Democrats’ Challenge in 2026? Winning Back the ‘Skippers’
As Democrats brainstorm how to win back key constituencies that swung for President Donald Trump in 2024, one group is urging a different strategy: Focus on the “skippers.”
New polling from Way to Win, a national donor network focused on building Democratic power in the Sunbelt, makes the case that most of the millions of voters who supported former President Joe Biden in 2020, but consciously sat out the 2024 election, are still in play for Democrats in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Those voters, according to the poll conducted by Democratic firm Lake Research, generally hold more favorable views of Democrats. And the majority – 56 percent – said that they would have voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris last year if they had actually voted.
The problem, Way to Win’s President Tory Gavito said, is that those voters simply didn’t like the candidates or their respective visions for the country.
“Everything we’ve learned from our research shows that these voters really want to vote for Democrats. They just want Democrats to want them,” Gavito said. “They want Democrats to act like they’re going to fight for them. The reason they didn’t vote for a Democrat in ’24 is because they viewed Democrats as too weak and not fighting for them.”
Who Are the “Skippers”
These “skippers” aren’t unreliable voters, Gavito said. They’re people with a recent history of voting and who regularly follow politics and the news. Forty-nine percent of those surveyed said that they check the news “several times a day,” while another 32 percent said they tune in about once a day.
That means that they’re easier to reach than infrequent or disengaged voters. What’s more, Gavito said, Democrats have a better chance of winning them back in 2026 than those voters who flipped their support from Biden to Trump.
“Our theory here is that the people that have crossed that Rubicon – that flipped from voting Democrat to Republican – are going to be really hard to persuade back,” Gavito said. “But this other group of people that voted for Biden in 2020 and skipped 2024 – they’re going to be incredibly important.”
Way to Win’s focus on 2024 “skippers” comes as Democrats grapple with a series of deepening challenges ahead of 2026. The party is quickly losing voters as more and more people register as Republicans or independents. At the same time, Trump’s 2024 victory was driven, in part, by steep GOP gains among historically Democratic-leaning constituencies, including Latinos and young voters.
If Democrats want to win in 2026, Gavito said, they’re going to have to focus on turning out their base – including those who didn’t vote last year.
“The party that secures its base and then rallies enough excitement to bring in people that aren’t paying close attention is the party that’s going to win,” she said. “But securing your base is No. 1 every single time.”
Winning over those voters, however, is going to require Democrats to take a hard look at 2024, Gavito said. She argued that Democrats failed to recognize “how deep the anti-elite sentiment” ran among Americans – including many of the voters that make up the party’s historic base. Harris, she said, ended up running as the “status quo candidate,” while Trump took on the role of “disruptor.”
And for voters who already felt as if Democrats weren’t doing enough to fight for them, Harris’ strategy wasn’t enough to get them to the polls.
“This is a reminder to Democrats that the American people are telling us the status quo isn’t working,” Gavito said. “This is going to come down to: Who has the solutions, and who’s going to make sure those solutions come through quickly?”
