Many won’t vote Trump or Harris. The size of that group will decide the election | Michael Podhorzer

We are mere weeks away from perhaps the most consequential election in American history. The good news, at least for your blood pressure, is that you can ignore the endless parade of horse-race polls. We already know everything we need to know about what will happen.

First, we can be confident that, for the third time in a row, a majority of Americans will reject Donald Trump and the Maga agenda. Last month, I used high-quality voter file data to explain why it’s almost certain that Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, will win the national vote.

Thanks to our wildly undemocratic electoral college system, however, we also know that we could see a different result that doesn’t reflect what most Americans want. Shockingly, if that happens, it will be for the second time in the last three elections, and for the third time in the last eight elections. If that is the case in this election, as well, it will be in large part because typically disengaged voters who voted for Biden in 2020 feel less alarmed today about the threat of Trump and Maga than they did four years ago.

As I wrote in July, “the winner in November will be determined by what, to most voters, the election seems to be ‘about’ by the time voting starts.” In what I call the Maga Era (post-2016), the best predictor of how – and whether – someone will vote in the future is how – and whether – they have voted in the past.

Unfortunately, most political coverage focuses nearly all its attention on for whom people will vote (that is, for Harris or Trump), and almost none on whether people will vote. Indeed, Biden would have lost the electoral college in 2020 without the support of those voters who stayed home.

The difference between Democrats’ losses in 2016 and subsequent victories has been the unprecedented participation of new voters who believe that if the Maga agenda wins they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted. This turnout surge from new voters is how Democrats have won 23 out of 27 statewide races in the battlegrounds since 2016. Today, there are about 91 million Americans who have voted for Biden and House Democrats since 2016, and about 83 million who have voted for Trump or House Republicans.

While the threat of a second Trump administration should be alarming, especially given the extremist Republican policy goals and planning on display in the conservative manifesto called Project 2025, survey data suggests that voters are less attuned to that threat lately.

There’s no question that Harris has done an amazing job of consolidating and energizing the Democratic coalition since Biden dropped out. But not all anti-Maga voters are necessarily pro-Democrat. Too many of those who hadn’t been regular voters before 2016 and still don’t have favorable views of Democrats – but came out to vote against Trump or Maga in 2018, 2020 and 2022 – seem disengaged. In particular, young voters, Latinos and non-college voters are disproportionately likely to have said that they haven’t heard Trump say something offensive “recently”, or that they “know nothing at all” about Project 2025.

When we imagine a stereotypical “midwest swing voter”, we might think of a burly guy sitting in a Wisconsin diner who thinks Democrats are too liberal or too “elite”. But this image ignores the “whether” voters who are much more key to Democrats’ success – like Charlene, the pro-choice woman pouring coffee for the burly guy, or Jimmy, Jenny and Amber, the contingently employed twentysomethings in the other booth who feel the whole system is rigged against them. All of them decided to turn out in at least one of the last three elections – not because they thought Democrats could make their lives better, but because they understood that Trump and Maga would make their lives worse.

Trump’s best chance is for these voters to shrug off the very real threat he poses. The US supreme court’s conservative majority, including three justices Trump himself put on the court, have contributed to that by shielding Trump this year from legal accountability for his crimes. Even though a New York court found him guilty of 34 felonies, the actions of the six Republican justices have ensured that he won’t be sentenced for those crimes, or tried for his conduct related to January 6 crimes before the election.

The good news is that any election within the margin of error is within the margin of effort. We know that voters come out against the Maga agenda when they realize what is at stake. The future of American democracy depends on the efforts of all of us – not just Democratic campaign operatives, but members of civil society, the media and ordinary Americans – to make sure the stakes are clear to all.

• Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the chair of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative and the Defend Democracy Project and writes the Substack Weekend Reading