A new poll finds that most people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 are economic progressives who were looking for leadership but didn’t find it.View this email in your browser [link removed]
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****JULY 21, 2025****
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****Kuttner on TAP****
**Bringing Back Nonvoters**
**A new poll finds that most people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 are economic progressives who were looking for leadership but didn’t find it.**
One of the great mysteries of recent politics is why some **19 million Americans who voted in 2020 sat out 2024** [link removed]. This was the opposite of what happened in 2018, when revulsion against Trump and a huge upsurge in organizing increased Democratic turnout and flipped 41 House seats. About 67 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 voted Democrat for the House. The surge lasted just long enough to elect Joe Biden and narrowly flip the Senate.
So why the collapse in 2024? Contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom, the explanation was not voter apathy.
**A new poll by Celinda Lake** [link removed] conducted for the group **Way to Win** [link removed] finds that a large majority of these disaffected nonvoters hold progressive views on the economy. Forty-nine percent said they would have voted for Kamala Harris, compared to just 25 percent for Donald Trump. But they were not motivated to vote for Harris because they found her views on key pocketbook issues too feeble.
These findings complement those **reported by my colleague Harold Meyerson today** [link removed]. On pocketbook issues, most Americans are economic progressives. What’s missing is compelling leadership.
Lake’s poll reached 833 Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote at all in 2024. The top reason, cited by 31 percent of such voters, was that Harris “didn’t have a strong enough plan to get the cost of living down” and failed to address “deeper issues like poverty and inequality.” Another 15 percent said she “didn’t have the leadership qualities the country needed.”
Interestingly, this was not a case of these nonvoters being tuned out of politics altogether. Fully 49 percent said they checked the news several times a day. And 75 percent said they closely followed politics. There were just underwhelmed by what the Democrats were offering.
Today, 62 percent would vote for a Democrat for Congress compared with just 19 percent for a Republican—if they voted at all.
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What leaders did these 2024 nonvoters admire? The top two in the poll were Bernie Sanders, approved by 78 percent, and AOC with 67 percent.
And these 2024 nonvoters have a split-screen view of the Democrats. In principle, said 39 percent, “They are more for the people and will fight for all Americans.” But at the same time, 24 percent said “they are weak and won’t stand up for Americans.”
When the poll asked what issues would make them more likely to vote in 2026, the top four were secure health insurance, making the rich pay their fair share of taxes while keeping taxes on working families affordable, the cost of living, and affordable housing.
In battleground states, 77 percent of 2020 Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 felt that the nation’s top problem was the top 1 percent taking too much at the expense of everyone else, but only 13 percent felt the main problems were government spending too much, out-of-control immigration, or “wokeness.”
Lake told me that Democrats in 2026 should “offer a populist economic alternative to Trump’s current economics that benefits wealthy corporations and wealthy political donors. Fight for working famiies, and offer specifics that you are willing to be accountable for.”
In one sense, the program sounds a lot like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. But a program of making life affordable for working Americans doesn’t have to be expressed in ideological terms. A classic political-science finding is that Americans tend to be **philosophical conservatives but operational liberals** [link removed].
Identifying the right issues framed by the right narrative is important, but issues by themselves don’t galvanize potential voters. That takes an exciting candidate combined with effective organizing. It wasn’t issues by themselves that got 50,000 volunteers to knock on doors for Mamdani.
But Mamdani doesn’t have a monopoly on articulating the concerns of working families in a way that motivates nonvoters to become voters. Kitchen-table economics can also work for candidates who don’t describe themselves as socialists.
**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**
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