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.