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If you, like a lot of us, spend your days confronting each fresh horror this administration manufactures and marveling, “How the fuck did Americans let this happen again?” —well, we can help you with the “how” part, at least. Data from the 2024 voter file is finally coming in, and a picture of the American electorate that ushered in a second Donald Trump term is starting to emerge.
There are two categories of voters whose decisions in November helped bring about our present and ongoing nightmare: swing voters who flipped from Joe Biden to Trump, and 2020 Biden voters who sat the last election out entirely. The progressive donor network Way to Win analyzed data from the Democratic data firm Catalist and worked with pollster Lake Research Partners in an effort to get a better handle on the second group — Biden voters in battleground states who opted out in 2024 — the results of which the group has shared exclusively with Rolling Stone.
Across the four Sunbelt battleground states — Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina — there were at least 937,200 Democratic voters who turned out in 2020, but didn’t show up for Vice President Kamala Harris four years later. That’s a meaningful drop, and one that was large enough on its own to swing the election: Trump only won those states by a combined 531,539 votes.
Analysis of Catalist data showed that Democrats (both registered and modeled) sat out of the 2024 election at a higher rate than their Republican counterparts. Across every state and almost every demographic group analyzed, Democrats’ vote share declined compared to 2020 — and left-leaning voters removing themselves from the voting pool meant that the electorate was redder than it would have been had they participated.
Some pundits and Democratic operatives have interpreted the election results as an emphatic endorsement for Trump’s message. But in focus groups, these voters paint a very different picture.
“If you listen to them you really understand that, on the whole, these voters didn’t skip voting because they viewed Kamala as too liberal or too woke, and the vast majority of them, if they had shown up, would not have voted for Trump. They are not swinging to the right, it’s more that the Democrats lost them,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder of Way to Win explains. “They’re deeply disappointed with the Democratic Party. They’re skeptical of government. They’re skeptical of politics in general — but they are gettable. They’re persuadable.”
The focus groups included Biden voters who didn’t vote in 2024 across those four Sunbelt states as well the same voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, with a particular emphasis on groups that constituted the Democrats’ largest losses in 2024: voters of all races and genders under 35, Latino men and women under 65, and Black men under 65.
The data collected in these groups helps dispel some of the misconceptions people have about why those voters stayed home in November. For one thing, they are not politically apathetic —the voters interviewed reported they were engaged with politics, but unhappy with their choices and unconvinced that either candidate could make a positive change in their lives. But they are open to persuasion — one woman shared a story about attending Harris rally, which she left early after Harris failed to address the issues that mattered most to her.
Nonvoters had other gripes with the Harris-Walz campaign too: “A surprisingly common frame was that the campaign ‘wasn’t serious,’ with many citing Harris’ celebrity endorsements and event appearances and framing them negatively.” Voters across groups indicated a belief that Democrats were focused on the “wrong things,” with Black men in particular expressing their feeling “that Dems cared more about immigrants, trans people, and waging war in Ukraine and Gaza than domestic priorities or their daily economic realities.” (Young voters, on the other hand, took issue with Harris’ perceived silence on Gaza, with a majority of voters in that focus group saying her unwillingness to take a stand affected their decision not to vote.)
It’s also worth noting that the word “woke” didn’t come up in any of the focus groups, but there was an overwhelming feeling expressed across all of the groups that the Democratic Party is “weak,” that Democrats “need to grow a backbone,” and “stand up, and not just talk” — and that the party, and its candidates,are not concerned enough with the realities of voters’ day-to-day lives.
“It’s not a question of left versus center, which is the question that has dominated the discourse. It really is a question of, ‘Are you going to fight for me, or are you going to fold and capitulate?’ And, the economic element of: ‘Are you for the oligarchs and the status quo? Or are you for disrupting these systems that have not worked for me, and helping me to get a better life?’” Ancona says. “That is the crux.”
There was a note of hope: The same voters who sat out last November have been horrified by what they’ve watched Trump and Elon Musk do since January — and most of the focus group participants reported that they are feeling strongly motivated to vote in 2026. The groups also offer some insight into what kind of leader might be able to draw these voters back to the Democrat party. Hint: That person is more in the mold of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who infuriated the Democratic base when he helped advance the GOP’s partisan spending bill.
“There’s such a disgust for the business-as-usual mentality, and I think it really sticks with people,” Ancona says. “When they see what’s happening, they feel what’s happening, and they just don’t understand why some of the Democrats they see seem so stuck in sort of civility politics — they’re just going along with it. These voters are like: This isn’t a game. My life sucks! Fix this stuff!”
