THE MEDIAN VOTERS STAY HOME.

Never attribute to malice that which might better be understood as apathy.

Put simply, some of those Obama-Trump-Biden voters from 2020 might have switched back to Trump, and some of them, having seen both Trump 1.0 and Biden 1.0 saw enough that was unsatisfactory in either presidency to have stayed home this time.  A Politico analysis of turnout and voting in six swing state cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix) suggests as much.

We were aware of those motivations last July, thanks in part to some thinking by Daniel McCarthy.  "He refers, there, to the base voters, although in that litany of policy failures, he's calling attention to the more glaring reasons for the reluctant Biden voter — not necessarily a Republican-leaning voter — to this time stay home, vote for the Free Soiler or Cornel West or who have you, or even tick the Trump box."  And I cautioned you, dear reader, not to draw any conclusions until all the votes were tallied and the counts certified.  "Let's all enjoy Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent and wait for those certified totals, generally coming in mid-December, before claiming anything more nefarious than more than a few 2020 voters staying home on Election Day this year."

Now the vote counts are in, and although the Republicans had a more aggressive get-out-the-vote plan in the swing states, a lot of people opted to reject either evil.

Heading into this year, Republicans in [Pennsylvania] were in a deficit compared to the powerhouse of mail-in ballot operations that the Democrats had built. In the 2020 presidential race, more than 35,000 “4-of-4” Republican voters (loyal voters who have voted in four out of the last four elections) skipped the general election. In 2022, that number of vote-skippers rose to over 61,000. Even worse, of the 3-of-4 participants (who voted in three of the last four elections), the number rose from more than 70,000 in 2020 to just shy of 174,000 in 2022.

In short, more than 100,000 high-propensity voters skipped the presidential election in 2020. In 2022, more than 230,000 high-propensity voters skipped the midterm elections.

In other words, if the over 100,000 high-propensity voters who skipped the 2020 presidential election actually had cast ballots, the outcome may have been different, as then-President Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania that year by about 80,000 votes.

This past November, Trump defeated Kamala Harris by over 170,000 votes, with McCormick defeating Casey by approximately 15,000 votes. Parnell said those numbers in future elections should continue to grow for Republicans as long as they don’t take their foot off of the gas pedal with professional efforts such as Pennsylvania Rising.

Focus, for the moment, on the net loss of 130,000 high-propensity voters from anybody's tally. That's Pennsylvania alone, and work to tally changing participation among voters of ordinary or lower propensity will take longer. (Yes, it is a matter of public record who votes, and a lot of that is now available on line, but going name by name through several hundred million people takes longer than the review cycle on the most anodyne Minimal Publishable Unit. Judge for yourself whether that work will ever be done.)

Within some sub-populations, though, the candidate-switching or hard-pass-taking registers with campaign strategists.

It’s been widely noted that the Democrats fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the November election. But I believe that the scale of the Democrats’ crash among Hispanic voters has not yet been fully processed nor the extent to which this crash undermines Democrats’ plans for the future.

That's Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixera, who is coming to terms with the failure of his Emerging Democrat Majority to emerge by figuring out what the heck happened.

They’d better figure it out since these trends undermine what has been Democrats’ default plan for their political future. Consider that most Democrats like to believe that, since a relatively conservative white population is in sharp decline while a presumably liberal nonwhite population keeps growing, the course of social and demographic change should deliver an ever-growing Democratic coalition. It is simply a matter of getting this burgeoning nonwhite population to the polls.

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.

Put another way, we're seeing recently naturalized voters hoping to have an America to buy into.  A Democrat elite obsessed with pronouns and "Latinx" doesn't give that impression.  But, again, if some of those Biden voters from 2020 stayed home this year, that decline in total turnout makes sense, doesn't it?