‘It’s The Economy Stupid’
James Carville….
It’s Donald Trump’s NOW….
He ALONE…. IS driving it into a Ditch….
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump gained a surprising edge from an unlikely group: Americans who typically don’t vote. According to a New York Times analysis, these low-turnout voters backed Trump by a double-digit margin, flipping the script from prior years when non-voters leaned Democratic. This wasn’t just a quirk of the horse-race polls; Campaign operatives, analysts, and post-election surveys all pointed to the same conclusion: The less you followed politics, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.
But now that he’s president again, something’s shifted.
New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. 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.
This is the story of the disengaged voter: why they showed up for Trump, why they’re turning on him now, and what that tells us about political accountability in the era of the “engagement gap.”…
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Staffers for Harris’s 2024 campaign call these people “opt-out” voters. They are the significant fringe, the hard-to-reach middle, the swinging masses, the “reactionary center.” Opt-out voters have loose ties to political parties and are more reactive to political and economic conditions, in theory, than partisans.
One theory for why low-engagement voters voted for Trump is because they remembered the economy being good (or not being bad enough to hear about it) in 2018-2019, and they heard about inflation under Biden, so pulled the lever for Trump…
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Of course, the economic conditions that led to Trump’s victory are no longer the conditions Americans find themselves in. Conditions are much worse today. But if we think these voters are more reactive to economic conditions, and less sensitive to messaging on things like immigration and budget cuts, would that mean this bloc is actually anti-Trump now?
That seems to be the case. According to polls, opt-out voters are moving more against Trump than informed, engaged ones, and significantly disapprove of the job he’s doing as president….
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….here in America, the engagement gap means that Democrats don’t really need to focus too much of their messaging power on economics, since conditions are inherently dragging Trump down among those voters who are hard-to-reach, anyway. But the party still needs to sell voters on some sort of positive/constructive case for prosperity — one that isn’t just “we’re not Trump.” Because in 2028, the Republican nominee for president won’t be, either….
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