Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats convinced frequent voters and highly engaged voters to stick with them in the 2024 presidential election.
Their problem: they lost with almost everyone else.
According to the latest NBC News poll on the 2024 race, 76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. The poll showed Harris beating Donald Trump by 5 points, 52%-47%, among that group.
But among the remaining quarter of voters who said they don’t follow politics closely, Trump was ahead by a much larger margin: 14 points, 54%-40%.
These less engaged voters were disproportionately younger, more Republican-leaning and less likely to have a college degree — all groups of voters that Democrats struggled with in the election results earlier this month, especially compared to previous presidential races, according to the NBC News Exit Poll.
After their 2024 defeat, Democratic strategists tell NBC News that the party must better communicate with these less engaged voters and avoid falling into a bubble.
“One of the biggest takeaways from this cycle is that the Democratic Party still has a lot of work to do in terms of how we reach voters,” said Democratic strategist Christina Freundlich. “We lost the persuasion game.”
Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic strategist from Florida who has worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and for a pro-Joe Biden super PAC in the 2020 campaign, is taking the criticism of his party even further.
“We don’t have authentic messengers,” he said. “We avoid the communication channels where many of these voters get their information.
“And, fair or unfair, our brand among many of these voters is defined by the most extreme voices in our party,” Schale continued, echoing a point recently made by Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman and others.
‘We simply stopped communicating with many voters’
Democrats performing better with highly engaged voters — but struggling with less engaged voters — reflect America’s political realignment over the past decade, as Democrats have made gains among more educated and more frequent voters, while Republicans have attracted more blue-collar and less-engaged voters. voters have been won over. frequent voters.
It’s a dynamic that helps explain Democratic success in the recent special elections and the 2022 midterms, as well as why Trump and the Republican Party did better in the higher-turnout 2024 presidential election.
Media consumption also underlines the political divide between highly engaged voters and less engaged voters. According to an NBC News poll in April — when President Joe Biden was still in the race — Democrats outperformed voters who got their political news from newspapers and national TV networks.
But they struggled among voters who got their news from places like YouTube and Google.
And the April poll showed Biden trailing Trump by nearly 30 points among voters who said they don’t follow political news.
NBC News’ most recent poll, from November, asked a different question: Do you listen to podcasts to get news and information?
Nearly half of voters — 42% — said yes, and Trump led Harris by double digits among these podcast listeners, 57%-42%.
Schale, the Florida Democratic strategist, said Democrats “just stopped communicating” with large groups of voters.
“Data analytics tries to tell us things like where it is or isn’t efficient to spend time or money, and we score voters with numbers to help maximize efficiency,” he said. “The problem is that we simply stopped communicating with many voters because they didn’t fit the model of how we achieved victory.”
“Guess what?” Schale continued. “It has led us to play in fewer states and talk to fewer voters. Voters with less information therefore rely on their own lives and their perception of the parties’ brands.”
Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a veteran of state and national campaigns, says it would be a mistake for his party to try to win over less engaged voters with more information.
“The wrong solution for Democrats is to think that voters with little information can be convinced by overloading them with more information,” he said. “The right solution is to be clear and focused on what we communicate.”
“Democrats have made a habit of using messaging and language that makes it harder for people to follow,” Ferguson added. “You can have a PhD, but you don’t have to communicate it in a way where only PhDs can understand what you’re saying.”
‘You don’t have to pick up a newspaper for that’: voters thought the country was on the wrong track
But Republican strategist Doug Heye believes discussing the divide between highly engaged voters and less engaged voters misses the point.
In the 2024 election, enough voters believed that prices are too high and that the country is on the wrong track to force change, he explained.
“They don’t need the media to tell them that prices are too high,” Heye said. “Live a normal American life and you’ll probably think we’re on the wrong track. You don’t have to get paper for that.”
“Whatever weird rabbit holes Trump would go down at events — which those voters weren’t paying attention to anyway — the overarching theme of his campaign was that we’re on the wrong track,” he added. “Harris didn’t seem to want to talk about that or had difficulty with the way in which he did so.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
