A Baseball Fan and News Obsessive Talks about the 2024 Election
Insights on the 2024 election, continued.
Summary: Two weeks ago, we first published our post-election poll and wrote about Priority Gaps, or how Americans misunderstand each other. Today, More in Common’s Executive Director, Jay Mangone, continues our analysis from our latest post-election poll by focusing on “reluctant followers.” You can read our full report here.
Baseball is my favorite sport. While I wasn’t alive in the 1960’s, my opinion has been in the minority since then – and today only 10% of Americans claim baseball as their favorite sport. I’m also a Mets fan. According to a decade-old New York Times map that used Facebook data to track baseball fandom, there are no zip codes in the United States where the majority of people are Mets fans.
Every decade or so since I was born, the Mets have made a big postseason run. Whenever that happens, I end up talking about baseball, and the vicissitudes of rooting for the Amazins, with a bunch of people who don’t care about baseball, or who only care enough to know that the Mets should suck.
Presidential elections are like the world series of politics: even reluctant followers feel compelled to have a rooting interest. With that in mind, we tried to understand how “reluctant followers” – i.e. the Politically Disengaged and late deciders – thought about the 2024 election. These groups reveal interesting patterns about how Trump built a wide, but fragile, coalition.1
Who are late deciders versus the political disengaged, and why do they matter?
According to the polling we fielded the day after the election, 16% of people decided their vote in the final days of the election – and they mostly broke for Republicans by a factor of 3:2. We found that 57% of people who decided to vote in the final days before the election voted for President-elect Trump, while only 38% voted for Vice President Harris.
Late deciders were more likely to be Black Men (27% of whom were late deciders) or Latino Men (24%), Gen Z (25%) or Millennials (25%), and the Politically Disengaged (23% of whom were late deciders).
Meanwhile, the Politically Disengaged are one of the seven “Hidden Tribes” More in Common uses to describe Americans’ political views. They are characterized by their lack of participation in political and community life —they are the group least likely to attend a political rally or vote in a local election and are the least likely to follow the news. About one in four of the Politically Disengaged have gone without food or medical treatment at least somewhat often within the past year.
Unsurprisingly, 60% of the Politically Disengaged didn’t vote in the 2024 election, while 25% voted for President-elect Trump and 15% for Vice President Harris.2 As a result, the Politically Disengaged comprised a larger share of Trump’s base – 22% compared to 14% of Harris’ base.
Explaining baseball to people who don’t care about baseball
When the Mets make their occasional run, my explanation for why the Baseball Disengaged should root for them focuses on the offbeat stories that make them fun to root for. These are often characterized by my fellow fans as “Metsiness”— including a hamburger mascot and a Latin pop hit composed and performed by our veteran second baseman.
With these anecdotes, I might be able to get a few people to root for the Mets for a couple of weeks. While Major League baseball has instituted some rules changes to speed the game and broaden its appeal, I don’t think it’s possible to get our football-obsessed country to care as much about baseball as I do.
Perhaps the same thing can be said about the majority of Americans who do not care about politics – and especially those who have been left behind. These are large groups. The Politically Disengaged, for instance, includes 26% of Americans.3 And our survey found that 16% of Americans reported making made their choice for president in the days immediately before or on the day of the election.
While these groups are not politically active, their political priorities match those of the median voter—the top priorities for most Americans in the 2024 election were inflation, the economy, and immigration, and so too for the Politically Disengaged and late deciders. Moreover, while these groups voted primarily for President-elect Trump, he hasn’t won them over in any enduring sense.
So winning over these groups represents a big opportunity for both political parties, and yet building a strategy to connect with them is exceedingly difficult: because they don’t pay attention to politics, they’re hard to reach, and even more challenging to persuade.
Rather than trying to get them more engaged in political life (it’s good to have people who don’t care so much about politics!), More in Common will be doing some work to see if we can unpack the nature of these groups’ political attitudes: how they view the country and their place in it, and what they’re looking for when they decide whom to vote for, even if they’re only paying attention for a few weeks every couple of years.
While I don’t know for certain why these groups voted mostly for President-elect Trump, I suspect that it has to do as much with style as with substance. As we pointed out in our Atlantic piece last week, he did a better job than his opponent of communicating his political priorities to voters. And as countless pieces of analysis have noted, he was candid and interesting and communicated on channels like the Joe Rogan Experience and Theo Von Show that were nontraditional for presidential campaigns.
In a fight for attention, he put on a show that was easier to pay attention to than Vice President Harris’ attempts at centrism—a move that those of us advocating for majoritarianism in our politics applauded, but that ultimately rung hollow.
If the Mets have hope...
On Sunday night, news came in that carried with it the promise of taking the Mets from occasional overachievers to perennial contenders, and even (just maybe) becoming the best baseball franchise in our own city. With Steve Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who now owns the Mets acting as the benefactor, the team signed Juan Soto, a generational young talent, to the largest contract in baseball history.
In the greater New York baseball market, the Mets have always had the better vibes. But wresting New York baseball supremacy from the Yankees required more than vibes: the Mets had to beat the Yankees at their own game. Soto played for the Yankees last year, and the Mets got him because they were willing to outspend their rivals.
The team’s made a lot of productive moves in the past few years, but sharply breaking with the past and changing the team’s culture after 62 years defined mostly by mediocrity and heartbreak required a key figure and lots of money—and even then, it’s still just a bet.
Speaking to reluctant followers of politics will require a similar amount of iconoclasm, resources, and high tolerance for risk. In our recent polling, only 44% of Americans agreed that “Kamala Harris respects people like me,” including just 41% of late deciders and 35% of the Politically Disengaged. Only 35% of Americans agreed that “Donald Trump respects people like me,” including just 39% of late deciders and 34% of the Politically Disengaged.
Americans don’t think their political leaders care about them. Is it possible for someone to break through with a constructive vision for the future, one that relies more on forging commonality than on sowing division? Is it possible for a leader to emerge from the center right or the center left to build a middle that’s not so mushy?
If I can be optimistic for the Mets, I can be optimistic for my country.
-- Jason Mangone, Executive Director of More in Common US
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When Carlos Beltran struck out looking to lose the 2006 NLCS, I broke my TV. I hope my analysis isn’t so bad that you have the same reaction.
The tilt within Politically Disengaged voters towards Republicans does not necessarily reflect a shift in support: Republicans maintained turnout among the Politically Disengaged at 2020 levels, whereas Democrats’ turnout levels fell significantly.
After analyzing the Hidden Tribes breakdown within our survey sample, the Politically Disengaged comprised 30% of respondents.