In Part 1 of our look at 2024 non-voters, Trendency provided a brief overview of those who did not end up voting in 2024, who they might have supported, and their dwindling likelihood to vote throughout the year. In Part 2, we move beyond the topline data and start to examine why some people may have abstained from voting in 2024.

Issues of Importance

As we mentioned in Part 1, Trendency’s national panel of registered voters included many who ended up casting a ballot, but it also included a subset who did not. We asked these panelists many questions throughout the year, including some direct ballot tests, while most were on a myriad of other topics. For example, at various points, we asked panelists about issues that might be important to them, letting them rank each on a scale from 0-100, with 100 meaning the issue was very important to them and a 0 meaning it was not important at all. The chart below shows the average mean score (the last time a panelist answered the question before the election), rounded to the nearest whole number.

What can we learn? Well, the most obvious lesson might be that non-voters simply rate top electoral issues lower than voters. The top issue for 2024 voters (among the options offered) was protecting democracy, an issue of paramount importance to people of all political stripes, just from a different perspective. For non-voters, they ranked it a whopping 29 points lower, on average. By far, it was the biggest difference between the two cohorts.

Either due to a belief that there is little danger to democracy at the moment or due to a cynicism about how much their vote matters, non-voters placed a much higher level of importance on more tangible issues, especially the economy and inflation. On this topic, voters and their non-voting friends agreed for the most part. In fact, the economy was the only issue that non-voters indicated any strong interest in. Every other issue averaged below 40, some well below. So, if non-voters were a single-issue constituency, how did they believe they were faring economically? Well… not great.

Economic Outlook

The trendline below plots the self-perceived economic sentiment of both voters and non-voters going back to the beginning of the Biden presidency. Among 2024 voters, their average rating of their household economic situation started at around 65 points (again on a scale from 0-100), which slowly and gradually dropped to about 58. This encapsulates the main drag on the Biden and Harris candidacies; voters felt their economic situation was worsening throughout the time period, with only a slight increase nearing Election Day in 2024.

For non-voters, they began at an average of around 55 points and ended up 13 points lower at 42. Not only did their economic sentiment decrease further than that of voters, but they also showed none of the improvement during the late stages of 2024. In fact, sentiment rapidly decreased in the last few months. Also worth noting is the overall volatility in this view among non-voters compared to those who did end up casting a ballot.

In sum, non-voters were mainly a single-issue voting bloc whose perception of that issue was heading in a negative direction. Based on the horse race data in Part 1, these voters were favoring Vice President Harris as the election grew closer, but it was not enough to get them to turn out on Election Day.

What lessons can we learn from looking at the demographic breakout on economic sentiment? For one, it reinforces the uphill battle Harris was fighting with her core potential constituency. Democratic non-voters were slightly less economically satisfied than were Independent or Republican non-voters but were a whopping 22 points less satisfied than voting Democrats. The exact same discrepancy exists among voters under 50.

Harris desperately needed to avoid a 2020 voter drop-off among her base and the most vulnerable portion of this base, and those who were thinking about skipping 2024 were the most dissatisfied with her and Biden’s performance on the economy. Hard sell indeed.

But did the Harris and Biden campaigns make an effort to combat this challenge? Did the Trump campaign try to poison the well even further? Our next section takes a look at voter outreach… or lack thereof.

Campaign Contact

In some ways, this simple table below is the most telling. All of Trendency’s national panelists are registered voters. Presumably, all are known quantities to each campaign’s sophisticated voter outreach efforts (we can’t decide if that last sentence should be read as earnest or dripping with sarcasm… please decide for yourself). Nonetheless, non-voters reported a much lower contact rate than did eventual voters. To slightly defend the campaigns here, we should note the higher “I don’t know” responses among non-voters. It could easily be presumed that a portion of this response group is due to a lack of interest or less attention being paid. It’s entirely possible that voters are simply paying closer attention to politics and, therefore, would be more attuned to outreach efforts.

With that being said, the 17-point difference is dramatic enough that the campaigns should not be shielded from criticism. Looking at one of our charts from Part 1 (shown below) shows the vote likelihood trendlines over the course of 2024. While lower even at the start, non-voters gave themselves an 80% chance of voting in January. This dropped down to just below 60%. Would extra outreach from the Harris campaign have magically solved this problem? Of course not. But it certainly doesn’t help that these weaker potential voters were left to fend for themselves.

Conclusion

Putting together Parts 1 and 2, a brief snapshot of our data begins to paint a not-so-rosy picture. Eventual voters were locked in; they knew they were voting, who they were voting for, and why. Non-voters, on the other hand, were losing interest in voting throughout 2024. They weren’t hearing from the candidates as much. Their top issue, the economy and inflation, was driving down their perception of their economic well-being. Combine all this with a lower beginning vote likelihood, and it’s a recipe for voter apathy. The shame in all this was the potential for this non-voting bloc to boost Harris’s vote count in close states, as they decidedly leaned in her direction over Trump.

Water under the bridge, right? Well, not here at Trendency. We will continue to track these panelists through 2025 and beyond, looking for insights about the 2026 elections and more. Stay tuned…