Disengaged voters are emerging as a critical and potentially decisive group in the 2024 presidential race. So who are these people? Disengaged voters can be thought of as people who are registered to vote but do not follow politics closely. Demographically, disengaged voters more often are younger, more often are women, and are less likely to have a college degree than politically engaged voters. Although for most of the last decade these voters have been more supportive of Donald Trump, net support among disengaged voters for Joe Biden relative to Trump has increased 16 percentage points since Trump’s felony conviction.
Who are disengaged voters?
Although Americans have been characterized as uniquely engaged in civics and political society, this characterization does not apply to all voters. Politically disengaged voters — often called low information voters — can be thought of as people who might vote but do not follow politics closely and may have little civic knowledge.
So who counts as a disengaged voter? It can be a fuzzy concept, and there is no consensus on exactly how to define it. First, disengaged voters are often limited to those who say they are registered to vote, though some polling organizations have more complex ways of determining whether or not someone is likely to vote. When talking about disengagement, or having low information, academics often use brief tests of political knowledge, such as asking whether people know the length of a U.S. senator’s term. Pollsters sometimes use political knowledge tests, but more often they simply ask how much people report following political news. For reference, about 20% of registered voters say they pay attention to politics "only now and then" or "hardly at all," while the rest say they follow politics at least some of the time. But are self-reports of following political news the same as testing political knowledge? While not exactly the same, they may be effectively interchangeable for defining disengaged voters. That is, people who follow politics less will most likely have lower political knowledge, and vice versa.
To explore how similar these measures of political engagement are, a recent YouGov survey tested respondents’ political knowledge and also asked them how much they pay attention to politics in general and to the 2024 election specifically. Respondents were asked 23 questions about politics in general and the 2024 presidential election, including who the Democratic and Republican candidates for president are, which political party controls the House of Representatives and which controls the Senate, which party generally supports various policies, whether the national political conventions have happened yet, and whether each presidential candidate is facing legal issues such as being convicted of a crime.
If we think of disengaged voters as those who do not follow politics and lack political knowledge, then people who say they have lower political engagement should score lower, on average, on political knowledge tests. Results support this: Registered voters who say they follow political news only now and then or hardly at all score an average of 54% on the political knowledge test, almost 20 points lower than the average score for all registered voters (72%). Similarly, those who are paying little attention to the 2024 election score 56%. The largest percentage of registered voters know the date of the next U.S. election, with 95% correctly identifying it as this year. The fewest voters — 40% — knew that at the time of the poll, the Democratic vice presidential candidate had been officially announced (and 88% of them knew it was Kamala Harris).
Political knowledge scores, attention to political news in general, and attention to the 2024 election each correlate with each other at a level of above r = 0.5, meaning that people who pay more attention to politics are more likely to score highly on political knowledge tests and vice versa. Essentially, these measures increase together, indicating that they are closely related aspects of political engagement. Despite sometimes being conflated with low education, the extent to which one follows political news is a better predictor of political knowledge test scores than education level is, aligning with previous research finding that disengaged or low information voters are not merely those with less education.
Because registered voters who report paying less attention to politics do not score nearly as well on political knowledge questions as those who pay more attention, it probably is acceptable to define disengaged voters using either political knowledge scores or self-reported attention to politics. The latter has the advantage of requiring fewer questions that don't need to change as the political environment does. In the rest of this article, we define disengaged voters as those who say they are registered to vote and say that they pay attention to politics only now and then or hardly at all.
How do engaged voters and disengaged voters differ?
Disengaged voters make up about 20% of registered voters; engaged voters make up the other 80%. Disengaged voters exhibit distinct demographic characteristics. Data from Economist / YouGov polls collected over the past year and a half shows that this group is on average younger, more likely to be women, more likely to be Black or Hispanic, less educated, and have a lower household income than the average engaged American voter.
Disengaged voters are more likely to believe the country is out of control and on the wrong track. The greatest share of them are most concerned about prices and inflation and they are more likely to think the economy is getting worse than engaged voters are. Disengaged voters more often say they are politically independent than engaged voters do and are likelier to have less extreme views of politicians. But they also are generally less favorable toward both Biden and Trump. This deficit is more stark for Biden, with a nearly 20-percentage-point deficit between unfavorable and favorable for Biden (in contrast to a 9-point deficit among engaged voters). Politically disengaged voters are less likely to have participated in the 2024 primary and are much less enthusiastic about voting in the upcoming election. Whereas 89% of engaged voters say that they “definitely will vote” in the presidential election in 2024, only 65% of disengaged voters say the same. Disengaged voters also are less decided about who they will vote for in 2024, if they choose to vote at all.
Disengaged voters also consume different kinds of media than engaged voters do. They are less likely than engaged voters to trust the news media and less likely to consume news from nearly every source. The two exceptions are social media and friends, family, and acquaintances; each group of voters are about equally likely to get news from both of these sources.
Who disengaged voters prefer in the 2024 election
Despite being less likely to vote than engaged voters, disengaged voters may be crucial to the 2024 election. Politically disengaged voters are largely credited as a key bloc of Trump’s political support and were found to be critical in his 2016 election win. Trump’s advantage with disengaged voters has persisted, though modestly. Over the past year and a half, engaged voters, and registered voters as a whole, have been effectively tied in their intent to support Biden or Trump in the 2024 election. Among disengaged voters, however, 36% on average have said they support Biden over the past year and a half, whereas 40% of them have supported Trump. Data from The Economist / YouGov Poll show that since April 2023, support among the disengaged is more volatile than that of other registered voters, raising the questions of whether and which news events will influence them.
Disengaged voters have shifted toward Biden since the Trump verdict
Disengaged voters are aware of Trump’s legal troubles, particularly the general outline of news about his recent conviction on 34 felony charges related to falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with an adult film actress. Although they are less aware of Trump’s many specific indictments, they are no more likely than engaged voters to hold several false beliefs about indictments of Trump: that he has not been indicted for taking classified documents, conspiring to overturn the election, or attempting to obstruct the certification of the election. According to a Yahoo! News/YouGov survey conducted a few days after the conviction, 79% of disengaged voters correctly said that Trump has been found guilty in the hush money case, compared to 88% of engaged voters.
Since Trump’s guilty verdict, net intent among disengaged voters to vote for Biden over Trump has increased by 16 points, essentially erasing Trump’s advantage among the politically disengaged. Support for Biden relative to Trump already was near a campaign low point immediately prior to the conviction. So it is unclear whether the verdict increased support for Biden over Trump among the politically disengaged, or if this is merely a reversion to the average for this group of voters that is already volatile. Despite a drop in support for Biden among engaged voters after the June 27 presidential debate, net support for Biden over Trump has continued to increase among the politically disengaged. It has reached -1, a virtual tie between Biden and Trump and 3 points above the average of -4 since April 2023.
Related:
- How much do Americans know about the 2024 presidential election?
- Snap poll: 50% of Americans approve of Trump's hush-money conviction
— Carl Bialik and Eli McKown-Dawson contributed to this article
Methodology:
- The political knowledge test poll was conducted online on April 30 - May 2, 2024 among 1,125 U.S. adult citizens. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel using sample matching. A random sample (stratified by gender, age, race, education, geographic region, and voter registration) was selected from the 2019 American Community Survey. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to November 1, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (33% Democratic, 31% Republican). The margin of error for the overall sample is approximately 3.5%.
- The Yahoo! News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,854 U.S. adults interviewed online from June 3 to 6, 2024. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to November 1, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (33% Democratic, 31% Republican). The margin of error is approximately 3%.
- The most recent The Economist / YouGov poll was conducted among 1,599 U.S. adult citizens from June 30 - July 2, 2024. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of U.S. adult citizens. A random sample (stratified by gender, age, race, education, geographic region, and voter registration) was selected from the 2019 American Community Survey. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to November 1, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (33% Democratic, 31% Republican). The margin of error is approximately 3%.
