The group known as “non-voters’ are a furtive, cryptic bunch that only come out to vote on special occasions — but when they do they rock those special occasion elections down to the ground. Now, apparently, they have it in for President Donald Trump.
“The vibe has shifted back to the left,” reports data analyst G. Elliot Morris, the figure behind several polling research organizations.
Pew Research Center on July 14 released their 2026 vintage of the NPORS, revealing that a particularly large rebound in party ID among young people, “who are heading back to their pre-2024 levels of Democratic Party loyalty.”
This by itself a big story, considering party elites and strategists in Washington, DC, have been assuming young Americans are the dominant pro-Republican force that landed Trump in the White House in 2024. But Morris said the nation now looks more like it did in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by nearly 5 points in the national popular vote, and Democrats won 50 seats in the U.S. Senate.
But that’s not the big news Morris said. Pew’s microdata reveals non-voters, specifically, have moved back toward Democrats in a big way. Pew and others found in 2024-2025 that people who didn’t vote in that election likely would have supported Trump if they had turned out, which was a big shift since 2020 and 2016, when non-voters leaned toward Democrats.
The belief was that “low-propensity” voters had become much more conservative and open to Trumpism, especially on immigration policy. But Morris and others predicted — correctly it turns out — that the group was just moving by anti-incumbency bias. They shifted against Biden because of inflation and COVID trauma, much like the rest of the population.
But while non-voters leaned Republican by party ID by 4 points in 2024, they now lean Democratic by an incredible +12.
“The Democratic lead in party ID now rivals what it was in 2020-2021, both overall and among low-turnout voters,” said Morris, which means an unexpected wave of unhappy people are suddenly looking up from their phones, jobs and lives and looking at polling places with an eye toward revolution.
They swung hard for Trump in 2024 and surprised many strategists with a second Trump win —but they’re swinging even harder away from him this year, and this could be the final pin nailing incumbent Republicans to the ground in November.
In addition to that, Pew found that 47 percent of adults now call themselves Democrats, 43 percent Republicans, and 10 percent Independents.
Every year, the Pew Research Center conducts a large, national poll of U.S. adults to measure important partisan attitudes and population characteristics that are valuable to researchers. The National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), for example, is fielded mainly by mailed invites and nabs a commendable 30 percent response rate — making the results very reliable and less subject to partisan non-response bias.