Unlikely Voters Vast, Untapped

By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

Most major national election polls limit their inquiries to the plans of “likely voters.” The questions end quickly when people tell pollsters that they have no plans to vote. But what would happen if non-voters could be persuaded to go to the polls?

HOPE? Voting is less frequent among the young and minorities.

Suffolk University in Boston asked that question of 800 unlikely voters last month and found that the result would be an avalanche of votes for President Obama. But, the pollsters say, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to energize the non-voters.

“This poll is a good news/bad news story for Barack Obama,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “The good news is that there is a treasure chest of voters he doesn’t even have to persuade — they already like him and dislike Mitt Romney. He just needs to unlock the chest and get them out to vote.”

Obama led among the non-voters who are registered to vote by a wide margin: 43 percent to 20 percent, with the rest undecided or favoring a third party. The percentage of respondents who said they viewed Obama favorably, 55 percent, was more than double the one in four who liked his GOP challenger, Romney.

Those who favored Obama also said they would be more willing to vote if they thought their ballots might make a difference in the election’s outcome.

Turnout on the Rise: Click here to view chart

Voter turnout hit a modern high of nearly 62 percent in 2008, but sustaining that participation is going to be tough, Paleologos says. Non-voters tend to be younger, poorer and more heavily minority than their voting counterparts, and all of those groups have suffered disproportionately during the recession and its aftermath.

“This poll shows people burned by the political system pulling out. The last four years have brought a major amount of disengagement and disconnect. I think you are going to see 90 million people who are eligible who aren’t going to vote in November,” he says.

Indeed, the study found no evidence that Obama would be able to tap into the reservoir of support among non-voters. Many were apathetic about politics — less than half knew that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the vice president, for example — and they said they either had no time to vote or believed that their vote didn’t count. A plurality of respondents said they didn’t know what might bring them to the polls, or that nothing would.