Just enough information voters
By 
When an election is both as close and as catastrophic in its effects as 2024, there’s a lot of counterfactuals to analyze — what mistakes did the Harris campaign make, how did the media coverage affect the campaign, should Biden have dropped out earlier. etc. And it’s worth doing. But a sobering underlying issue is that Trump’s most salient political skill was to mobilize extremely low-information voters and get them to vote:
In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. One pre-election poll found Americans who didn’t consume any news at all said they’d vote for him over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60%1 to 40%.
Was Harris’s decision to make a couple of appearances with Liz Cheney a good idea on net? I dunno. But contrary to the many confident pronouncements on Twitter, it’s massively implausible that it materially affected the election, because Trump’s most critical marginal voters have no idea who Liz Cheney is, let alone that she got on a stage with Harris in Ann Arbor that one time. Similarly, it was not great that the political press allowed Trump to just bury the Project 2025 story when it was hurting his campaign, but among these voters it just doesn’t matter.
One thing about pure-vibes voters, though, is that there’s less likely to show up in non-presidential elections. Another thing is easy come, easy go:
Today, the president’s support among low-knowledge voters has cratered to just 43%, according to a new analysis of data from our January Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. The share of 2024 voters who now disapprove of the president is well over 55%.
According to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Now, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points — a 25-point shift away from the president.
High-knowledge voters were roughly evenly split in 2024 (voting for Harris by 2 points, per self-reports in our data), and have moved against Trump at a softer rate, to -14.
I’m also pretty skeptical that Trump’s ability to get sporadic voters to the polls is going to transfer to Rubio or Vance.