The New York Times’s Nate Cohn, founder of FiveThirtyEight, raised red flags on former President Donald Trump’s building momentum toward November’s general election Friday.
He pointed out how Trump’s momentum is “built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.”
President Joe Biden previously led in that demographic by two points in the 2020 election, but politically unenthusiastic nonvoters have shifted to a 14-point lead for Trump in 2024. Biden has maintained a two-point lead over 2020 voters.
A lead among nonvoters, a constituency who has obviously not proven they will turnout at the polls, could make “it easy to imagine how [the race] could quickly become more volatile” in November.
Cohn notes that nonvoters’ “unusual significance” could create “major challenges for pollsters, who have long known that low-turnout voters are less likely to respond to political surveys,” and a regular pollster could underestimate Trump’s reach.
Millions of voters often vote in one presidential election and stay home for the next, and vice versa. This could refute Cohn’s own argument, as he later says, “Mr. Trump’s big edge among nonvoters means the exact number of new voters could be hugely important or even decisive.”
Cohn sums up the nonvoter situation well.
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“Of course, it’s unlikely that disengaged, irregular voters have already formed solid plans about November,” he wrote. “There’s plenty of time for them to make up or change their minds about whom they might vote for — and about whether they’ll vote at all.”
Trump has a 1.5% lead over Biden in FiveThirtyEight’s presidential polling average, his largest since early April.
