Dem
47
GOP
53
A core belief among many Democrats is: If we could only improve turnout, we would do better. Put in other words, Democrats fervently believe that the 30-40% of people who don't vote are actually secret Democrats and if they could be turned out, Democrats would always win. Turns out, more and more studies are showing that belief to be wrong. Nonvoters are, at best, politically neutral and, at worst, secret Republicans.
Pew Research has a new report out that shows Democrats are deluding themselves. Pew interviewed 9,000 voters after the election and then painstakingly checked to see who voted and who did not and how the nonvoters skewed. What the study showed is that if all the nonvoters had voted, Trump's 2024 margin would have been 3% instead of 1.5%. In other words, if the nonvoters had voted, Trump's popular vote margin would have doubled. The nonvoters were actually lazy secret Republicans.
This one study is not a fluke. In 2020, a Stanford study compared states that had made voting easier to states that had not. The conclusion was that neither party gained from having a greater turnout. The extra voters were roughly evenly split between the parties.
Similarly, a study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that making it easier to vote either had no effect or in some places helped Trump.
The dynamics of this are complicated. If there is a strict voter-ID law, campaigns will invest more money and energy in educating and registering voters. If there is a law making voting by mail easier, campaigns will do more outreach to get ballots returned. If early voting is expanded, campaigns will divert funds and spend them in October to nail down votes. The effects of changes in the law are not always simple. But the assumption Democrats have been making for years that nonvoters are just lazy Democrats is not likely to be true.
So far no reason for this effect has been found. Maybe nonvoters watch Fox News from time to time but are generally not interested in politics. Maybe they get their news from ill-informed friends. Also, why don't they vote? Some probably say it is too much trouble. Others probably say their vote doesn't matter. More in-depth research is needed here. (V)