast a ballot for Biden but now says the president has “the hardest road back to my vote” because of disappointment over campaign promises not kept.
“I’m just getting to the point where I really don’t even want to be involved anymore.”
The article is frankly a bit of a mess. People believing that their vote doesn’t matter, that the candidates are terrible, that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, that the politicians don’t care about people like them, etc. are not new phenomena.
Unfortunately, neither USA Today nor Suffolk are making the poll responses or crosstabs available as of yet. Exactly what percentage of the Trump-supporting unlikely voters are unlikely voters because they think the 2020 election was rigged/stolen?
The “tidal wave” in difference between the 2012 election and today is one indicator. But how much of that is an effect of Trump’s campaign (abetted by Fox and various other pro-Trump media outlets) to delegitimate the election and how much of it is further realignment of the parties? A lot of Trump voters didn’t vote for Romney and vice-versa.
_____________
*Technically, one polls registered voters and then applies a screen to filter out those unlikely to vote based on past behavior and other cues. So, unlikely voters have been polled (although the questioning may truncate early, depending on the order) but they’re not counted.
…and this guy is an engineer.
Trump broke everything, or at the very least he was the accelerant.
@al Ameda: Ahh, but want kind of engineer? Mechanical, train, social?
After Novmber 2020, didn’t Trump discourage the people of Georgia from voting because all elections were “rigged and stollen (sic)”?
Somewhere there is an R strategist who has read this with his face in his hands, muttering “and we’ve spent the last decade trying to make it more difficult to register and vote and it’s coming back to bite us.
What is the head space of a guy who voted for Obama but now leans Trump? What connects those two things? I’m at a loss…
Much like I think it’s journalistic malpractice to not link directly to court fillings and decisions or academic reports that are being summarized, I don’t think polls should ever be reported on without linking to the actual relevant questions and all related crosstabs. Those details are so critical for any serious analysis of the data.
@Franklin:
Choo-choo?
I wonder how many more years of the current SCOTUS will suffice to cure that opinion…
More than 1 in 4, or 28%, volunteered that it would take “better choices” and an “honest candidate that I like” to get them to vote. But nearly half couldn’t come up with the name of anyone whose candidacy would inspire them.
– This kinda sounds like that bad Open Forum from this past weekend.
Among those who are registered, more than a third, 37%, said they didn’t like any of the candidates. Others said that their vote didn’t matter, that the election was rigged and that the system was corrupt.
– These are folks who are likely to think that elections/the lottery/sports/divorce courts are all rigged, run by The Illuminati/Global Elites/Snidely Whiplash.
Frustrating.
@Jay L Gischer: Grievance. Doesn’t matter about what. So always a vote against something.
@Jay L Gischer: I know people who were lifelong Democrats and voted for Obama twice who voted for Trump. It seemed to be a combination of “blow the whole thing up” and anger at both parties being in the bag for Wall Street.
@Scott:
@Long Time Listener:
@James Joyner:
Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, who spouts “Biden’s too old” should be forced to name the magical Democrat that’s going to walk through the door to beat Biden in a primary and win a general election against Trump. Still waiting for the real last name of that magical Democrat. I think his first name is “Generic”.
@Jay L Gischer: It’s the Clinton-Trump voters that confuse me.
I assume brain worms are responsible for that. I can’t come up with any rational narrative.
Bullshit. Obama was exciting, Trump was exciting, and some people voted because they were caught up in the excitement and it had nothing to do with issues. They’re the people who suddenly discover a love of football just as soon as their local team makes it to the superbowl. They go for the shiny object, the thing of the moment. These are not fully-formed, mature humans. Their opinions and beliefs are vapor. They’re herd animals following the goat and chased by the dog.
One of my little theories is that people who are losers know they are losers, that they are comfortable being losers, and will make choices that keep them as losers. You don’t join a cult of personality because you’re a winner with you whole future ahead of you. You join a cult because you’ve failed, you have no plan to make your life any better, and you need a strongman to tell you what to do and what to think because you got nothing else.
And when that doesn’t work, when your cult leader fails you, what do you have left? Where do you go? You never had anything of consequence in your head and at some level you know it. The delusion fades, the fun is gone, so it’s off to your fentanyl dealer so you can get on with the job of self-destruction.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m not saying your wrong, but your description and some of the other descriptions (Thanks, everyone!) can co-exist in superposition. In everybody’s head is more than one, uh, sub-process. It’s just that in healthy people they know about each other. So which process gets to run things? The “I hate those guys!” process? The “I’m a loser!” process? The “Wait a second, X is better than Y, even though they are both really flawed.” process?
The last is important, I think. It’s hard. I’ve watched a guy at the same blackjack table as I was at struggle with hitting a 14 while the dealer is showing a 10. It’s the right play, even though he had a bad hand. It doubles his chance of winning, from something like 10 percent to 20 percent. But it means being the author of his demise. Doing something seems different from not doing something, even though they are both the same. It’s the problem of agency.
So if you vote for X over Y, inevitable some things that you find undesirable will happen. So maybe you don’t vote at all.
Yes, there’s not much new here, but it is a difference in degree.
But fundamentally, it’s not surprising there are a huge number of politically disaffected people in a large and diverse country of 330+ million people when the system forces a binary choice, and the candidates for that binary choice are determined by a handful of unrepresentative voters and a primary system that is too democratic.
In a normal system with strong parties that actually control their brands, we likely wouldn’t see either Trump or Biden on the ticket. But because the parties are extremely weak, and because our primary system has bad incentives and is a dysfunctional collective action problem, relative popularity wins the day.
And this is why @EddieInCA‘s question cannot be answered. The current nature and status of our parties and primary system make it impossible to evaluate or collectively promote alternatives because there is no way to do that except through a contested primary. And therein lays the collective action problem: as long as Biden wants to run, going through that process would be internally very divisive among the coalitions that identify with the Democratic label. So none of the people who aspire to the Presidency want to cross that Rubicon except for the fringe candidates. Because, quite obviously, one likely outcome is that Biden wins a contested primary anyway, but the process weakens him in the general and he loses – and that’s a valid fear. As the old saying goes, dance with the one that brought you.
That’s a huge weakness for the system, such as it is, that chooses our candidates. But it’s not the only weakness.
I’m inclined to think that a significant factor in what is going on is that people who are not inclined to vote will still prefer the candidate that the conventional wisdom is proclaiming as the more conservative one over the one the conventional wisdom is holding to be liberal. That the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are pretty meaningless in this particular context may well be unimportant compared to the bone-deep fear of communism cultivated over decades and America’s pretty long-standing rejection of socialism as a desirable model.
It’s possible that as silents boomers and Gen Xers continue to die off, the biases that are bone deep will eventually fade out because of the paradigm shift after the cold war. What biases the younger generations of non-voters will bring is something that I know little about–guest teachers almost never lead class discussions anymore. 🙁 But they are unlikely to be like mine, if only because no one ever assigns students to read Cold War-era dystopian fiction anymore. Kids only “know” Stalin third or fourth hand these days. (Although I suspect the current kids might connect to Brave New World.)
There, FIFY.
Just like last time.
@alanstorm: If only they’d had you to plead their cases in all those venues where their charges of stolen elections were dismissed…
[…sigh…]
so sad… 🙁
@Jay L Gischer:
Shiny New Object Syndrome.
I know a guy who has, over the years in successive order supported Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Pete Buttigieg, and now is deciding between RFK Jr or DeSantis.
His political ideology is “Whatever seems new, disruptive and different.” There is no there there, in terms of consistent principles, beliefs or values.
There are many many many many people like this. In 2016, a video made the rounds on Twitter of an Iowa woman who was trying to decide whether to caucus for Buttigieg or Trump, and was leaning towards Trump after finding out Buttigieg was gay. Which she had been unaware of.
Idiocracy.
And long may that lead increase. 😉
@Michael Reynolds:
Exciting leadership is over-rated IMO.
Was Truman exciting and charismatic? Was Attlee?
But both, in their different ways, laid the foundations of the post-war order, domestically and internationally, as executors and educators of the will of a national plurality.
I’ve lost count of the number of “radicals” boring on about the “uncharismatic” nature of Sir Keir Starmer. Or in the US context President Biden, or Vice President Harris for that matter.
Meh.
Give me boring competence over the tawdry flim-flam of the Johnson’s and Trumps’s of this world any day.
And, possibly controversial opinion: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama may have been charismatic and , they sometimes tended to substitute charismatic charm, and verbal formulae, for substantial policy achievement.
President Biden looks likely to eclipse both his Democratic predecessors in substantial achievement, despite the handicaps of a recalcitrant Congress.
(Though, to be fair to President Obama, his potentially game-changing care policy was crippled by obstructionism)
Be interesting to see what Starmer may be able to achieve in the UK; given the damage of over a decade of Tory folly (austerity, tax cutting, Brexit), he may only be able to effect repair rather transformation.
@JohnSF:
It’s sad that ‘competent’ has come to be seen as a diss, as damning with faint praise. Competence is in desperately short supply in this world. I’ve said before that I considered Obama a good president, but Biden is actually better at the job.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m curious what you’re basing that on. Biden hasn’t faced anything remotely like the reflexive opposition that That N****r faced, so it’s not at all clear to me how much of his relative success is due to being better at the job and how much is due to being… less viscerally objectionable.
No doubt the former tv reality show star is a turnout machine for both parties. The question arises as to what happens when he is not in the ballot. The evidence so far suggests that the GOP suffers more than the Dems.
@DK:
Correction: the cited video about the Buttigieg-Trump voter is from 2020, not 2016.
And the Shiny New Object Syndrome friend I commented about (my high school bestie) also supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries before switching to Trump for the general. Was just reminded in our high school buddies’ group chat, where this guy is currently being razzed for his political schizophrenia.