If you don’t vote, you don’t get to decide

According to the YouGov daily tracking survey for July 23, 78% of Republicans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president while only 35% of Independents and 10% of Democrats approve.

Conversely, 87% of Democrats disapprove, along with 49% of Independents and 18% of Republicans.

If you apply these statistics to the approximate number of registered voters – and factor in the percentage of them who identify with each political party – one fact becomes crystal clear: If every registered voter cast a ballot according to his or her opinion of Donald Trump, a Democrat would defeat the faux-president in a landslide.

I could fill up this essay with lots and lots of numbers, but for those of you who actually like statistics, here are a few:

* There are approximately 250 million Americans of voting age in the country, but only 231 million are registered to vote. Only 129 million (56%) even bothered to go to the polls in the last election.

* The Census Bureau says 31% of Americans identify as Democrats, 24% as Republicans and 42% as Independents.

* If every registered voter cast a ballot based on his or her approval or disapproval of Trump, and all who disapprove voted for a Democrat, Trump would lose by 119,819,700 to 84,361,200. That’s a margin of 35,458,500 votes. (Of course, the Electoral College would have to turn blue, too.)

In other words, Trump would get only 36% of the vote. That’s pretty consistent with his approval rating throughout his presidency, so it doesn’t really matter that nearly 80% of Republicans are backing him, because overall, that’s a fairly small minority of the voting public.

* In the last election, Hillary Clinton received 66 million votes (rounded off), which is only 29% of the number of registered voters, while Donald Trump received 63 million or 27%.

* Democrats outnumber Republicans 71.6 million to 55.4 million, but there are 97 million Independents who can ultimately decide elections. The winning party needs to court this bloc of voters.

* And finally, 19 million eligible voters – for one reason or another, and there are several – have not registered to vote.  

All of this means one thing to me: For Democrats to break through the Republican wall and reclaim Congress or the White House, the “voting public” will have to include the people who voted in the last election, plus the ones who didn’t vote and the ones who voted for Donald Trump and now wish they hadn’t. 

Or, as I consistently say, elections have consequences. The 2018 mid-terms and the 2020 presidential election could have a vastly different outcome than the 2016 election if the American people just do their job. It really is that simple.   

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YouGov updates its polling data daily. Click here for the latest results.