While I understand that 100,000 voters in a few swing states can make all the difference, and that - thus - numbers at the margins can matter in a presidential election:
When we invoke “unengaged voters” … just how large is this cohort? And just how important?
Do we think “unengaged voters” are even as much as 10% of the electorate (~15 million people bases on votes cast in 2020)? More? Less?
And, in numbers, do they vote? Are the Democrats chasing scraps of “meh” voters where they can be found, and needing to build up a meaningful number of them? And if so, are there enough Election-Day voters in this cohort to turn the tables (the opening paragraph here notwithstanding)?
Probably the best way to conceptualize “the unengaged voter” is precisely that these are eligible voters who may or may not bother to vote.
Turnout for presidential elections in recent cycles have ranged from 1996 having 51.7%, to 58.6% in 2012, to 66.6% in 2020. Varying in between.
So that’s up to 15% of the voter eligible population that sometimes votes and sometimes does not. A big part of the increase on the D side was the increase in Black voter turnout. On Trump side his appeal to less highly educated white voters who resent “others” stepping over them on the economic ladder I think drove turnout.
Getting those who would vote for Trump if they bothered to vote to not bother to, and those who would vote D if they bothered to, to bother this time, is a large part of what potentially decides those few critical states. Probably more than the mythic swing voter.
From what I’ve seen the number decreases as age increases. The older you are the more likely you are to vote even for the lesser of two evils. That makes it much harder to engage otherwise unengaged voters when the choices are a couple of old guys.
… if so, does that benefit the Democrats? Some here, without saying so directly, seem to believe that Trump has 90% of the “unengaged vote” locked up right now. More “unengaged voters” = “more Trump voters”, right? Or no?
Unengaged means they are likely to not vote at all. He’s not going to pick up a lot of youthful unengaged but a non-vote in the right state is just as helpful to him.
The unengaged do not move in lockstep. What engages a disenfranchised no college educated white voter upset about the price of eggs and with fear of others, is different than what engages younger college educated voters worried about their futures. You can engage one group more than the other.
That link, and others I see on the subject, emphasize that these less likely voters are also drastically less informed voters. They are not MAGA or progressive or well anything other than mostly apathetic to politics. They don’t know much about what is going on in the world; they have other interests.
The claim is that they are vaguely anti incumbent and if they vote they will vote for change.
Among reliable voters who follow the news cycles Biden, and well likely almost any D, anybody other than Trump even, leads.
It makes me more enthusiastic about Biden stepping down as a possibility.
Reliable voters will be as likely to vote Harris as they would Biden.
But these unengaged voters? The vague uninformed antipathy they have to Biden is unlikely to transfer to Harris. They are, I suspect tired of Trump too. And she is the more different choice. That may be as far as their analysis goes.