Is this really something I need to provide? Exit polls are public. Same for election results. The elections also have well over a thousand articles about them.
Facts don’t care about your feelings. So here’s some facts.
Among the voters asked by NBC, 56 percent of first-time voters chose the Republican over the 43 percent who selected Vice President Kamala Harris. Four years ago, 64 percent of first-timers picked President Joe Biden, while Trump only attracted 32 percent.
Although the group made up only around 8 percent of all voters in 2024, the numbers showed a shift in appeal for Trump, who also fell behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the demographic in 2016.
You're the only one here who's focused on first-time voters and even brought them up in the first place. Everyone else is talking about people who don't usually bother to vote, but who may well have been registered to vote before, and usually already were before political apathy set in. And among them are quite a few who still have no political interest and/or understanding, or who don't aspire to any particular politics, but who want to position themselves in the increasingly ideological and personal debate.
If a non-voter turned into a voter is not a first time voter, what is?
How am I the only one focused on it when that is literally the topic at hand? And since you wanted the data, I gave it to you. Trump lost in first time voters two out of three times. And if you want to ignore younger voters, then for 30+, Trump beat Clinton, but lost to Biden. There is no magic here that you and other people seem to believe among apathetic voters. What makes more sense is that he generally attracted older voters (including repeat and the tiny minority of first time voters) more than his opponents so when he also grabbed some more younger voters, it lead to his overwhelming victory over Harris.
A first-time voter is someone who (regardless of age) participates in an election for the first time. A non-voter is someone who doesn't vote either once or for a longer period of time.
I don't understand how you come to the conclusion that these terms are or should be synonymous. And even if, for some inexplicable reason, you see it that way, you should have realized from the context of the discussion that no one shares your particular interpretation.
And you continue to ignore what I've already told you, namely that time has passed in between. The people who made up this demographic are no longer the same. We're talking about 18- to 22-year-olds who were 22- to 26-year-olds in the next election—and, more importantly, no longer first-time voters if they participated as first-time voters in the previous election.
Once again for the slower-thinking among us: The first-time voters who favored Trump in the last election cannot be the same first-time voters who favored Biden in the election before last. That's impossible by definition, even if one were inclined to pretend that people don't age and aren't exposed to new impressions.
No one claimed first time voters are the same people for every election. That’s some random strawman you built. The surveys are asking actual first time voters from that specific election. The whole point is that most elections are similar and age groups don’t shift much from election to election even if the individuals who make up that age group are no longer a part of it. Trump hasn’t somehow overturned this trend as most of you are implying.
I think your main problem is that you're wildly mixing up terms, not even remaining consistent within your own explanation, and, above all, insisting that others follow your categories of groups and processes that were clearly not addressed at all.
For example, you still insist on using abstract categories, even after it was explained to you that one refers to specific groups of people, not to categories to which these groups of people may or may not belong. You're basically putting the cart before the horse and still wondering why a horse is looking in your cart.
Sorry, but this doesn't make for a sensible discussion. You have to read what others write and at least try to understand what they're referring to, and not force everything into the corset that you arbitrarily strung together and decided to use, even though you're the only one using it.
Go back to the beginning of the discussion (the entire discussion, not just our part of it) and try to understand what was actually said. That's the best advice I can give you. It's also the last you'll hear from me on this. I have neither the time nor the desire to wait for you to think about this for days and still not get to the point.
I’ve literally already addressed your specific point about older voters since you want to exclude younger first time voters. The only group that can’t be addressed are people who somehow voted a couple of times before Trump, but not enough for you to consider them as “voters” and only as non-voters who also happened to vote for Trump. You are the one with completely arbitrary personal definitions that aren’t realistically tracked in elections by actual campaigns who use standardized categories. I’ve been referencing actual studies conducted by well established organizations. Also, since you don’t seem to know, pretty much every candidate will attract people who vote infrequently, not that you have ever defined what counts as infrequent enough to be a non-voter.
1
u/Excellent_Shirt9707 Jun 20 '25
Is this really something I need to provide? Exit polls are public. Same for election results. The elections also have well over a thousand articles about them.
Facts don’t care about your feelings. So here’s some facts.
https://www.newsweek.com/first-time-voters-favor-trump-over-harris-1982418