But Trump’s share of the Latino vote has continued to rise. A survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Univision last October found that while Biden took approximately 65 percent of the Latino vote in 2020, only 35 percent of respondents were committed to voting for him again this year. Nearly a fifth of them had not yet decided whom they would back. “This erosion in support and enthusiasm for Biden impacts not only potential turnout issues for the president’s campaign,” Neil Newhouse, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies, told me in an email, “but raises the very distinct possibility of voter defection for Trump.”
What will decide how Latinos influence this year’s election, however, is not only which candidate they favor but whether they’re willing to stand in line to vote. During Trump and Biden’s 2020 contest, Trump’s campaign workers knocked on Florida doors to turn out his fans, while Biden’s campaign discouraged it because of the pandemic. With ambivalent voters, these kinds of tactics change outcomes.
Candidates who look or sound original — like Barack Obama or Trump — draw new voters off the sidelines because of the contrasts they create with more traditional opponents. But their blockbuster appeal may also come from doubling down on disruptive policies (universal health care, a drastic reduction of both legal and illegal immigration). In this framework, Bernie Sanders’s Pied Piper appeal to younger voters makes sense; contrast may come from gender, race or background, but it may also come from party-defying ideas.
Ambivalent voters may be more attracted to candidates who deviate from the political norm. “Citizens who are outside the electorate are less attached to the existing system,” Thomas E. Patterson, a Harvard political scientist, observed in his 2002 book, “The Vanishing Voter.” Casting votes regularly makes you a part of the American system, so you’re not as drawn to ideas on the margins, like socialist or authoritarian appeals. But people who rarely or never vote, the politics website FiveThirtyEight found in a 2020 poll, are more likely to agree with statements like “No matter who wins, nothing will change for people like me” and “The system is too broken to be fixed.” These kinds of sentiments make people want to snub or overturn a system, not participate in it.
Unsurprisingly, no one is more ambivalent about participating in elections than young people. Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the youth vote for decades, argues that Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016 because she couldn’t get enough of the young people who did vote to back her. Younger voters, he explained, always have the lowest turnout rate in any election. And in 2016, exit polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed that substantial numbers of the under-30 voters who did show up preferred to cast their ballots for Green or Libertarian Party candidates. Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, later told an audience that she won less than 60 percent of the youth vote. “That’s why she lost,” he said.