It’s not just the demographics of voters and nonvoters that differ; so do their views. Four questions from the American National Elections Studies (ANES) data show a stark divide on issues related to economic inequality. Nonvoters tend to support increasing government services and spending, guaranteeing jobs, and reducing inequality—all policies that voters, on the whole, oppose. Both groups support spending on the poor, but the margin among nonvoters is far larger. Across all four questions, nonvoters are more supportive of interventionist government policies by an average margin of 17 points.   

Factoring in wealth and race only widens these gaps. Between white voters and nonwhite, nonvoters, there was a 42-point net gap on these questions, and between rich voters and poor nonvoters, the gap was 50 points on average.

Measuring these differences with other data sets produces similar results. I took numbers from Pew and YouGov comparing registered voters with the non-registered population. These polls were not taken close to elections, so registration can serve as a rough proxy for the voting and nonvoting population. The polls show the same dramatic differences. In every instance, net support for greater government intervention in economic affairs was higher for the non-registered populations—sometimes dramatically so. For instance, while net support for free community college was 7 points for the registered population, it was 46 points within the non-registered population.