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Democrats are getting a lot of support from people who don’t usually vote.
As of mid-October, registered Democrats had cast 74.6% of the two-party early ballots from North Carolinians with no 2022 vote on record. At the same point in 2022, that group was 58.0% Democratic. In Texas, as of Oct. 30, Democratic voters in Houston who skipped 2022 are turning out at a 10-point higher rate than Republican Houstonians.
This is quite the turnaround for the Democrats. Support for low-engagement voters — including 2024 Trump voters — could be pivotal in key Senate seats next week.
Two years ago, people who don’t pay much attention to politics were the reason Donald Trump won the presidency. In our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling, Harris actually won the more engaged three-quarters of 2024 voters, by about 3 points. But Trump won the least engaged quarter by 13 — and that was enough.
My read of the 2024 election, as I’ve argued before, is that these low-engagement voters weren’t buying what MAGA was selling. Rather, they were voting against the party in power while prices were high.
Now, Trump and Republicans are the party in power. So where do those low-engagement voters stand now? And will they show up?
I’ve used two new polls to dive into the attitudes of low-engagement voters, who I define using a series of questions about political information, engagement with the news, and likelihood to vote. One is a national survey of 5,240 adults from Wave Polling and Research, the polling firm I run, conducted Oct. 5–29. The other is our October Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll of 2,028 adults (conducted Oct. 13–19).
I then grade each respondent’s overall engagement level as a sum of four qualities: (1) whether they say they’ll definitely vote for this November’s midterm elections, (2) whether a turnout model built on past midterms gives them better than a coin flip’s chance of voting, (3) whether they say they follow political news at least daily, and (4) whether they can correctly answer two basic factual questions about politics. Anyone who comes up short on two or more of these criteria counts as a low-engagement voter. (People who skipped 2024 entirely are, of course, the least engaged of all.)
In this week’s Chart of the Week — the last before the 2026 general election! — I find that the least engaged voters have swung hardest against Trump this cycle.
This portion of the post is sponsored content.
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The less politically engaged someone is, the more they have swung against Trump
While low-engagement voters favored Trump over Kamala Harris by 13 points in 2024, low-engagement likely voters now favor Democrats in congressional races by 2 points. That’s a 15-point swing toward Democrats in a group that made up about a quarter of 2024 voters. The most engaged half of voters, by comparison, have moved just 4 points.
As I’ve written here, Americans who didn’t vote at all in 2024 have moved the most. Two years ago, they leaned toward Trump, 44% to 40%, according to Pew Research Center’s validated-voter study. Today, they favor Democrats for the House by 20 points across both polls (21 in the Wave poll and 18 in SIN). And if you weight them by how likely each one is to actually vote, the Democratic lead grows to 32. Points. These are massive shifts in a not insignificant block of voters, who may be key to Democrats flipping the House and Senate next week.
The chart below shows swings from 2024 to 2026 vote for all adults (light points and lines) and likely voters (dark points and lines)
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