What do disengaged voters think about Trump now?
Trump's job approval rating is down 33 points among people who read or watch little to no news
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.”
Polarized by engagement and Information
What Trump's election showed us was the consequences of an increasing engagement gap in U.S. politics. And by engagement, I do not just mean engagement in the voting process, but engagement in politics or with political information whatsoever. For example, a post-election survey from Data for Progress found that the voters who paid the most attention to the news in 2024 voted for Kamala Harris by 6 percentage points, while those who paid no attention at all voted for Trump by 19. Democrats are also posting huge numbers in special elections, largely because low-engagement voters just aren't showing up.
So, a big reason why Trump won in 2024 is that the Americans who are least likely to be informed about the news and usually don’t show up voted for him. These are the people that are hardest to reach with political messaging; They do not read the New York Times, they do not digest a lot of political advertising on cable and network television, and they get the lion's share of their opinions about politics through dialogue with their friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and on social media.
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.
Polls show Trump losing support among low-engagement voters
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. According to two Pew Research Center surveys, for example, in February, 44% of 2024 non-voters approved of the job Trump was doing. By April, just 31% of them approved — a 13 percentage point decline. That was larger than the 7-point decline Trump picked up among all adults, and the same size as the drop in Trump support among people who say they only somewhat strongly supported him in 2024:
People who do not pay attention to the news have also moved against Trump in large numbers. I asked YouGov, an online pollster, to share data from their polls with The Economist that breaks down the president's approval rating by how much news people report consuming.
Comparing these crosstabs for YouGov's first poll of Trump's presidency, conducted Jan. 26–28, 2025, to their most recent survey, fielded April 25–28, 2025, we see a massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump's net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news. When Trump was inaugurated, net approval among people who say they read or watch news “hardly at all” was +12, and it's now -21. That compares to just a 14-point drop in Trump approval, from +3 to -11, among people who say they pay attention to the news "most of the time."
Here's a chart of this relationship:
If YouGov is right, the people who pay the least attention to the news and are the least involved in the political process are now the least likely to support Trump, rather than the most likely. That is a complete inversion of the relationship between engagement and support for Trump in 2024, and a return to the old dynamic of less-informed/engaged voters being systematically more friendly to Democratic candidates and causes.
But I’m not sure this is a political shift, so much as it is the result of a mass of voters conditioning their support for the president on economic conditions, especially recent local economic indicators (especially inflation), regardless of which party is in charge.
Are less-engaged voters still behaving rationally?
In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Harris 2024 campaign manager Rob Flaherty says of so-called "opt-out" voters that:
If there is any lesson I gleaned from the 2024 campaign, it’s that winning opt-in voters is about facts. (“Inflation is among the lowest in the world!”) Winning opt-out voters is about attention. (“I am taking a shift at McDonald’s because I understand you.”)
And he says if there's any time Democrats have attention on their side, it's now:
We have an opening. In this Trump era, in which working people foot the bill for Elon Musk and Mr. Trump’s self-dealing while the government gets further into people’s bedrooms, we have a chance to offer something different. Not a return to normal but a vision for a better future. A government that roots out corruption, checks runaway corporate power and works — for the love of God, works. A country where you don’t go broke when you get sick, where you’ll be left alone if you’re not hurting anyone.
I think people should view the 2024 election and the fallout from Trump this way: There is one segment of America that watches news, follows their party leaders on Twitter and Instagram and whatever, listens to the Ezra Klein show, voted overwhelmingly for Harris in 2024 and overwhelmingly opposes Trump now. For them, paying attention to politics is on the level of a hobby or sport.
Then, there's another part of the country that is comparatively extremely averse to politics. These people mostly don't watch the news or read the papers. Maybe they see news clips on social media, or when a friend shows them something on their phone, or when a colleague brings it up at the water cooler. But these people are comparatively more attuned to what life is like for them, right now, rather than for the collective
If you think of the American public as being positioned on a scatter plot according to (a) how liberal or conservative each person is and (b) how engaged in the news they are, then the result of the 2020 election may look something like this (where each dot is a Biden or Trump vote.)
Note that the electorate is polarized mainly on the left-right axis.
And then, in 2024, you may get something like this, where the public has polarized by informational fluency as well:
Note all the additional Trump votes in the liberal/disengaged quadrant in the bottom left. My theory would be that these voters reacted to inflation in 2022-2023, were primed to vote for Trump because of the good economy in 2018-2019, and for the most part the little information that reached them during the 2024 campaign did little to persuade them. Ideology drove their vote less than in 2020.
Now, with 401ks sinking, goods getting more expensive, shelves emptying, and the president saying kids should have just three dolls instead of 30, they have moved against the president again. Their lack of incentive to see politics through partisan lenses, and to process data from opinion leaders according to one's own party identity, may make these people more rational in reacting to economic stimulus (even if they aren't evaluating future policy change accurately).
Economic instability and one-term presidents
If this theory is right, it means that incumbents are also uniquely sensitive to economic contractions, since there is little they can do to counter narratives. YouGov's data indicate that about half of the public follows news no or only some of the time. How should Biden have told them things were looking up in June 2024? How should Trump address their deep (and justified) concerns now?
We may be in an environment where engagement polarization means it's inherently harder for incumbents to win re-election. Apart from the Trump 2020 and Biden 2024 examples, take Canada, where Liberals just managed a stunning upset after kicking out their old prime minister, Justin Trudeau, for a new non-triggering face in Mark Carney. And in Australia last weekend, Labor got swept into a second term because the opposition focused on migration and other issues instead of the cost-of-living crisis there.
Back 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. And in 2032, the engagement gap could cut the other way.
Meanwhile, Trump has lost arguably the best advantage the Republicans had for the future. And if conditions remain poor, they may lose ground, not gain it. After all, it is their mess — isn't this how democracy is supposed to work, anyway?
This is very interesting data and I agree with your conclusions, i.e., the left needs strong economic messaging and action to capture the low-engagement population. I would add that the majority of low-engagement groups are getting their news from social media (Pew, 9/17/24 Consumption across Platforms), and the majority of those sources are right-wing. So if we want to engage these folks, we must not let the right dominate social media as they are now.
One theory about low information voters backing Trump in 2024 is that they weren't paying attention to political news, but were still being fed subtle rightwing messaging on non-news social channels like TikTok, Instagram, podcasts and content focused on sports and gaming. Democratic messaging was reportedly largely absent from those channels That messaging undercut support for Biden, then Harris as well as for Democrats generally while boosting Trump.
I was struck by interviews with young Trump voters, young women, young blacks and Latinos who'd you'd expect to vote for Harris, whose reasons for chosing Trump were straight out of rightwing propaganda and divorced from reality. Anecdotal data for sure but reinforcing the point that rightwing messaging reached them and influenced their vote.
In the experience of consumer marketers like myself, we learn early on that people act on emotion not facts, that messages with an emotional base work to get action while facts don't. When I look at a state like Missouri controlled by Republicans for a couple decades with failing schools, shrinking income, poor healthcare outcomes, yet voters are not punishing Republicans for the facts of results in the ground but are reelecting them based on effective emotional messaging. So personal experience does not appear to determine how people vote there.
That makes me dubious about the impact of personal experience on voting opinion. What data is available for what factors are most influencing political opinions of low information voters now which result in this dramatic change against Trump?