Following up on my earlier post today, I see that Philip Bump has some nice charts to illustrate the point that Biden has an advantage among likely voters:
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.
He points out that the Harvard Youth Poll released last week suggests the same thing.
That amounts to an almost 20 point lead among likelies.
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.
Bump suggests this might indicate that all the handwringing about a supposedly big shift right among those voters is a bit of a mirage.
Obviously, Democrats still need to do everything they can to get out the vote. Apathy isn’t ever something to count on especially since Trump has a unique ability to motivate his cult. (Also, they’re going to try to throw out as many votes as possible.) But this does at least show that the majority of the most engaged people are appalled by Donald Trump and will do whatever they can to assure that he doesn’t get back into the White House. It’s something.