On the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2026, most Americans will not vote. In the coverage of the upcoming election, between now and then, that fact will not garner many mentions. Nor will it garner many mentions in the after-the-fact reporting once the election has come and gone, or in the after-action assessments produced by whichever of the two major parties loses the midterms. It’s a glaring political blindspot in a system where elections are determined every bit as much by who stays home as by who turns out.
But this is not a meditation on voter registration drives or the reallocation of political capital from turnout to activation. This is an attempt to do something which is almost never done by campaigns or the political press: to understand the nonvoter. To examine, without judgement, why they have chosen not to vote, and to ascertain whether anything can change that behavior.
Thankfully, despite the political class’s dedication to ignoring their existence, nonvoters have attracted the attention of pollsters, researchers, and social scientists in adequate numbers over the years to produce a body of research which can provide answers.
In the 2022 midterm elections, nationwide turnout among the voting-eligible population (VEP) was just 46%, nevertheless making it the second-highest midterm turnout since 1970. The only midterm election which saw higher turnout between 1970 and 2022 was 2018, when VEP turnout just barely cracked 50%. There’s a broad understanding in American political discourse that midterms see lower turnout than presidential election years, but voting in presidential elections is not all that popular either. Average VEP turnout in presidential election years over the last century is just 57%, and that stat is skewed upwards by higher than average turnout in both 2020 and 2024.
All that to say, voting is something done by only slightly over half of the eligible population, and even then only sometimes.
What I want to understand is why?
In my years of obsessing over this question, the best resource I have encountered was a 2020 report by the Knight Foundation, called The 100 Million Project: The Untold Story of American Nonvoters. While organizations like Pew and Gallup have done extensive work on nonvoters over the years, that work has often been in the context of specific elections, rarely taking a more holistic look at the subject. With the 100 Million Project, the Knight Foundation conducted extensive research to produce an exhaustive taxonomy of nonvoters (for the purposes of the study, the Knight Foundation counted as nonvoters anyone who is eligible and/or registered to vote, but has not voted in more than one of the last six presidential or midterm elections). The research underpinning the project is now six years old, and a lot has happened in those six years, but the report’s findings hold up well. On a quest to understand nonvoters, few resources provide as many answers.
One of the most important takeaways from the 100 Million Project, in my view, is that “nonvoters” is not actually a particularly helpful category. After having more than 12,000 participants answer surveys, Knight Foundation researchers categorized their responses into six distinct types. In other words, there’s not one kind of nonvoter, there are at least six. They care about different things, they have different commonalities, and they non-vote for different reasons.
They call these six types: Established Progressives, Traditional Conservatives, Modern Moderates, the Indifferent Average, Unattached Apoliticals, and Underemployed Unsures. These six types fall into two broader categories: Plugged-In and Disconnected.
The “Plugged-In” types are Established Progressives, Traditional Conservatives, and Modern Moderates – and while they all share the “plugged-in” distinction of being interested, informed, and engaged, that’s roughly where the similarities stop. Established Progressives (21% of nonvoters), according to Knight, are the leftmost among nonvoters, and the most likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates when they do vote. They tend to have high educational attainment, high income, and skew slightly older. Established Progressives report dissatisfaction with candidates as the most common reason for nonvoting.
Traditional Conservatives (17% of nonvoters) are also dissatisfied with candidates, but otherwise incredibly different. They are the most Republican-leaning cohort of nonvoters, as well as the oldest, least diverse, and most male-dominated. Modern Moderates (20% of nonvoters), meanwhile, are identified by the Knight Foundation as “left-leaning moderates working hard as they approach middle age.” They are fairly well educated, slightly younger than the average nonvoter, and most likely to show a preference for Democratic candidates when they do vote. But they are also only moderately interested in politics, and the cohort most likely to say that voting is difficult.
Then there are the “Disconnected” types: the Indifferent Average, Unattached Apoliticals, and Underemployed Unsures. These, according to the report, are “significantly more uninterested in and disengaged from politics and civic participation” than the plugged-in types. And, despite the disconnected types more neatly aligning with the traditional stereotype of nonvoters as lazy, uninformed, or both, they represent a significantly smaller portion of the non-electorate than the plugged-in types: combined, the three disconnected types identified by Knight only account for about 42% of nonvoters.
The Indifferent Average (17% of nonvoters), the report says, are those with “a mix of political viewpoints” who are “united by members’ lack of interest in news or following political current affairs.” They are mostly middle-income women. Unattached Apoliticals (17% of nonvoters), on the other hand, are the youngest cohort of nonvoters and are distinguished by a lack of attachment to either major party. Lastly, the Underemployed Unsures (8.5% of nonvoters) are distinguished by their lack of political opinion and very low interest in politics. 60% of them are not registered to vote. The disconnected types are also where we find some of the Americans most likely to be systemically disadvantaged from voting by things like working multiple jobs, restrictions on early voting, and discriminatory practices.
The reason I think it’s worth going through those categories at length is because they shed more light on nonvoters than the word “nonvoter” ever could. When nonvoters are actually, rarely, discussed in the political press, they are often treated as a monolith: Those Who Do Not Vote. What the Knight Foundation’s research shows, though, is that, far from being monolithic, nonvoters are several distinct cohorts with distinct identities and interests. Broadly speaking, some of them don’t vote because they don’t care, and some of them don’t vote because they don’t like the options.
One of those problems can be addressed.
The Knight Foundation report gets close to answering the question I posed up top: why? Why don’t nonvoters vote? According to the foundation’s major nationwide survey, the three top answers given to that specific question were that they didn’t like the candidates (17%), they didn’t know the candidates or issues (13%), or they didn’t feel that their vote matters (12%).
Those findings track neatly with survey findings from other organizations. In 2017, Pew studied registered voters who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election. 25% of them said they did not like the candidates or campaign issues, and 15% said they felt their votes would not make a difference.
When politicians and the political press occasionally spare some seconds to remember that tens of millions of eligible voters choose to stay home every election, these are not the reasons they bring up. The talking points on nonvoters tend to be that they are lazy or uneducated. What the research shows us, though, is that most nonvoters, by about a 60-40 margin, are neither lazy nor uneducated. In fact, the largest cohorts of nonvoters identified by the Knight Foundation were most likely to be highly educated and fully employed. Educated, employed, eligible voters are staying home by the tens of millions because they don’t like what’s on offer.
When I think about nonvoters, one of the great blindspots in American political discourse, it’s never long before I think of another one of those blindspots: both major parties are wildly unpopular. If you watch cable news or horse race-style elections coverage, it’s easy to leave with the impression that the nation is about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, squabbling over a few percentage points in the middle. But that’s not the case at all.
A healthy majority of Americans disapprove of the country’s major political parties. Last month, Pew found that 59% of American adults have a negative view of the Democratic Party, and that 58% of American adults have a negative view of the Republican Party. To put that in perspective, 58% of Americans also currently disapprove of Donald Trump. Here in Colorado, more than 52% of voters are unaffiliated with any party.
There is broad discontentment with the American political system, and I am by no means immune to it. Every two years, I swallow my bile and vote for people I wouldn’t break bread with, because that’s how the system works. It should come as no surprise that some people just get sick of swallowing the bile. In our system, though, those in power are more inclined to spend $10 million on an ad campaign to convince people that swallowing bile is fun than they are to produce less of it.
All of this to say: elections go a long way towards determining the direction of our country and our society, and the people who choose not to participate in them are as important a factor in what direction is set as those who do. They are ignored, but they are not unreachable. They are not unreadable. For the most part, they just aren’t buying what’s being sold.
Some day, one party or the other will stop seeing that fact as a problem and start seeing it as an opportunity – and they will reap the rewards at the polls for a generation. I just hope it’s the right one.
