Low-turnout voters favor Trump over Biden by 14 points—good for Trump so long as they get out and vote: NYT polls

A new report from the New York Times covering voter patterns over a year’s worth of polling has revealed that if everyone in the US got out and voted come November, Trump would win the presidency.

The outlet looked at results from New York Times/Siena College polls over the past year, organizing voters by most engaged to least engaged. The most engaged voters, those who voted in the 2022 primaries, backed Biden over Trump 49 to 44 percent. Biden’s lead slips among those who voted in the 2022 midterms but not the primaries, with 46 percent supporting Biden and 45 percent supporting Trump.

Trump pulls into the lead among voters who voted in the 2020 presidential election but not in the primaries or midterms, the second to least engaged group, with 44 percent supporting Trump and 42 percent supporting Biden. Among the least engaged group of voters, those with no voting history, Trump saw a double-digit lead over Biden, with 49 percent saying they support Trump and 35 percent saying they support Biden.

As the Times reports, "If everyone voted, it is Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, who would benefit," something "unimaginable for a Republican as recently as a few years ago," with the average of these four groups revealing that 46 percent would cast their ballot for Trump while 44 percent would vote for Biden.

Many low-turnout voters, including those who consider themselves to be Democrats, are now saying that they will back Trump. Trump has also seen gains in young and non-white voters, a voting block that helped elect Biden in 2020. 

The outlet noted that Democrats in the Obama era depended on young and non-white voters coming to the polls to cinch a win. This new dynamic has shown that voters "whom Democrats took for granted are now considered 'persuasion' targets, as if they were traditional swing voters."

New voter registrations across the country have favored Republicans, and in Pennsylvania, the state’s automatic voter registration has seen Democrats trail Republicans by six points in new registrants.

"On paper, many of the disengaged voters behind Mr. Biden’s weakness look as if they should be loyal Democrats," the New York Times wrote, noting that many of these voters are registered as Democrats, support abortion, and are form Democratic-leaning constituencies, among other things. 

"But their attitudes are more complicated. They are much more likely to say the economy is “poor” than Democratic primary voters, and they’re much likelier to disapprove of Mr. Biden’s job performance. They want fundamental changes to America, not merely a promised return to normalcy."