There is a chasm between people who follow politics closely and people who don’t follow politics at all.

Follow this authorRamesh Ponnuru's opinions

The voters most active in politics are richer, Whiter and more credentialed than the disengaged. They also have more extreme — or, if you’d prefer, more ideologically consistent — views.

In the past, the disengaged, also known as “low-propensity voters” who frequently skipped elections, were more likely to be Democrats. Consequently, Democratic politicians had a strong interest in boosting turnout. Today, though, these disengaged voters are strongly backing Trump. They account for his lead. The Democrats’ strength among highly politicized voters, in turn, explains their recent dominance in special elections, in which fewer voters participate.

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The need to persuade disengaged voters shapes presidential campaigns in all kinds of ways. Take the metronomic message discipline that many candidates adopt. Reporters and political junkies hate hearing the same lines at every stop, but breaking through to these voters requires repetition. Regular readers of newspapers already know that President Biden supports legal access to abortion while Trump takes credit for ending Roe. But 17 percent of registered voters think Biden is more responsible for its demise and another 13 percent do not know which candidate is. Biden keeps hammering this point in part to educate this subset of voters — almost a third of the electorate.

The contrast between the highly politically........

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