'Democrats Lost Them': Here's Why 2020 Biden Voters Sat Out The 2024 Election (Rolling Stone)

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If you, like a lot of us, spend your days confronting each fresh horror this administration manufactures and marveling, “How the fuck did Americans let this happen again?” — well, we can help you with the “how” part, at least. Data from the 2024 voter file is finally coming in, and a picture of the American electorate that ushered in a second Donald Trump term is starting to emerge.

There are two categories of voters whose decisions in November helped bring about our present and ongoing nightmare: swing voters who flipped from Joe Biden to Trump, and 2020 Biden voters who sat the last election out entirely. The progressive donor network Way to Win analyzed data from the Democratic data firm Catalist and worked with pollster Lake Research Partners in an effort to get a better handle on the second group — Biden voters in battleground states who opted out in 2024 — the results of which the group has shared exclusively with Rolling Stone.

Across the four Sunbelt battleground states — Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina — there were at least 937,200 Democratic voters who turned out in 2020, but didn’t show up for Vice President Kamala Harris four years later. That’s a meaningful drop, and one that was large enough on its own to swing the election: Trump only won those states by a combined 531,539 votes. Analysis of Catalist data showed that Democrats (both registered and modeled) sat out of the 2024 election at a higher rate than their Republican counterparts. Across every state and almost every demographic group analyzed, Democrats’ vote share declined compared to 2020 — and left-leaning voters removing themselves from the voting pool meant that the electorate was redder than it would have been had they participated.

Some pundits and Democratic operatives have interpreted the election results as an emphatic endorsement for Trump’s message. But in focus groups, these voters paint a very different picture. “If you listen to them you really understand that, on the whole, these voters didn’t skip voting because they viewed Kamala as too liberal or too woke, and the vast majority of them, if they had shown up, would not have voted for Trump. They are not swinging to the right, it’s more that the Democrats lost them,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder of Way to Win explains. “They’re deeply disappointed with the Democratic Party. They’re skeptical of government. They’re skeptical of politics in general — but they are gettable. They’re persuadable.”

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