Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats convinced frequent voters and highly engaged voters to stick with them in the 2024 presidential election.
Their problem: They lost with most everyone else.
According to the final NBC News poll of the 2024 race, 76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. The poll showed Harris winning among that group by 5 points over Donald Trump, 52%-47%.
But among the remaining quarter of voters who said they don’t follow politics closely, Trump was ahead by a much great margin — 14 points, 54%-40%.
These less-engaged voters were disproportionately younger, more Republican-leaning and less likely to have college degrees — all groups of voters the NBC News Exit Poll showed Democrats struggling with in the election results earlier this month, especially compared to past presidential races.
After their defeat in 2024, Democratic strategists tell NBC News that the party must do a better job communicating with these less-engaged voters and prevent itself from getting trapped in a bubble.
“One of the main takeaways from this cycle is that the Democratic Party has a lot of work to do on how we’re reaching voters,” Democratic strategist Christina Freundlich said. “We lost the persuasion game.”
Steve Schale, a veteran Florida-based Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and for a pro-Joe Biden super PAC in the 2020 campaign, takes the criticism of his party even further.
“We don’t have authentic messengers,” he said. “We avoid the communication channels where many of these voters get their information.
“And, fair or unfair, our brand among many of these voters is defined by the most extreme voices in our party,” Schale continued, echoing a point recently made by Sen. John Fetterman and others.
‘We simply stopped communicating to many voters’
Democrats overperforming with highly engaged voters — but struggling with less-engaged voters — reflects America’s political realignment over the past decade, as Democrats have made gains among college-educated and more frequent voters, while Republicans have won over more working-class and less-frequent voters.
It’s a dynamic that helps explain Democratic success in recent special elections and the 2022 midterms as well as why Trump and the GOP did better in the higher-turnout 2024 presidential election.
Media consumption also underscores the political split between highly engaged voters and less-engaged ones. In an NBC News poll in April — when President Joe Biden was still in the race — Democrats overperformed among voters who get their political news from newspapers and national TV networks.
But they struggled among voters who got their news from places like YouTube and Google.
And that April poll showed Biden trailing Trump by nearly 30 points among voters who said they don’t follow political news.
The most recent NBC News poll, from November, asked a different question: Do you listen to podcasts to get news and information?
Almost half of voters — 42% — said yes, and Trump led Harris by double digits among these podcast listeners, 57%-42%.
Schale, the Democratic strategist from Florida, argues that Democrats “simply stopped communicating” with huge swaths of voters.
“Data analytics tries to tell us things like where it is efficient or not to spend time or money, and we score voters with numbers to help maximize efficiency,” he said. “The problem is we simply stopped communicating to many voters because they didn’t fit the model of how we got to a win.”
“Guess what?” Schale continued. “It’s led us to play in fewer states and talk to fewer voters. So for lower-information voters, they are relying on their own life and their perception of the brands of the parties.”
Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, a veteran of state and national campaigns, says it would be a mistake for his party to try to win over less-engaged voters with more information.
“The wrong solution for Democrats is to think that low-information voters could be persuaded by clogging them with more information,” he said. “The right solution is to be clear and focused on what we’re communicating.”
“Democrats have gotten into a habit with messages and language that makes it harder for people to follow,” Ferguson added. “You can have a Ph.D., but you don’t need to communicate it in a way where only Ph.D.s can understand what you’re saying.”
‘You don’t need to pick up a paper for that’: Voters felt nation was on wrong track
But Republican strategist Doug Heye believes discussing the split between highly engaged voters and less-engaged voters misses the mark.
In the 2024 election, enough voters believed prices are too high and that the country is on the wrong track to compel change, he explained.
“They don’t need the media to tell them prices are too high,” Heye said. “Live a normal American life and you’ll probably think we’re on the wrong track. You don’t need to pick up a paper for that.”
“Whatever weird rabbit holes Trump would go down at events — which those voters weren’t paying attention to anyway — the overarching theme of his campaign was we are on the wrong track,” he added. “Harris seemed to either not want to talk about that or struggled with how to.”
