The NY Times takes a look at what polls are saying could be as much as 10% of voters 5 months out from the November election….
Politically disengaged Americans are emerging as one of the most unpredictable, complex and potentially influential groups of voters in the 2024 race. They are fueling Mr. Trump’s current polling leadsbut in many cases hail from traditionally Democratic communities, giving Mr. Biden a chance to win some of them back — if he can get their attention.
No shortage of events could jolt alienated voters over the next five months, starting with a verdict in the first criminal trial of a former president in American history, which could arrive this week. Even though many of these people are historically infrequent voters, those who do cast ballots could make the difference in an inevitably close race.
But reaching them is a problem. Campaigns up and down the ballot are operating in an ever-more-fragmented media landscape where misinformation thrives — spread especially by Mr. Trump and his allies — and basic facts are often ignored, disputed or filtered through a partisan lens.
“People have really separated into their own information cul-de-sacs,” said former Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat. “It’s harder now to reach people than it was in previous elections because of that disaggregated or decentralized information network.”
‘When your team’s losing, you don’t read the sports page’
In a presidential election in which more than 80 percent of voters, according to a Pew Research Center survey, say they wish one or both major candidates were not running, some are opting out of straight-ahead political news entirely.
That is evident in polling about current events.
Recent New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer surveys found that nearly 20 percent of voters in battleground states said Mr. Biden was responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion, even though it was Mr. Trump’s choices for the Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
Almost half of the country believes the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high, a Harris poll conducted for The Guardian found, even though it is near a 50-year low.
And in a recent Politico-Morning Consult poll, voters were divided over who had done more to “promote infrastructure improvements and job creation.” Mr. Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law, while Mr. Trump repeatedly failed to advance the issue.
“When your team’s losing, you don’t read the sports page after the game,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. “You have a big swath of the country that just thinks they’re losing when it comes to politics, and so the way to deal with that is to just not pay attention.”
Low-information voters are hardly a new phenomenon: Landmark studies dating back nearly 80 years have found that the public is often uninformed on key issues.
And many Americans are indeed following this contest.
A Gallup survey released this month showed that 71 percent said they had given “quite a lot” of thought to the upcoming presidential election, in keeping with findings around this time in 2020 and 2008.
‘People out here are struggling’
Voters who are paying less attention, pollsters say, tend to be younger or more working-class, and are more likely to engage late in the race, if they do at all.
“It’s not that politics is unimportant to them, but they have other priorities,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “Turning out the low-information voters who favor your candidate is one of the major tasks of political consultants.”….