Joe Perez is exactly the type of voter President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are fighting over: A 22-year-old Hispanic man in Las Vegas who grew up leaning Republican, he also supports abortion rights and was turned off by the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021.
But Perez — unenthusiastic about a Biden-Trump rematch, overwhelmed by the news and disillusioned by politics — is tuning out.
“If you ask me right now what’s going on with, like, the presidential race, or the situation in Gaza or Ukraine or whatever, I don’t think I can answer,” said Perez, who supported Trump in 2020 and is intrigued by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now. “I’m not trying to follow that anymore.”
Instead, said Perez, a valet who hopes to become a firefighter, “I’m just going to have to roll with the punches, because I don’t think I’m going to make a difference.”
In fact, people like him could be quite important.
Politically disengaged Americans are emerging as one of the most unpredictable, complex and potentially influential groups of voters in the 2024 race. They are fueling Trump’s current polling leads but in many cases hail from traditionally Democratic communities, giving Biden a chance to win some of them back — if he can get their attention.
No shortage of events could jolt alienated voters over the next five months, starting with a verdict in the first criminal trial of a former president in American history, which could arrive this week. Even though many of these people are historically infrequent voters, those who do cast ballots could make the difference in an inevitably close race.
But reaching them is a problem. Campaigns up and down the ballot are operating in an ever-more-fragmented media landscape where misinformation thrives — spread especially by Trump and his allies — and basic facts are often ignored, disputed or filtered through a partisan lens.
“People have really separated into their own information cul-de-sacs,” said former Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. “It’s harder now to reach people than it was in previous elections because of that disaggregated or decentralized information network.”
‘When your team’s losing, you don’t read the sports page’
In a presidential election in which more than 80% of voters, according to a Pew Research Center survey, say they wish one or both major candidates were not running, some are opting out of straight-ahead political news entirely.
That is evident in polling about current events.
Recent New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer surveys found that nearly 20% of voters in battleground states said Biden was responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion, even though it was Trump’s choices for the Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
Almost half of the country believes the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high, a Harris poll conducted for The Guardian found, even though it is near a 50-year low.
And in a recent Politico-Morning Consult poll, voters were divided over who had done more to “promote infrastructure improvements and job creation.” Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law, while Trump repeatedly failed to advance the issue.
“When your team’s losing, you don’t read the sports page after the game,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. “You have a big swath of the country that just thinks they’re losing when it comes to politics, and so the way to deal with that is to just not pay attention.”
Low-information voters are hardly a new phenomenon: Landmark studies dating back nearly 80 years have found that the public is often uninformed on key issues.
And many Americans are indeed following this contest.
A Gallup survey released this month showed that 71% said they had given “quite a lot” of thought to the upcoming presidential election, in keeping with findings around this time in 2020 and 2008.
‘People out here are struggling’
Voters who are paying less attention, pollsters say, tend to be younger or more working-class, and are more likely to engage late in the race, if they do at all.
“It’s not that politics is unimportant to them, but they have other priorities,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “Turning out the low-information voters who favor your candidate is one of the major tasks of political consultants.”
An NBC News poll conducted last month found that 15% of voters surveyed said they did not follow political news closely. Among those voters, Trump had an edge of 26 percentage points over Biden.
By contrast, among voters who primarily consume news through newspapers, national network and cable news — 54% of those surveyed — Biden was up by 11 points.
Trump’s commanding lead among the politically disengaged underscores how hard it may be for Biden to translate his record and vision into a galvanizing and attention-grabbing message for these voters, some of whom are firmly committed to Trump.
But some Democrats also see an opportunity.
Pointing to subjects like Trump’s record on abortion rights or Biden’s work to lower the cost of insulin for older people, he added: “That doesn’t take a lot of explaining. It takes focusing people, it takes jolting them, but these are not complex points to get across.”
Trump also remains unpopular, and Democrats are betting that he will grow weaker as more voters see reminders of what they disliked about him.
Republicans, however, note that most Americans drew conclusions about Trump and Biden years ago — and that many voters are not following the former president’s provocations closely.
“Trump, I think he gets up there and talks a lot of stuff,” said Carla Williams, 50, of Detroit.
But Williams, who said she was often too busy with her work at an auto factory and a hotel to follow the news closely, said she was considering him anyway. She faulted Biden, whom she said she supported in 2020, for the high cost of living.
“People out here are struggling,” she said. “Everything is expensive.”
‘The only night where you’re not yelling at each other about the election’
Many Americans now consume political news through social media, and TikTok’s emergence has greatly accelerated that trend.
By 2023, almost one-third of people aged 18 to 29 were regularly getting news from TikTok, a hub for liberal causes that has also had an uptick of pro-Trump influencers since the last election.
The nature of social media — fast-moving and sometimes driven by unreliable narrators or bad actors — means that large audiences are more vulnerable to misinformation.
“I don’t really dig into it very much,” said Dean Citroni, 30, of Newnan, Georgia, who works in TV and film production and said he predominantly got political news from Facebook or TikTok. Citroni, who said he would “probably” lean toward Trump over Biden but was interested in Kennedy, added, “Somebody posts a reel of it, I’m probably looking at it, going: ‘Huh! Can’t believe that!’”
And even as young voters get much of their information from individualized social media feeds, while cable news often reinforces partisan instincts, Americans have fewer cultural connections to unite them.
The era of major-network, prime-time TV hits has given way to pay-walled streaming services. Music has moved into personalized, app-driven experiences. Instagram and TikTok algorithms pelt people with unending, individualized streams of content.
And Americans’ shared vocabulary — and shared set of facts — is shrinking.
“It used to be that you could reach practically every voter through conventional electronic media, radio and television,” said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich. Now, he said: “You can’t really even just reach them through the more popular social media platforms. The splintering of information, the way people consume information, it’s much more difficult.”
Kal Penn, an actor who worked in the Obama administration, said he challenged himself to bridge the divide through humor.
“I love making something that your crazy uncle can watch with you on Thanksgiving,” he said. “And it’s like the only night where you’re not yelling at each other about the election.”
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