Disengaged Voters Are Abandoning Trump In Droves—Can Democrats Win Them Back?

Trump just handed Democrats an opening with one of his key voting blocs

A Make America Great Again hat lies in ashes. Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

A poll released just after last year’s election showed a strong correlation between voters’ level of political news consumption and the candidate they supported for president.

Over the course of the month leading up to Election Day, Data For Progress polled over 13,000 voters and found that among those who self-identified as having “a great deal” of “news attentiveness,” 52% supported Kamala Harris and 46% supported Donald Trump, while 51% of those who had “none at all” supported Trump and just 32% supported Harris.

David Shor noted this gap between engaged voters and disengaged voters in his post-election analysis for The New York Times, in which he observed:

The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don’t follow politics closely became much more Republican.

Unfortunately for Harris, there were just too many normally disengaged voters who were inspired to come out and support Trump. Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’s deputy campaign manager, referred to these voters as “opt-out voters” in a recent New York Times OpEd.

From Flaherty’s perspective:

It was these voters — opt-out voters — who decided the 2024 election.

Political data journalist G. Elliott Morris describes their impact on the 2024 race in an eye-opening new piece over at his Strength In Numbers Substack:

So, a big reason why Trump won in 2024 is that the Americans who are least likely to be informed about the news and usually don’t show up voted for him. These are the people that are hardest to reach with political messaging; They do not read the New York Times, they do not digest a lot of political advertising on cable and network television, and they get the lion's share of their opinions about politics through dialogue with their friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and on social media.

As Data For Progress found in a separate pre-election poll last year, these low-information low-propensity voters are “spending their time on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, not on cable news or The New York Times” and that “what little political content reached them was overwhelmingly pro-Trump or, at the very least, open to his message.”

They concluded:

Trump’s campaign was tactical about going around traditional media, using alternative channels to reach these voters directly — and it looks to have worked.

That was in November. After helping deliver the White House to Donald Trump, how do these same voters feel about him now just over 100 days into his second term?

In his analysis, Morris reveals that these politically disengaged voters are “moving more against Trump than informed, engaged [voters], and significantly disapprove of the job he’s doing as president.”

In today’s piece, I’ll take a look at the data Morris lays out and expand on his theories as to why this is the case. And I’ll explore a critical question as we look ahead: What can Democrats learn about these elusive voters as they prepare for a comeback in the 2028 presidential election?

The Shift Of The “Opt-Out Voter”

For as long as I can remember, Democrats have proclaimed, with good reason, that if only every eligible voter were to vote, we would win every time. Well, in 2024, Trump turned that completely on its head.

As Shor put it, “this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.”

He elaborated:

If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted [in 2024], Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points.

Part of the reason for this is a distinct alignment between “opt-out voters” and Trump’s core message. Per Flaherty:

At their core, opt-out voters generally don’t trust politicians or the mainstream media. Many assume the system is rigged, the media is biased and neither party is actually fighting for them.

Another reason was a failure of Democratic messaging. As Flaherty points out:

If you think the system is broken, we’ve been the ones defending it.

If you don’t trust the mainstream press, we’re not for you — because it’s the only way we know how to reach people.

In style, substance and communication, Democrats have become an opt-in party in an opt-out country.

But the inversion is also due to an inherent quality of these opt-out voters, namely, as Morris describes it, they “have loose ties to political parties and are more reactive to political and economic conditions.”

As Data For Progress found:

They’re generally less politically engaged and more motivated by material economic factors like the cost of living.

In a post just ahead of last year’s election, political scientist Dan Hopkins broke down voter issue preferences based on how many elections they had participated in, observing:

Inflation is the top issue for infrequent voters; democracy for frequent voters.

When Kamala Harris spoke on the campaign trail about the threat a Trump victory posed for our democracy, she was speaking directly to the opt-in voters; when Trump said he’ll bring prices down on day one, he was talking directly to those opt-out voters.

But as Morris observes, it’s that very quality of these opt-out voters that is making them turn on Trump just months after they helped deliver him the presidency:

[W]e see a massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump's net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news. When Trump was inaugurated, net approval among people who say they read or watch news “hardly at all” was +12, and it's now -21. That compares to just a 14-point drop in Trump approval, from +3 to -11, among people who say they pay attention to the news "most of the time."

Morris depicts the phenomenon in the following graph:

As Morris posits, this is why they turned against Trump in 2020 due to his handling of Covid and against Biden (and then Harris) in 2024 due to inflation. And it’s why they are turning on Trump now.

Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details... still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.

And more to the point:

Now, with 401ks sinking, goods getting more expensive, shelves emptying, and the president saying kids should have just three dolls instead of 30, they have moved against the president again. Their lack of incentive to see politics through partisan lenses, and to process data from opinion leaders according to one's own party identity, may make these people more rational in reacting to economic stimulus.

But can Democrats learn the right lessons from 2024 and convert these voters to their side by 2028?

The Opportunity For Democrats

One bit of conventional wisdom that came out of the 2024 election was that Donald Trump won in part because he went into alternate media spaces where many elusive voters were, while Kamala Harris avoided those spaces.

Case in point: Andrew Shulz’s Flagrant podcast. It’s precisely the sort of “manosphere” media space that Trump ventured into and where Democrats feared to tread. To correct this imbalance, Pete Buttigieg recently went on the podcast for an almost three-hour conversation, and it was masterful.

It was invigorating to hear Buttigieg prove the concept. He came off as real and engaging, communicating Democratic values in an eloquent, relatable way. And the hosts were clearly charmed by him, even as they insisted that Democrats failed to win in 2024 because they don’t know how to communicate the way Trump does.

You need a “Build the wall!” slogan, they insisted, the sort of over-the-top promise that can elicit an emotional response and fit on a poster. And when Buttigieg reminded them that Trump never built the wall and that it was one of the great failures of Trump’s presidency, they laughed. That didn’t matter. The promise was the point. It was a bumper sticker, it was a rally chant, and it made people feel good.

“At least do us the favor of lying to us!” one of the hosts said.

While Democrats might benefit from taking a page out of the Trump playbook on political communication, emulating the worst qualities of Trump’s campaign can’t be the way forward. But as I listened, it became clear where this advice was coming from.

At one point in the conversation, Buttigieg mentioned how Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education Secretary, referred to A.I. as “A-1” during a speech, and the hosts were shocked. They’d never heard of this story. Then Buttigieg had them on the edge of their seats as he exposed Trump’s and Musk’s lie that millions of dead people were getting Social Security checks. “Wow” they exclaimed, with one host even confessing, “I thought that was just a fact.”

A lightbulb went off. These guys are just normal, non-political, low-information voters—the sort that shifted to Trump in 2024. Their advice highlighted that Trump does one thing better than anyone else in politics: getting their attention.

It’s a point Rob Flaherty made in his NYT OpEd:

If there is any lesson I gleaned from the 2024 campaign, it’s that winning opt-in voters is about facts. (“Inflation is among the lowest in the world!”) Winning opt-out voters is about attention. (“I am taking a shift at McDonald’s because I understand you.”)

Trump understood something in 2024 that Democrats didn’t. When voters are getting their media and information from social media, podcasts, and friends rather than conventional media outlets, you’ve got to not just meet them where they are, but break through the noise so your message gets through.

Flaherty went on:

Success in communicating online most often has less to do with social media trends and tactics and more to do with doing the right thing offline. We watched a few weeks ago as Senator Cory Booker reaped the benefits of this approach: He gave a big, bold 25-hour speech on the Senate floor that captured attention, gave people hope, drove conflict and generated the first bona fide social media moment of this iteration of the resistance.

Democrats are starting to learn the right lesson from 2024, as we saw from Senator Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador to demand a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and as we’ve seen from Bernie and AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy tour of western (including many red) states. As Flaherty reminds us, Bernie even went viral for an appearance he made at the Coachella music festival.

But at the same time, it appears Trump has learned the wrong lesson. He thought what worked for him in the 2024 campaign would work for him as president. Instead, it’s backfiring. Turns out attention can be a double-edged sword.

Take DOGE. Trump tried to recreate the Elon Musk spectacle that helped win him the swing states during the campaign so he could decimate the administrative state as president. The result: Musk’s approval rating tanked, Tesla’s stock price plummeted, DOGE achieved a fraction of its cost-cutting goals, and Musk is set to slink away from his government role, weak and disgraced.

Take Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Trump got our attention all right. In fact, he got the world’s attention by tanking the global markets with his blanket 10 percent tariffs on most countries, even some uninhabited ones. The result? Working Americans are seeing their 401-Ks drop as grocery prices rise. Trump now has an approval rating hovering around 40 percent, the worst of any president at his 100-day mark in U.S. history.

And now we have his “Big Beautiful Bill” going through Congress—or more accurately, not going—as Republicans try to cut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. While the reconciliation bill may have a Trumpian attention-grabbing name, like “build the wall” before it, it is proving quite difficult to actually get done, as a recent CNN headline makes clear:

House GOP infighting turns ugly over Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’

And those opt-out voters he won over in 2024 are proving anything but faithful to his MAGA cause. Democrats have a golden chance to win them back.

As Morris framed the decline in support Trump has seen from his one-time supporters:

That is a complete inversion of the relationship between engagement and support for Trump in 2024, and a return to the old dynamic of less-informed/engaged voters being systematically more friendly to Democratic candidates and causes.

He had a caveat, though:

I’m not sure this is a political shift, so much as it is the result of a mass of voters conditioning their support for the president on economic conditions, especially recent local economic indicators (especially inflation), regardless of which party is in charge.

This finicky and elusive bloc of voters is thus both an opportunity and a cautionary tale. But it’s pretty clear that Trump is unwittingly driving them back into the arms of Democrats.

But can Democrats leverage this moment and lay the groundwork for a strong coalition of both opt-in and opt-out voters in time for 2028?

Rob Flaherty thinks so.

The good news? We have an opening. In this Trump era, in which working people foot the bill for Elon Musk and Mr. Trump’s self-dealing while the government gets further into people’s bedrooms, we have a chance to offer something different. Not a return to normal but a vision for a better future. A government that roots out corruption, checks runaway corporate power and works — for the love of God, works. A country where you don’t go broke when you get sick, where you’ll be left alone if you’re not hurting anyone. We should help people believe in better. If we’re not hope merchants, we’re nothing at all.

And hope, especially in a time of great crisis and economic pain, is something even the most disconnected voters could choose to pull the lever for come 2028.