Q&A: Can Democrats Win Back Election ‘Skippers’ in 2026?

The Democratic National Committee is pursuing an ambitious voter contact effort to remobilize Americans who cast ballots in 2020, but sat out the 2024 election. 

Those voters were the focus of an extensive post-2024 analysis conducted by Way to Win, a major Democratic donor group that has spent the past year searching for lessons about what went wrong for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ ill-fated White House bid and what Democrats can do to win back the so-called “skippers.”

Campaigns & Elections spoke with one of Way to Win’s co-founders Jenifer Fernandez Ancona about the DNC’s new voter outreach strategy and what the “skippers” need to see from Democrats in order to turn out in 2026. 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

C&E: Way to Win spent last year doing this deep dive on “skippers” – these voters that backed Biden in 2020, but didn’t turn out in ’24. Can you give us a rundown of what that analysis found?

Ancona: So when we looked at these Biden skippers, we saw a few things. One is that we feel like they were winnable –  like, they were paying attention. They were listening to the news. They weren’t apathetic or, you know, totally disengaged.And they really made an active choice not to vote. So that was  one of the things that we heard from them. 

When we then asked them, “okay, if you did have to vote in the election, who would you have voted for,” it was about 56 percent who said they would have voted for Harris, and it was about 25 percent that said they would have voted for Trump. And this was just a different narrative, then we had been hearing in the aftermath of the election, which was this idea that if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by more. And I’m not saying that’s not true. But among this particular group of Biden skippers, that wasn’t true. 

We also heard – and this is what we sort of summarized in our post-election report that we put out last year – these voters actually have a decently favorable view of Democrats, more than you might suspect. And the attributes of Democrats that they like the best are around Democrats fighting for everyone, fighting for all people, being more inclusive and Democrats standing up to Trump and authoritarianism.

What these voters really want is a deeper kind of change than they have seen or felt from the Democrats, right? One of the summary points we had is that these voters want fighters, not folders. They feel like they have voted for Democrats in the past, but nothing really changes in their lives, and that’s part of why they sat out the election.

C&E: It seems to me that this is a messaging failure by the Harris campaign and Democrats more broadly in 2024. Is there something larger going on here? Were there any tactical failures?

Ancona: Well, starting with the first point, I really think that the deeper issue is the inequality of the economic system. We heard a lot about affordability and prices, and yes, there was the acute economic pain that people were feeling that helped shape their vote – or their lack of vote – in the election. But among the skipper group, we definitely were hearing about this chronic economic pain and imbalance in the system, where they can just see that the system is rigged for the wealthy and the billionaires. And they sort of feel like both parties are captured by that. 

It’s not just a messaging thing. It’s like, how are you actually showing up and embodying the idea that you’re a fighter for the people and that you are going to tax the wealthy and make this system more fair? That’s something that goes beyond just the words you say. It is also the actions that you take.

On your second question about the tactics, I would say the thing that really comes to mind the most is the media environment and the way that people get information. It wasn’t that these skippers weren’t aware or they needed more direct outreach. They talked about how they had seen the ads. Many of them live in swing states and knew about the rallies, or had gone to the rallies and the events, so it wasn’t like they were totally out of it or didn’t hear from the campaign. But I do think the Democrats, at large, underestimated the extent to which people were watching YouTube channels where all of this messaging is being slipped into the culture.

The way that digital media is so dominant, social media is so dominant – I don’t think the Democrats fully understood that. And the Republicans definitely did and took a total advantage of it in the election.

C&E: Let’s turn to this voter contact program that the DNC just launched. It’s prioritizing this “listening-first” approach to outreach. What are your top line thoughts on that? Is this going to re-engage the 2024 skippers, or is there something more that needs to be done?

Ancona: I think it’s a really good starting point, to be honest. One of the things that we heard when we did listen to the skippers is that they don’t feel listened to and they feel talked at. It wasn’t that they didn’t hear what the Democrats were saying. It was that they didn’t like what the Democrats were saying. So this idea of going out early and trying to understand what’s going on – I do think that is valuable. And the idea of listening first does seem like the right tactic, because, like I said, these voters really don’t like Republicans. They don’t like Trump. They’re very turned off by everything Trump is doing. But they don’t also love Democrats, and that’s partially why they’re staying home versus just voting for the Democrat, even though they hate the Republican. 

You have to start to dig into that and reach out to people in a way that I think is more about, “Hey, like what’s going on with you? What do you really care about? What do you need to see?” I do think that is an important first step. It’s got to be part of the program. 

Starting early also makes a ton of sense because I do think that we saw a lot of energy among this voting group – the skippers – to show up in 2026. It was something that they said. Many of them talked about feeling regret about having not voted in 2024 now that they were seeing what Trump was doing, and that the 2026 election is a way for them to make up for that.  

So I think it’s good to start with that idea of listening and gathering information and using that to figure out what the next steps should be.

C&E: Well if listening is the starting point, what else needs to happen? How do Democrats begin to take what they learn and turn it into tangible action?

Ancona: I mean, there’s some value in just showing up, right? No matter what people say to you, there is some value, I think, in people hearing from Democrats in this way. 

You’re going to hear a big, wide range of things, but I think there probably will be themes. And so figuring out what those themes are is great, but it has to kind of filter up through the party itself – the people making decisions about the kind of money that needs to be spent, the kind of messaging that needs to happen. One thing that I saw in the rollout of this program was about getting this feedback directly from the voters, synthesizing it and then bringing that to groups like the DCCC that are going to be running huge campaigns and helping support all these candidates across the congressional map. 

It’s really going to be important to feed those lessons up the chain of command to the people who are making those decisions, because it could shape how the candidates are showing up and the words they’re saying, but also the bigger frames that they’re driving or the stories that they’re telling. Storytelling is really important, and that was somewhat missing in the 2024 election too. 

We know that it’s not enough to just say, “Trump is bad, Trump is bad.” It has to be something bigger.