While the daily machinations of the Trump Administration continue to churn up news cycle after news cycle, a book about President Biden is about to come out (and it doesn’t sound flattering), and the former President’s cancer diagnosis, the lessons from the 2024 presidential election are easy to lose sight of amidst the chaos. It felt like a good time to hit pause and take a look back.
Throughout 2024, Trendency tracked a national panel of registered voters to get an understanding of what they were thinking and how they were reacting to the information around them. These panelists responded to a myriad of questions during the lead-up to Election Day, but in this piece, we are focusing on three questions in particular: vote likelihood, presidential vote choice, and generic congressional vote choice. It’s important to note that a large segment of our panel of registered voters ended up casting a ballot, but some did not. Below, we offer a first glimpse at these two groups, where they differed, and some thoughts as to why.
Vote Likelihood
About once a month throughout the election cycle, our panelists received a simple question: How likely are you to vote in November 2024?
As with many questions on our Trendency platform, users can respond with nuance; for this question, they are given a 0-100 scale of likelihood. We prefer these types of questions over a Likert scale or similar method, as it allows for users to adjust their answers with a subtlety that “highly likely” or somewhat likely” doesn’t provide. Plus, it lets us create pretty trendlines like this:
It does not come as a shock that those who eventually declined to submit a ballot reported a lower likelihood of voting throughout the cycle. Two things stand out in the trendline, though. First: the gap between the two groups. This question is a self-reported vote likelihood; it does not take into account vote history or any other 3rd party measures of vote propensity. Non-voters were not completely delusional about their chances. On average, they started 2024 at about a 15-point gap between those who became voters and ended with an even larger difference.
This brings us to the second notable item: the gradual but real decline in vote likelihood throughout 2024 among non-voters. This cohort started the year peaking at around an 80 percent chance of voting, but ended 20 points lower. Voters, on the other hand, started high and ended even higher. One could argue that these non-voters were a lost cause, i.e., they were never going to cast a ballot. But we would contend that this group wasn’t lying when they gave themselves a higher chance to vote in January of 2024. They potentially represent a missed chance for engagement.
What about when we dive into the final vote likelihood numbers right before Election Day? As you can see in the table below, more dramatic differences make an appearance:
At this point, it’s clear that decisions have been made. Those who are voting know this with close to 100 percent certainty. Those who end up not voting are much less enthusiastic. We would note that Democratic-leaning non-voters reported a slightly higher chance, as did respondents over the age of 50. Younger non-voting respondents were quite clear in their refusal to even consider voting for president.
Presidential Vote Choice
What about the actual vote for president? Who did these non-voters think they might have voted for? When asking for whom they would vote, we allow respondents to allocate their responses out of 100 percent. They can give all 100 percent to a single candidate or spread their answer out among the choices.
These trendlines make for a fascinating chart, and one that has to be slightly depressing to the Harris campaign. The trendline starts around the moment that Joe Biden dropped out of the race. At that moment in time, Harris was barely a blip for eventual non-voters. Their allegiance was either tied to Trump or, more likely, to a 3rd party candidate. We can speculate that the candidate would have been Robert Kennedy, Jr., but he was also about to exit the race.
With Kennedy and Biden gone, the vote allocation average began to change in Harris’s favor. Among non-voters, her average increased from July until Election Day, almost without stopping. The 3rd party allocation dropped rapidly in July and then leveled out below 20 percent. Trump’s allocation did rise slightly, but Harris ended with a 10-point lead. Not everyone is going to vote (we aren’t Australia), but Harris certainly could have used some increased turnout, at least based on these numbers.
What about the presidential vote among non-voters when looking at the same demographics as before?
Again, the Harris campaign probably wouldn’t enjoy looking at these numbers, especially voters under 50. Fair or not, lots of newspaper ink and airtime were spent on the disagreements younger voters, especially college students, had with Biden and Harris, namely their policies regarding Israel and Gaza. The table above shows that younger non-voters, those who by Election Day had tuned out, were allocating 20 points more to her than to Donald Trump.
Congressional Vote Choice
We didn’t just ask our panelists about the presidential election. They also received regular questions regarding the race for Congress. Here, we ask voters to generically allocate their answers among a Democratic or Republican (or 3rd party) representative in the US House. Did the same non-voters who preferred Kamala Harris as president want a Democratic representative? Well, not exactly:
The allocation for Democratic candidates did increase alongside Harris, but could never quite surpass their Republican counterparts. 3rd party allocation dropped here as well, decreasing from over 30 to about just over 15 points.
Conclusion
This data is just a cursory look at voters and non-voters. Our next installment will dive deeper into some reasons behind the differences shown here. But even without knowing the exact reasoning, it is clear that non-voters were self-aware about their lower potential to cast a ballot. When asked about who they supported, they split their vote allocations much more evenly among the two major parties and a potential 3rd party candidate. This is quite common with less likely voters and those who tend to pay less attention to the election cycle. Even when accounting for the higher 3rd party values, non-voters clearly were moving in Kamala Harris’ direction. Turning out just a few more from this cohort could have made a tight race even more so, or even turned things in her favor.
