Trump’s Unlikely Voter Problem

By Noah Rothman

Monday, April 22, 2024

 

One of the foreseeable sources of irritation that will accompany the results of the 2024 presidential election is that the reasons for either candidate’s loss are so obvious today that the outcome, whatever it may be, will be seen as inevitable in retrospect.

 

As I wrote in February, if Joe Biden is not retained in the presidency, it will be because his party assembled a coalition top-heavy with degree holders, and there just aren’t enough of them. Almost all the party’s electoral problems are downstream from that phenomenon — from its degraded support among minority voters to its inability to broaden its messaging around “boutique issues” such as climate change, structural racism, and its crusade to “save democracy.” If Democrats lose in November, it will be because they pushed all their chips in on a coalition that was too small to win in a high-turnout year.

 

But if Trump loses, the causes are just as predictable. One advantage Democrats accrue from their efforts to juice support among degree-holders is that those are reliable voters. In special elections, off-year elections, midterm elections, and general elections, those voters turn out (which explains the Democratic Party’s recent winning streak despite the polls that suggest a challenging environment for the party). By contrast, Trump and the GOP he has cultivated have sought to remake the Republican coalition into one that is reliant on voters without college degrees. That is a much larger coalition but a less reliable one. And as two polls released over the weekend demonstrate, its performance at the ballot box is expected to be weaker than it appears on paper.

 

Marist College’s latest national poll finds Joe Biden in the lead by three points among registered voters, but that becomes a seven-point lead when its pollsters apply a screen to weed out voters who are unlikely to show up at the polls in November. The finding dovetails with a survey sponsored by NBC News published over the weekend. That survey found Trump retaining a narrow advantage among registered voters. But among voters who cast ballots in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, Joe Biden leads Trump by nine points. Nor are the third-party candidates playing the “spoiler” role Democrats appear so worried about. In both surveys, to various degrees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy appears to draw as much or more from Trump’s support as it does from Joe Biden’s.

 

This is not a new phenomenon, as CNN polling analyst Harry Enten explained on Monday morning. Trump’s strength across a variety of polls declines or disappears entirely when pollsters screen for enthusiasm and voting history:

An ABC News/FiveThirtyEight analysis released earlier this month conducted a deep dive into a recent NORC survey of the electorate identified the same pattern:

 

President Joe Biden performed much better among frequent voters, while Trump had a large lead among people who haven’t voted recently. Specifically, among respondents who voted in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections, Biden outpaced Trump 50 percent to 39 percent. But among respondents who were old enough to vote but voted in none of those three elections, Trump crushed Biden 44 percent to 26 percent.

 

Poll watchers can quibble with this voter screen or that. They can argue that one pollster has overweighted particular demographics to compensate for unsatisfying response rates, and they can take issue with sample sizes and partisan breakdowns. But they should not argue with a trend that is now observable across multiple polls. Trump’s appeal among marginal voters vastly outstrips Joe Biden’s, but that doesn’t mean a thing if the Trump campaign cannot mobilize those voters. It’s no stretch to conclude that the outcome in November will be determined by both campaign’s organizational strength, and it’s reasonable to expect that Democrats will substantially outspend the GOP this year.

 

If Biden loses in November, one of the primary factors will be its overreliance on a smaller universe of dedicated voters. If Trump loses, it will be partly attributable to his overreliance on a large population of Americans who cannot be bothered to cast a ballot. Either way, the result will be attributed to the bets both campaigns placed early in this campaign cycle. And everyone, save perhaps for the campaigns themselves, will have seen it coming.