Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats have convinced frequent voters and high turnout voters to stick with them in the 2024 presidential election.
Their problem: They lost along with everyone else.
according to The latest NBC News poll of the 2024 race76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. According to the poll, Harris leads Donald Trump by 5 points in this group, 52% to 47%.
But among the remaining quarter of voters who say they don’t follow politics closely, Trump is ahead by a huge margin – 14 points, 54% to 40%.
These less engaged voters were disproportionately younger, more Republican-leaning, and less likely to have higher education—all voter groups NBC News Exit Poll The election results earlier this month showed struggling Democrats, especially compared to past presidential races.
After their defeat in 2024, Democratic strategists tell NBC News that the party needs to better communicate with these less engaged voters and protect itself from being trapped in a bubble.
“One of the key takeaways from this cycle is that the Democratic Party has a lot of work to do on how we reach voters,” said Christina Freundlich, a Democratic strategist. “We lost the game of persuasion”
Veteran Florida-based Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who worked for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and a pro-Joe Biden super PAC in the 2020 campaign, is taking his party’s criticism even further.
“We have no real messengers,” he said. “We are avoiding the channels of communication through which most of these voters receive information.
“And fair or unfair, among many of these voters, our brand is defined by the most extreme voices in our party,” Schale said. echoes a point recently made by Senator John Fetterman and others.
“We just lost contact with a lot of voters”
Democrats’ outperformance with highly engaged voters — but struggling with less engaged voters — reflects America’s political realignment over the past decade, as Democrats have made gains among college-educated and more frequent voters, while Republicans have more workers. and won over more voters. infrequent voters.
It’s a dynamic that helps explain the Democrats’ success in recent special elections and the 2022 midterms, as well as why Trump and the GOP fared better in the 2024 presidential race.
Media consumption also highlights the political divide between highly engaged voters and less engaged ones. one An NBC News poll in April – When President Joe Biden was still in the race – Democrats performed highly among voters who got their political news from newspapers and national television networks.
But they struggled among voters who get their news from places like YouTube and Google.
And that April poll showed Biden trailing Trump by about 30 points among voters who said they don’t follow political news.
The latest NBC News poll, in November asked a different question: Do you listen to podcasts for news and information?
Almost half of voters — 42% — said yes, and Trump led Harris by double digits among those podcast listeners, 57% to 42%.
Schale, a Democratic strategist from Florida, argues that Democrats have “simply stopped communicating” with large swaths of the electorate.
“Data analytics tries to tell us things like whether or not to spend time or money, and we quantify voters to maximize efficiency,” he said. “The problem is that we stopped connecting with a lot of voters because they didn’t fit the model of how we win.”
“See what?” Schale continued. “It’s forced us to play in fewer states and talk to fewer voters. So for less-informed voters, they’re relying on their lives and perceptions of party brands.”
Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a veteran of state and national campaigns, says his party would be wrong to try to woo voters who are less engaged with more information.
“The wrong solution for Democrats is to think that they can convince less informed voters by hooking them up with more information,” he said. “The right solution is to be clear and focus on what we are communicating.”
“Democrats have made a habit of messaging and language that makes it hard for people to follow through,” Ferguson said. “You can have a Ph.D., but you don’t need to deliver it in a way that only Ph.D.s can understand.”
‘No need to take paper for this’: Voters felt the nation was on the wrong track
But Republican strategist Doug Heye believes that the discussion of the divide between highly engaged voters and less engaged voters misses the mark.
In the 2024 election, enough voters believed the stakes were too high and the country was on the wrong track to force change.
“They don’t need the media to tell them the prices are too high,” Heye said. “Live a normal American life and you’ll probably think we’re on the wrong track. There is no need to take paper for this.”
“Whatever strange rabbit holes Trump went down in events — these voters didn’t care anyway — the central theme of his campaign was that we’re on the wrong track,” he said. “Harris either didn’t want to talk about it or didn’t know how to.”