The Most Important Voters In 2026 Didn't Even Vote In 2024

Understanding why voters stayed home in 2024 is the key to turning them out for Democrats this November

Credit: CNN

In 2024, Donald Trump shattered many preconceived notions about politics that had largely been taken as gospel, particularly by Democrats, prior to that cycle. Much of this focused on the voting behavior of certain demographic groups.

It was shocking to see Trump eat into Harris’s margins among voters of color in metropolitan centers, and to watch him earn historically high support (for a Republican) among Latino voters, even after demonizing immigrants throughout his campaign as “invaders” from so-called “shit hole countries.”

But the one demographic group that most often gets overlooked is the one that didn’t vote at all: the non-voters, or “skippers,” who sat out 2024 entirely. They, too, confounded expectations.

Conventional wisdom on the left long held that the higher the voter turnout, the better the Democratic candidate would do. That turned out to be one of 2024’s many false assumptions, as Pew’s demographic study of the 2024 election found. According to Pew, among those eligible voters who sat out the 2024 election, non-voters actually favored Trump over Harris by four points. As NPR summarized Pew’s findings:

Even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%.

But today, just like other demographic groups among whom Trump over-performed two years ago, the narrative has flipped. As G Elliott Morris put it bluntly in a recent Strength In Numbers post,

“non-voters have turned on Trump.”

As Democrats look ahead the Congressional midterms and the race for the White House in 2028, they see an opportunity to win back these “skippers.” And there’s one very important reason why.

Look at how those who skipped the 2020 election but then turned out in 2024 performed. Again, from NPR:

Trump won more of those who didn’t vote in 2020 but decided to cast a ballot in 2024. Almost three-quarters of 2020 non-voters stayed home again. But by a 52%-45% margin, Trump won those 2020 nonvoters who voted in 2024.

In other words, as go the skippers, so goes the nation.

So how are the 2024 non-voters leaning today heading into November? And how can Democrats ensure they actually turn out for them this time, not just in November, but beyond?

Non-Voters are “just pissed off”

As we have tracked over the past 17 months, Trump’s approval rating since returning to office has completely cratered. While Trump started out in positive territory in January 2025, he now is polling consistently under 40%, with his disapproval numbers reaching new highs each week.

FiftyPlusOne’s latest poll aggregator shows this starkly:

To achieve this level of unpopularity, Trump has largely given up any gains he made in 2024 among the demographics he shifted to the right. For instance, after winning 46% of the Latino vote in 2024, according to CNN’s polling average, Trump is now at 28% approval among that demographic. And what about young men, whom Trump actually won by 1 point in 2024? Now, according to CNN’s Harry Enten, men under 30 view Trump unfavorably by a whopping 55 points.

And the voters who didn’t even cast a ballot in 2024 are tracking similarly.

As Enten laid out in dramatic fashion last month, according to the recent New York Times/Sienna poll Trump is now underwater among 2024 non-voters by -50% with an approval of just 26%. Recall that he was at +4 in November 2024.

And to demonstrate why, Enten put some key numbers side by side. Per Pew, in 2024, 60% of non-voters were confident that Trump would make good decisions as president. But as of May, 2026, only 19% of those non-voters approved of his performance on the economy.

Not surprisingly, this animus toward Trump is informing how they intend to vote for Congress this November.

Back in February, after just a year into Trump’s second term, Enten looked at an NBC poll, which found buyer’s remorse among 2024 voters was setting in, with Harris up 8% over Trump in a hypothetical rematch.

Among non-voters, Enten found something similar: a non-buyer’s remorse, perhaps. And it’s growing.

Enten noted that, per Pew, Trump won the 2020 non-voters who cast ballots in 2024 by 7%. But as of February 2026, the 2024 non-voters favored Democrats by 16%, according to their preference on the 2026 generic congressional ballot, even as the electorate as a whole favored Dems by just 5%.

As G Elliott Morris recently laid out over at Strength In Numbers, as of their own April generic ballot poll, the Democratic margin stood at +20 points among 2024 non-voters.

And the May New York Times/Sienna poll had even worse news for Trump, showing non-voters preferring Democrats to lead Congress by a 31% margin.

But will these 2024 non-voters actually become voters in 2026 and 2028? Enten is bullish, citing NYT numbers showing 48% of 2024 non-voters are either “Very Likely” or “Almost Certain To Vote.”

It’s notable that non-voters’ preference for Democrats for Congress this year went from +16 in February to +20 in April and then +31 in May, even as the electorate at large went from D+5, D+8 and D+11 in those very same polls. In other words, a group that was Trump +4 just two years ago is now far more anti-Trump—and pro-Democratic—than the rest of the country.

Enten made clear the consequences of this:

“So, this is a group I would really be paying a lot of attention to because the reason why Democrats are doing so well on the generic ballot is in large part among those who stayed home in 2024. Many of them will vote in 2026 and they won’t be voting Republican. They’ll be voting Democratic, because truth is, they’re just pissed off at the president of the United States.”

Enten concluded:

“When you’re when you’re perturbed you turn out to vote.”

Why Are Non-Voters So Angry?

In February, G Elliott Morris explored the phenomenon of 2024 low-information voters.

In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters.

According to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Now, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points — a 25-point shift away from the president.

Morris contrasts this with the shift away from Trump that he found among high-knowledge voters, which was just 12 points. This disparity is something he has found consistently over the past year.

In May 2025, I reported a similar result using data from YouGov on self-reported news attention. Then, Trump’s approval had fallen 33 points among people who said they paid the least attention to the news — roughly twice the drop among the most attentive Americans.

Morris equates this with a broader trend among the least engaged voters.

First, as I have discussed in this newsletter previously, low-engagement voters over the last decade have been particularly pessimistic about prices and economic mobility. They were likelier to vote for Trump in 2024, I have argued, not because they were more conservative than other voters, but because they were more anti-incumbent.

And who’s less engaged than voters who didn’t vote at all? As Morris concludes about this disengaged voter cohort:

Now that Trump’s in power, we should expect this group to punish him more, too.

And that’s precisely what we’re seeing from the 2024 non-voters. As Morris concluded in his May analysis, in which he found that “non-voters have swung back left”:

The reason is straightforward: low-engagement voters react more directly to lived economic conditions and are less likely to filter their views through partisan news or social media sources. Non-voters and weakly-engaged independents are less likely to evaluate the economy through the lens of partisan content creators and which party is in charge, and more likely to be reacting to the price of groceries or gas at the pump.

Importantly,

Non-voters rank highly the issues [Trump] has exacerbated: namely, affordability.

In his Strength In Numbers polling, Morris finds 35% of non-voters rank affordability as their top issue of concern, which is higher than either Trump voters or Harris voters. Additionally, he found

Non-voters’ next-tier concerns are jobs (19%), health care (11%), and government funding and social programs (7%).

So, when you look at Trump’s first 17 months in office, it’s clear why non-voters are actually more anti-Trump than the electorate at large.

As Morris explains.

These are the types of numbers you get only when you are betraying the coalition that put you in office. Trump won in 2024 because a critical mass of politically disinterested, low-engagement, and working-class voters decided he was the one to give them desperately needed economic relief after 2 years of harsh inflation (and hysterical media coverage) under Biden. What has he given them in return?

In short:

the president said he would lower prices on day one, and then he went and actively made decisions that produced the opposite outcome... Basically everything about the current political environment is downstream of these decisions.

All of this offers clues Democrats will need to ensure 2024 non-voters come out and support them in November.

How Can Democrats Turn Out Non-Voters?

In 2020, Joe Biden earned more votes than any presidential candidate in history, with 81 million votes in the highest turnout election among the voting age population since 1968, at 62.8%. But then in 2024, that dropped down to 57.8%, with 3 million fewer voters voting for president than did so in 2020. So where did that drop come from?

On one hand, we can look at the shift in pure vote numbers for each candidate from 2020 to 2024, which is as close to an apples-to-apples comparison between two election cycles as you’re likely to get. And we see a telling statistic:

In 2024, Donald Trump grew his coalition from 74 million in 2020 to 77 million two years ago. By contrast, Kamala Harris drew just 75 million votes, down 6 million from Joe Biden’s 2020 high.

To break it down another way, per NPR:

Trump was able to hold more of his coalition from 2020 than Harris did of Biden’s. Trump won 85% of his 2020 voters; Harris won 79% of Biden’s.

About 15% of Biden’s voters did not vote, 5% switched to Trump and 1% voted for someone else. That’s compared to 11% of 2020 Trump voters, who sat it out, 3% who switched to Harris and 1% who went for someone else.

In other words, the result in 2024 was determined as much by who didn’t show up as who did.

A poll by Celinda Lake’s Way To Win, taken last summer, tried to explore the reason for the collapse of the Biden coalition, namely why Harris was unable to motivate millions of Biden voters to cast votes for her. The results give important lessons for 2026 and track with Morris’s findings.

Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect broke it down:

Lake’s poll reached 833 Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote at all in 2024. The top reason, cited by 31 percent of such voters, was that Harris “didn’t have a strong enough plan to get the cost of living down” and failed to address “deeper issues like poverty and inequality.”

This group is even more Democratic when it comes to the Congressional ballot in November, with 62 percent who would vote for a Democrat for Congress compared with just 19 percent for a Republican.

There is one important caveat to that, however, as Kuttner notes:

—if they voted at all.

So what would make these Biden non-voters show up this November?

When the poll asked what issues would make them more likely to vote in 2026, the top four were secure health insurance, making the rich pay their fair share of taxes while keeping taxes on working families affordable, the cost of living, and affordable housing.

In battleground states, 77 percent of 2020 Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 felt that the nation’s top problem was the top 1 percent taking too much at the expense of everyone else.

The prescription, per Lake:

Lake told me that Democrats in 2026 should “offer a populist economic alternative to Trump’s current economics that benefits wealthy corporations and wealthy political donors. Fight for working famiies, and offer specifics that you are willing to be accountable for.”

Of course, banking on historically disengaged voters to turn out may be a fool’s errand. But as Way to Win’s President Tory Gavito told Campaigns and Elections, non-voters are precisely who Democrats should be targeting:

“Our theory here is that the people that have crossed that Rubicon – that flipped from voting Democrat to Republican – are going to be really hard to persuade back,” Gavito said. “But this other group of people that voted for Biden in 2020 and skipped 2024 – they’re going to be incredibly important.”

G Elliot Morris agrees. While he acknowledges that “Most 2024 non-voters will not turn out in November,”

the GOP’s deficit among 2024 non-voters really matters, for two reasons. First, because many of them will vote this year. Midterm turnout always falls short of presidential years, but tens of millions of 2024 non-voters will still cast ballots — and Democrats have held an enthusiasm advantage in our polling all year. Nine in ten registered voters in the Times poll say they plan to participate in November, and Democratic voters are eight points more likely than Republicans to say they are “almost certain” to turn out. Second, the non-voter shift represents a huge swing from 2024.

It won’t be easy. The key to “winning over those voters, as Tory Gavito told Campaigns and Elections,

is going to require Democrats to take a hard look at 2024, Gavito said. She argued that Democrats failed to recognize “how deep the anti-elite sentiment” ran among Americans – including many of the voters that make up the party’s historic base. Harris, she said, ended up running as the “status quo candidate,” while Trump took on the role of “disruptor.”

So far, the good news is Democrats seem to have learned the right lesson. The Democratic Socialist wing of the party, whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Senator Bernie Sanders, has long banged the economic populist drum Lake is prescribing.

But now we’re seeing “normie” Democrats such as Jon Ossoff in Georgia and James Talarico in Texas take up the mantle. They are running anti-elite, anti-system campaigns directly linking the corruption of Republicans in power to the higher costs Americans are seeing every day.

It’s a message that is resonating, particularly among traditionally disengaged non-voters, who stayed home in 2024 precisely because Democrats failed to deliver this message two years ago.