The Sand Castle

{"leadStory":{"url":"https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-lost-low-info-voters","title":"The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore","summary":"According to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024.\nVoters who knew the least about politics were the ones most favorable to Trump in 2024.\nNot anymore; low-knowledge voters are now just as likely as high-knowledge voters to oppose his presidency.\nWe call someone "high knowledge" if they know which party controls both the House and Senate today (about 75% of 2024 voters), and "low-knowledge" if they got either one of those questions wrong (about 25% of 2024 voters).\nLow-knowledge voters are more elastic So low-knowledge voters are more upset about prices.","clusterId":"6ffb2ee8-c0ac-4d31-b6e2-5680aa72c833","leadStory":true,"snippet":"The less voters knew, the more they liked Trump in 2024. Not Anymore — Two notes: First, this is a special article with insights from Strength In Number's recent polling with Verasight. We just finished writing our February poll, and will publish the results in two weeks.","text":"Two notes: First, this is a special article with insights from Strength In Number's recent polling with Verasight. We just finished writing our February poll, and will publish the results in two weeks. (Please pray to the news gods that our questions stay relevant until then.)\n\nSecond, I'll be recording the weekly Strength In Numbers Podcast live on Substack with David Nir today (Thursday) at 2:00 PM Eastern. Subscribers can ask questions during the interactive portion of the taping, so join us via the Substack app or at the Strength In Numbers website.\n\nIn 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump's strongest supporters. One pre-election poll found Americans who didn't consume any news at all said they'd vote for him over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60% to 40%.\n\nToday, the president's support among low-knowledge voters has cratered to just 43%, according to a new analysis of data from our January Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. The share of 2024 voters who now disapprove of the president is well over 55%.\n\nAccording to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Now, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points — a 25-point shift away from the president.\n\nHigh-knowledge voters were roughly evenly split in 2024 (voting for Harris by 2 points, per self-reports in our data), and have moved against Trump at a softer rate, to -14. The two groups are compared in the following chart:\n\nThis isn't the first time I've found this pattern. In May 2025, I reported a similar result using data from YouGov on self-reported news attention. Then, Trump's approval had fallen 33 points among people who said they paid the least attention to the news — roughly twice the drop among the most attentive Americans.\n\nVoters who knew the least about politics were the ones most favorable to Trump in 2024. Not anymore; low-knowledge voters are now just as likely as high-knowledge voters to oppose his presidency. With fresh polling data, Strength In Numbers can report on other questions that distinguish these two groups. We can gain a better understanding of why they have changed their minds—and what this means for 2026.\n\nShare\n\nThis article is free to read, but it was not free to produce. I spent a couple of days crunching raw data to run these survey crosstabs, perfecting the charts, and writing, editing, and re-writing this analysis — and that's not counting the time and resources that went into the poll itself.\n\nIf you find this kind of work valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Your support is what makes it possible. Paid members also get access to all my Tuesday Deep Dives and support a growing suite of interactives at projects.gelliottmorris.com.\n\nIf a paid membership is not in your budget, the best thing you can do to support this business is to share this article across social media.\n\nBecome a paying member today\n\nI. Low-info voters are more punishing of incumbents when conditions are poor\n\nIn our poll, we asked respondents to answer two factual questions about politics today — which party controls the U.S. House and which party controls the U.S. Senate — in order to compare the attitudes of high- and low-knowledge voters. We also asked people to tell us their approval of Trump's presidency overall and for key issues, and whether they voted in 2024 (and if so, who they voted for). We call someone "high knowledge" if they know which party controls both the House and Senate today (about 75% of 2024 voters), and "low-knowledge" if they got either one of those questions wrong (about 25% of 2024 voters).\n\nBased on their 2024 voting behavior, you might expect low-knowledge voters to be more conservative across the board. However, that's not what the data show.\n\nWhen you break out Trump's approval on specific issues, the high- and low-knowledge groups look remarkably similar on almost everything. Net approval of Trump's handling of jobs and the economy (-19 vs. -21), trade (-19 vs. -22), foreign policy (-15 vs. -18), immigration (-9 vs. -9), health care (-30 vs. -27), and government funding (-20 vs. -21) barely differ between the two groups.\n\nThe one exception is on prices. Low-knowledge respondents disapprove of Trump's handling of prices and inflation by 40 percentage points in our poll, compared to -30 among high-knowledge adults. That 10-point gap is statistically significant.\n\nI can think of a few explanations for this. First, as I have discussed in this newsletter previously, low-engagement voters over the last decade have been particularly pessimistic about prices and economic mobility. They were likelier to vote for Trump in 2024, I have argued, not because they were more conservative than other voters, but because they were more anti-incumbent. Now that Trump's in power, we should expect this group to punish him more, too.\n\nSecond, demographics: The people in our poll who are most exposed to price increases are exactly the people in the low-knowledge group. Low-knowledge adults skew lower-income, younger, are less politically engaged, and are less educated. These groups spend a larger share of their income on groceries and essentials — and thus would be more likely to balk at price increases from things like tariffs and labor shortages. If your monthly grocery bill increases by $100 but you make $100,000, you might not really notice the difference. But for someone making $35,000 a year, an extra $100 a month is ~5% of their after-tax income.\n\nFinally, our survey suggests there may be a compounding effect from health care costs. In our poll, 19% of low-knowledge adults report losing coverage or facing premium increases since the enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025, compared to 11% for high-knowledge adults. Low-knowledge respondents drove Trump's victory, but are now feeling the squeeze from his policies.\n\nShare\n\nII. Low-knowledge voters are more elastic\n\nSo low-knowledge voters are more upset about prices. But that may not fully explain why they've moved twice as much against Trump as everyone else. The bigger reason is that their opinions were softer to begin with.\n\nJohn Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) is the best framework here. In his model of public opinion, people can resist political messaging only to the extent they have the context to evaluate counterarguments. High-knowledge voters have pre-existing ideological filters through which they can sort new information based on whether it affirms their existing worldview. Low-knowledge voters, on the other hand, lack those filters and absorb information less selectively, which means their opinions move more easily in whatever direction conditions push.\n\nThis shows up in our data. Among high-knowledge adults, 24% say they strongly approve of Trump's job as president, while 50% strongly disapprove. So in total, 74% of highly knowledgeable Americans have "strong" feelings about the president. Now compare that to low-knowledge adults: just 15% strongly approve of Trump and 43% strongly disapprove — a total of 58%. The "soft" opinions of low-info voters are easier to shift.\n\nShare\n\nIII. How Trump won in 2024 (and how Democrats can win in 2026)\n\nOver the long term, this all means voters who are habitually disengaged are more likely to vote based on the general conditions and direction of the country. When consumer sentiment is as low as it is now, that means incumbent parties are in danger.\n\nThis pattern explains a lot about what happened in 2024. Trump won low-knowledge voters without them knowing much about what he planned to do. They were unhappy with Biden, unhappy with prices, and voted accordingly. They weren't making an ideological commitment to Trumpism — most aren't even ideological at all. Now that conditions point the other way, Trump's in trouble. If conditions keep deteriorating, these voters will keep moving against the president.\n\nTrump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn't paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he'd do as president. Now that they are seeing the results — especially on prices — they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.\n\nIf Republicans aren't winning high-knowledge respondents because of the negative news, and they aren't winning low-knowledge respondents because of conditions... then they're not winning elections.\n\nShare\n\nRelated Articles\n\nWhat do disengaged Americans think about Trump now?\n\nMore evidence that many "moderates" are non-ideological\n\nWhat the Democrats can actually learn from the 1992 election\n\nNew poll: Trump loses ground on immigration as Democrats lead generic ballot by 8\n\nIf you're a frequent reader of Strength In Numbers, I'm confident you will get a lot of value out of a paid subscription. You'll get access to all of my analysis, including weekly Tuesday Deep Dives, and you'll be supporting independent data journalism."},"relatedStories":[{"url":"https://drudge.com/news/290034/year-into-trumps-term-voters-say-biden","title":"A Year Into Trump's Term, Voters Say Biden Was Better","summary":"I can't think of a more typical, average politician than Biden.\nI think he probably could have come back from that bad first debate if he hadn't been forced out.\nThose who advocated for that need to accept they're at least partly responsible for what ended up with.\nBiden was hands down better.\nI've wondered why some people choose to sit in Trump's bowel movements, but concluded there is no fancy reason for that.","clusterId":"6ffb2ee8-c0ac-4d31-b6e2-5680aa72c833","leadStory":false,"snippet":"Zachary Basu / Axios:\n\n\nA year into Trump's term, voters say Biden was better\n\n\n+\nDiscussion:\nRaw Story, CalMatters and Times of San Diego\n\n\n–\nDiscussion:\nNicole Charky-Chami / Raw Story: Trump racing to beat 'alarming trend' as MAGA base collapses: 'Potential wipeout'Wendy Fry / CalMatters: Kristi Noem to visit border near San Diego today as polls show declining support for Trump policiesTimes of San Diego: Kristi Noem visiting Mexican border near San Diego today","text":"I can't think of a more typical, average politician than Biden.\n\nSo of course he was better, by far. I think he probably could have come back from that bad first debate if he hadn't been forced out. Those who advocated for that need to accept they're at least partly responsible for what ended up with.\n\nBiden was hands down better. n entire universe better.\n\nPeople soil themselves by association with Trump. That only becomes more obvious.\n\nI've wondered why some people choose to sit in Trump's bowel movements, but concluded there is no fancy reason for that.\n\nThe simply enjoy the smell."},{"url":"https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/02/just-enough-information-voters","title":"Just enough information voters","summary":"But a sobering underlying issue is that Trump's most salient political skill was to mobilize extremely low-information voters and get them to vote: In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump's strongest supporters.\nThe share of 2024 voters who now disapprove of the president is well over 55%.\nAccording to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024.\nNow, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points — a 25-point shift away from the president.\nI'm also pretty skeptical that Trump's ability to get sporadic voters to the polls is going to transfer to Rubio or Vance.","clusterId":"6ffb2ee8-c0ac-4d31-b6e2-5680aa72c833","leadStory":false,"snippet":null,"text":"When an election is both as close and as catastrophic in its effects as 2024, there's a lot of counterfactuals to analyze — what mistakes did the Harris campaign make, how did the media coverage affect the campaign, should Biden have dropped out earlier. etc. And it's worth doing. But a sobering underlying issue is that Trump's most salient political skill was to mobilize extremely low-information voters and get them to vote:\n\nIn 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump's strongest supporters. One pre-election poll found Americans who didn't consume any news at all said they'd vote for him over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60%1 to 40%.\n\nWas Harris's decision to make a couple of appearances with Liz Cheney a good idea on net? I dunno. But contrary to the many confident pronouncements on Twitter, it's massively implausible that it materially affected the election, because Trump's most critical marginal voters have no idea who Liz Cheney is, let alone that she got on a stage with Harris in Ann Arbor that one time. Similarly, it was not great that the political press allowed Trump to just bury the Project 2025 story when it was hurting his campaign, but among these voters it just doesn't matter.\n\nOne thing about pure-vibes voters, though, is that there's less likely to show up in non-presidential elections. Another thing is easy come, easy go:\n\nToday, the president's support among low-knowledge voters has cratered to just 43%, according to a new analysis of data from our January Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. The share of 2024 voters who now disapprove of the president is well over 55%.\n\nAccording to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Now, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points — a 25-point shift away from the president.\n\nHigh-knowledge voters were roughly evenly split in 2024 (voting for Harris by 2 points, per self-reports in our data), and have moved against Trump at a softer rate, to -14.\n\nI'm also pretty skeptical that Trump's ability to get sporadic voters to the polls is going to transfer to Rubio or Vance."},{"url":"https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-democrats-can-crush-the-midterms-tariffs-economy-affordability-immigration-deportation-border-crime","title":"How Democrats Can Crush the Midterms","summary":"DONALD TRUMP'S APPROVAL RATING is sinking and gasping for air.\nSo the Democratic party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November.\nPresident Biden whiffed on tariffs, choosing to keep most of Trump's first-term tariffs in place, which leaves a legacy for Democrats to explain or live down.\nDemocrats should stress that diverting federal agents from crime-fighting toward grandma-snatching is making Americans less safe.\nBill Clinton's promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the '90s and cut against the Democrats' soft-on-crime image.","clusterId":"6ffb2ee8-c0ac-4d31-b6e2-5680aa72c833","leadStory":false,"snippet":null,"text":"DONALD TRUMP'S APPROVAL RATING is sinking and gasping for air. His average net approval stands at -13.7, which is lower than Joe Biden's was at this point in his term. Meanwhile, the share of Americans who strongly disapprove of the president broke 46 percent for the first time ever. This matters beyond cosmic justice: The president's approval rating is the best predictor of midterm election outcomes. When it falls below 50 percent, his party tends to lose seats, as in the 1982, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018 elections. By contrast, when presidents enjoy approval above 50 percent, as in 2002 and 1998, the president's party can actually gain seats in an off-year election.\n\nSo the Democratic party, written off as dead by some a few months ago, stands poised for victory in November.\n\nThat's good—but not good enough. The stakes are so high that a win isn't sufficient to meet the moment. We need a crushing repudiation of this fascistic horror show.\n\nIf I were designing a Democratic party to please former Republicans like me, it probably wouldn't be able to hold on to large chunks of its base, so what follows is not my personal fantasy political agenda, but instead some practical suggestions about framing on a few issues that would be both popular with independent voters and acceptable to traditional Democrats.\n\nThe easiest issue, perhaps surprisingly, is immigration. Since 2024, Democrats have been snake-bit on the subject, afraid that their instinctive pro-immigrant positions were unpopular enough to lead voters to select a snarling villain vowing mass deportations. They fell silent for a while and still seem unsure how best to position themselves. They can exhale. What the polls over the past year suggest is that most Americans are not white-supremacist goons like Stephen Miller, ready to trash the Constitution in the name of purifying the Volk.\n\nInstead, voters actually believed (naïve at best, I know) that Trump would only deport "the worst of the worst." Many a focus group participant has lamented that they thought Trump was only about deporting criminals. As they watched the inhuman treatment of gardeners, veterans, children, and American-citizen protesters, they soured fast. Following the shooting of Alex Pretti, fully 60 percent of respondents told NBC they disapproved of Trump's immigration policies, 49 percent strongly so. Asked who deserved most of the blame for clashes and unrest in Minnesota cities, 57 percent cited the Trump administration versus 19 percent who named protesters. Asked whether ICE should be maintained in its current form, abolished, or reformed, 72 percent chose abolish (29) or reform (43). That is as close to national recoil as we are going to get in an era when so much of the GOP is MAGAfied.\n\nOther surveys have found that even Republican voters have relatively warm feelings toward legal immigrants—71 percent of 2024 Trump voters had a positive view of legal immigrants, compared with 72 percent of all voters.\n\nIf Democrats present themselves as opposing the brutal tactics of ICE and CBP and favoring firm border controls, they should find themselves in the sweet spot. Messages like Billie Eilish's "No one is illegal on stolen land" are unhelpful. This is the moment for Democrats to express their idealism about America as a haven for the oppressed and a melting pot—or salad bowl or potpourri plate or whatever—for people of all races, creeds, and countries of origin. By all means, get angry about the savagery; stress that law and order means that first and foremost the state cannot be the lawbreaker. But also add that borders are not notional and chaos cannot be permitted to prevail along the Rio Grande.\n\nShare\n\nTHE OTHER BIG ISSUE on voters' minds is inflation, or in Democratic parlance, "affordability." The reality is that politicians cannot actually bring prices down, as Trump promised to do in 2024, except by crashing the economy. Still, some voters presumably believed him (perhaps they overlap with those who thought he would only deport criminals)—but in any case they are disillusioned now. Some Democrats may be tempted to run on taxing the rich to pay for health care or rental assistance or other expenses of daily life. This is a comfortable old shoe for Democrats, but as a political strategy it hasn't been terribly successful. Middle-class voters often fear that they will be labeled as rich. Besides, taxing the rich will not bring down prices, as the experience of high-tax states like California, New Jersey, and New York demonstrate.\n\nOn the other hand, voters have already concluded that tariffs are making life more expensive. The issue is a layup—if Democrats can get out of their own way. Nearly 60 percent of Americans blame Trump for rising prices, and 65 percent disapprove of his tariffs. Fifty-nine percent of independent voters say the tariffs have hurt the economy and their personal finances. Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs. Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.\n\nPresident Biden whiffed on tariffs, choosing to keep most of Trump's first-term tariffs in place, which leaves a legacy for Democrats to explain or live down. And the progressive wing of the party represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has long favored tariffs as a way to protect American workers from competition from low-wage nations. This muddies the waters. Democrats can head into the midterms saying they're for "targeted tariffs" and in opposition to Trump's chaotic tariffs, and maybe that will be effective, but wouldn't a full-throated repudiation of the international trade war be cleaner?\n\nDemocrats can run as the party of competition, prosperity, and global alliances. Above all, cutting tariffs is one of the only levers governments can pull that will actually reduce prices, and since price sensitivity is very much on voters' minds, does it make sense to temper that message at all? Some Democrats have already adapted. All House Democrats voted in favor of a resolution that would end the national emergency excuse for tariffs, and three Republicans joined them. This is the moment. Tariffs bad—full stop.\n\nFINALLY, A VULNERABILITY that Democrats must overcome is seeming soft on crime. Here again the Trump administration has handed them a golden opportunity. MAGA is so fixated on ethnic cleansing that it is pulling Justice Department officials off crime-fighting to pursue immigration cases. A memo from then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed officers who had been working on transnational organized crime, money laundering, and major drug trafficking networks to focus instead on assisting ICE. Ditto for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces. In fact, roughly 25 percent of FBI agents (and 40 percent in larger field offices) have been diverted from fighting financial crimes, public corruption, cybercrime, and complex corporate investigations and pulled into immigration enforcement. Most maddening are the thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents who've been pulled from investigations of child sex abuse to assist with deportations—as if the administration needed more ways of signaling that it's okay with child sex trafficking.\n\nDemocrats should stress that diverting federal agents from crime-fighting toward grandma-snatching is making Americans less safe. The funds appropriated for ICE would be far better deployed to local police departments. Bill Clinton's promise to hire 100,000 police officers was very popular in the '90s and cut against the Democrats' soft-on-crime image. The slogans write themselves: More Cops, Less ICE.\n\nThe voters are the last redoubt in the fight to reclaim American democracy and decency, and the Democratic party, the world's oldest political party since the advent of universal suffrage, is the only entity that can carry the burden. If they can win a resounding victory in the House and Senate in nine months, there is hope for us."}]}