INFREQUENT VOTERS PREFER TRUMP -- COULD WE DISSUADE THEM?

Democrats have been doing well in off-year elections, but Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at Penn, says that might not carry over to the presidential election:

Between Feb. 20 and March 18, 2024, Gall Sigler and I oversaw a survey, fielded by NORC, of 2,462 English- and Spanish-speaking adults living in the U.S.

... when we broke out respondents by their voting history, we found dramatic differences in whom they support for president in 2024. President Joe Biden performed much better among frequent voters, while Trump had a large lead among people who haven't voted recently. Specifically, among respondents who voted in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections, Biden outpaced Trump 50 percent to 39 percent. But among respondents who were old enough to vote but voted in none of those three elections, Trump crushed Biden 44 percent to 26 percent.

... these results are a cautionary tale for those who would extrapolate Democrats' strong performance in 2022 or recent special elections ahead to this November. The 2024 election will almost certainly have turnout far higher than those races.

This is why I'm still pessimistic about November. Sure, President Biden is slowly gaining on Donald Trump, and now trails Trump by only 0.2% in the Real Clear Polling average. But turnout is always higher in presidential elections than in midterms or special elections, so it really might be Republicans who are being underestimated in this race. And I suspect that Hopkins and Sigler would also have found a Trump skew among voters who stayed home in 2018 and 2022 but did vote in 2020 -- based on the hero worship we see, Trump is undoubtedly the only politician some Americans care enough to vote for. This wasn't enough to get him elected last time, but Biden's victory in the Electoral College came down to a few very close states.

Democrats may need to give very infrequent voters a reason to stay home if they won't vote for Biden. If I were running the Biden campaign, I'd be ordering up ads that are montages of Trump presidential utterances and headlines, edited in a way that's as visually and sonically abrasive as possible. The goal would be to remind voters who have begun to believe that the Trump years were actually pretty good that the Trump years were, in fact, an exhausting shitshow.

I'm imagining ads that work on a visceral level, not on a policy level -- not Trump appointed the justices who overturned the Roe decision or Trump said nice things about Nazis but, rather, Trump was an obnoxious, headache-inducing troll every day for four years. Ads like this could include praise for Nazis, for instance, but they should emphasize Trump's blowhard nature, and the climate of national outrage it inspired. They should be seek to be a visual and auditory representation of how it felt every day to have Trump as president.

I think ads like these could work on even habitual voters, if they're among Trump's "soft" supporters -- the non-cultists who nevertheless prefer him to Biden. For many Americans, a nostalgic haze now surrounds the Trump presidency, or at least the first three years of it. Prices were lower! There were no wars in Ukraine and Gaza! And so on. It's possible that Trump will dispel that haze every time he opens his mouth. But I think Democrats should give him a push. He's wrong on policy, but he's also obnoxious. We might need to remind voters just how it felt to have him in office.