Nate Silver is another commentator that infuriates the Left and the Right. The man is on Substack; he couldn’t care less for the trolls. Liberals hated how Silver gave Trump the Electoral College edge in the 2024 race and his view that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be president. He viewed Trump as unacceptable over January 6—this is all rehashed in his latest post about how the current president truly took a katana to the old Democratic Party playbook on winning elections. Silver added that the old liberal axiom for elections was to increase turnout.
‘When we vote, we win’ was the Democrats’ mantra for ten-plus years. That’s no longer the case. Liberals will likely look at the difference in voter turnout between the 2020 and 2024 elections and use that as a crutch. Silver threw cold water on that, adding that 2024 was a high-turnout election. Also, how, in that cycle, a hyper-Democratic voter outreach operation might have turned out more Trump voters:
Catalist estimates that 126 million people voted for president3 in both 2020 and 2024; these are what they call “repeat voters.” But 30 million voters dropped out of the electorate. A substantial minority of this has an unhappy cause: former voters dying. But the majority is due to people choosing not to vote.
However, these “dropoff voters” are usually replaced by an equal or greater number of new voters. About 4 million Americans turn 18 each year, or about 16 million over a four-year cycle. Then other people are inspired to participate in elections when they might not have been before. But 2024 was an exception to this: there were fewer new voters (26 million) than dropoff voters (30 million).
[…]
About 56 percent of dropoff voters — people who voted in 2020 but not in 2024 — had voted for Biden in 2020, excluding third-party voters. (All of Catalist’s figures reflect the so-called two-way vote: the share of the major-party vote received by Democrats rather than Republicans.) That hurt Harris, certainly. But two other shifts also harmed Democrats. First, unusually, a majority of new voters (people who didn’t vote in 2020) voted for Trump. Since many new voters are young voters, this reflected a substantial tepidness toward Democrats among the younger ranks of Gen Z. However, as the Catalist report suggests, it was mostly relatively moderate young voters, particularly young Black and Hispanic men, who drove the shift rather than the campus activist types the media more often writes about
What’s more, Harris also (slightly) lost to Trump among repeat voters, a majority of whom had voted for Biden in 2020. This potentially has a greater impact due to the arithmetic…
As liberal data scientist David Shor also noted, if every registered voter were dragged to the polls, Trump would’ve won the popular vote by five points instead of 1.5:
There are a lot of ways you can squint at this data. Harris lost the election by 2.3 million votes, and per our calculations above, she lost a net of 2.7 million votes from dropoff voters. So even if there had been some vote switching and Trump had gained from new voters, she would have won the popular vote by around 400,000 voters without those dropoffs; the Electoral College would have been very close.
This ignores a major complication, however. Those Democratic dropoff voters weren’t necessarily Harris’s to keep. If you’d forced them to vote, a lot of them might have chosen Trump or a third party instead.
Silver may annoy many, but at least he dissects the data, which I know is a ‘gee—no kidding ’-type shrug-off, but today’s liberals neither do that nor understand nuance. Even simple things, like voters not liking Trump personally but liking his policies, are lost on these people. They only hear the first part, which isn’t accurate, and when Biden trashed the economy, voters were more than willing to make peace with Trump’s more colorful personality traits. Also, they’re wrong—Trump is popular. Taking the fake news press as gospel after the Russian collusion hoax, the overt bias, lying about COVID, and criminally underselling Trump’s support is how you keep the zombies sated, I guess.
Wow.
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@honestpollster) May 28, 2025
Trump approval at 53%, +7 today.
Basically where he was on January 20th.
Cool!@FoxNews - Remember, honest and accurate polling is one DM away! pic.twitter.com/WHWnUPtJZm
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@honestpollster) May 29, 2025
New - Trump job approval poll (Hispanic voters)
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) May 26, 2025
🟢 Approve 60%
🟤 Disapprove 40%
Insider advantage #A - LV - 5/19
Go back to sleep, liberals.
But Silver, like others, are saying the same thing: the Democratic playbook on winning elections is dated. Trash it and start anew. But first, Democrats must find a charismatic leader and a resonant message. They have neither in their pocket and likely won’t for the foreseeable future. Without that, talking about increasing voter turnout is just silliness. They’re the silly party now if not a wholly ineffective one.
Still, this opportunity is being scuttled since congressional Republicans often become aces in shooting themselves in the foot in these situations.
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