The Apathy Election: Political Engagement Dropped Dramatically in 2024

Especially atheists and agnostics

I have hunches about things, often based on vibes or anecdotes or my own created realities. We all do. It’s just part of being a human being. We see two or three tweets or news headlines about something and that makes us think in a very specific way about the world. But here’s what's awesome about my job - I can actually test those hunches with real data. That’s really the engine that drives this whole newsletter: me just trying to figure out how wrong I am about something happening in the world.

When I think about the 2024 election the biggest sentiment that comes to my mind is a simple malaise. When Trump burst on to that scene about a decade ago he immediately stirred up an opposition that was really excited to oppose him at every turn. I remember reading news stories about how he managed to drive his casinos into bankruptcy, cheat vendors out of their negotiated payments, and commit adultery on several of his wives. It’s like the media dug up every skeleton about Trump and plastered it all over our social media apps for years. Then, two things happened. They ran out of dirt to dig up and the public just couldn’t get outraged anymore.

That’s where we were in November of 2024. It’s like all the momentum went out of the room and it was impossible to get it back. And guess what? That’s exactly the story that emerges from the data. Let me show you how much religious groups engaged in political activity in 2024. This is the standard battery employed by the Cooperative Election Study for years.

When it comes to attending a political meeting, like for the school board or city council, that was a rare occurrence in 2024. The most engaged group were Jews but only 14% had gone to a meeting in the previous month. Almost every Christian group was in the single digits - 8% of white evangelicals, and 9% of white Catholics were attending a local meeting. And that was also the case with participating in a protest or march. About 11% of Jews took part in one and 19% of Muslims marched for a political cause (I am guessing that was something to do with Israel and Hamas but I can’t say for certain). But among most other groups it was incredibly rare - less than 5% were protesting.

Now there were some activities that saw quite a bit more engagement. For instance, there were several groups where at least 20% of people had contacted a public official. That was also generally the case for donating money to a candidate or campaign during the presidential election. On that metric only two groups had a donation rate that was above 30% - Jews and atheists.

But the bottom left graph really sealed it for me. It asked people if they had displayed a political yard sign or bumper sticker. Something that takes almost no time at all. Atheists scored the highest at a measly 20%. There were lots of groups around 15-18% but that was about the extent of it. You get the point here right? Engagement was just so incredibly low across the board.

Let me make that clear by showing you the rate of political activity in 2024 compared to 2020 among all sixteen of these religious groups. I know this graph is very busy and has a lot going on, but I think it’s helpful to see the entirety of this data.

I want you to scan all these dumbbell plots and find the number of times where the green circles (indicating the 2024 results) are clearly higher than the 2020 results, which are denoted by the blue circles. I can find a few instances where the 2024 numbers are higher, but by just 1-2 percentage points. It does look like white Catholics were more likely to attend a political meeting. And Orthodox Christians were more likely to volunteer for a political campaign in 2024 compared to 2020. But honestly? That’s it. That’s sixteen religious groups and six political activities, and I can find two instances where overall engagement was up in 2024.

People just stopped caring about politics in 2024 compared to four years earlier. I do wonder if the pandemic had an impact on that. For what it’s worth, the pandemic probably had varying impacts on political activity. It gave us more time to engage in other pursuits (and some people had more spending money to do so), but attending a rally or political meeting was also problematic because of mitigation rules that were in place.

Here’s the percentage of the general public who engaged in each political activity in 2020 vs 2024, so you can get a sense of the overall downward turn in engagement.

In 2024, people were half as likely to attend a protest or march compared to four years earlier. I bet part of that is there were fewer national issues to rally around like the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But it’s still a huge drop in political engagement from one presidential election cycle to the next. In 2024, just 18% of folks said that they had recently contacted a public official. It was 23% in 2020. The share of Americans who made a political donation dropped from 28% to 20% during this time period and just 15% displayed a political sign in 2024 compared to 19% in 2020.

There’s no single political activity that was more popular in 2024 than it was during the election of 2020. The clear impression I got was that people have just given up on the political process in a meaningful way.

I created an additive index of all six political acts and calculated the mean score for both 2020 and 2024 for each of the sixteen religious groups that I identified in the Cooperative Election Study. Overall, the average person engaged in .75 activities in 2020. In 2024, that dropped to .60 activities. A drop of about 20%.

Which religious groups saw the biggest slide? It was the non-religious, honestly. Among atheists, the average was 1.27 acts in 2020. It dropped to .93 in 2024. That’s a decline of more than 35%. For agnostics the dip was almost exactly the same percentage. I also took note of what was happening with mainline Protestants, too - down about 30%. That was also the case with evangelicals - 30% less engaged in 2024. So it’s not like it was just liberals who felt helpless and stayed home. It was also happening among conservative traditions, as well.

But I do want to make note of the fact that the general order of traditions stayed relatively steady. Jews did manage to pull into the lead as the most politically engaged religious group in 2024, though. They were tied with atheists in 2020 but then the atheists’ declines were much larger. That allowed Jews to rise to the top. But the largest religious groups like white evangelicals and white Catholics sat squarely in the middle of the whole continuum.

What individual activities really fell off a cliff? I made a handy table to make that plain.

I think this makes the point pretty clearly - atheists sat on their hands a whole lot in the 2024 cycle. Their political donation rates dropped by 17 points. They were 13 points less likely to contact a public official and ten points less apt to march or protest for a political cause. But agnostics also gave at a much lower rate, too - down about 15 points. That may be the biggest upshot for me in all of this - the two groups of nones who typically lead the charge during election season just didn’t seem to be energized in October of 2024.

But I know what the people want - a definitive answer to the question of which religious group was the most politically engaged in 2024. In the 2020 contest it was atheists by a small margin over Jews. I put together a pretty basic regression model with controls for gender, race, income, and age to try and compare apples to apples. The dependent variable was the total number of political activities.

Clearly more educated people are more involved in the political process. That’s true for Christians, Jews and non-religious Americans. But when you look at the top end of the educational spectrum, what you see is that among people with a four year college degree, atheists and Jews were neck and neck at about 1.2 political acts. But when you just look at people with graduate degrees, Jewish voters pull ahead slightly.

What I can say, without a doubt, is that evangelicals are not some kind of super engaged voting bloc in the United States. That wasn’t true in my prior analysis of the data from 2016 and 2020. It’s not true in these results from 2024 either. Christians, by and large, punch below their weight in the political arena. Education does tend to nudge their activity levels up just a bit, but it’s only marginally. It’s the smaller religious groups who are very much involved in the political process.

Of course some of you are wondering why political engagement tanked in 2024. I don’t know if the data can give us an answer. Maybe it was the fact that Trump had been on the ballot for three elections in a row. Maybe it’s because Kamala Harris was unable to really whip the Democratic coalition into a fervor about her candidacy. But regardless of the cause, the 2024 election will not be remembered as a super high engagement affair.

Code for this post can be found here.