We’re not as dumb as you think we are. That seems to be the message being sent from many normally reliable black, brown, and young voters who are finding themselves drifting away from Joe Biden and toward Donald Trump.

We get a sense of this drift from a steady stream of recent polling, which shows the Democrats’ advantage among black, Hispanic, and Asian voters to be at its lowest level since John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in 1960. And we get further evidence of this drift from a confidential internal memo sent by a leading Democrat data scientist to around a dozen major Democrat donors “about whether to narrow the focus of voter registration efforts to avoid signing up likely Republicans.”

As the Demo memo from Aaron Strauss laments, “Indeed, if we were to blindly register nonvoters and get them on the rolls, we would be distinctly aiding Trump’s quest for a personal dictatorship.”

I know it’s hard to believe, but the Democrats’ longstanding efforts to register voters haven’t been based on some noble concept of voting as the ultimate expression of “our democracy.” Instead, they’ve been based on a simple calculation that most of these unregistered voters are natural Democrats.

Indeed, The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer and Sabrina Rodriguez come right out and say the quiet part out loud: “For decades,” they write, “nonpartisan groups allied with the Democratic Party have run wide-ranging efforts aimed at increasing voter registration among people of color and young people — groups that tend to lean Democratic but have historically voted at lower rates than older and White people.”

Perhaps what frightens these Democrat operatives most is that these unregistered voters might be asking themselves the all-important question that Ronald Reagan posed to the American people during his one-and-only debate with then-incumbent President Jimmy Carter back on October 28, 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Suffice it to say that this question doesn’t inspire voters to come out for Joe Biden, whether the issue is the price of groceries on the shelves, the effects of nine million illegals having poured across our southern border, the feeling that crime in our streets is out of control, or the unmistakable sense that the world has become a much more dangerous place on Biden’s watch.

Black, brown, and young people aren’t impervious to these problems. And though they might not be able to articulate the evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — that food prices have gone up 25% since March 2020, or that rent has gone up 22%, or that credit card debt has gone up 47% — they can feel these things in their bones, just like the rest of us.

So the Democrats have a problem: Their GOTV (get out the vote) intentions are turning into a GOTTV (get out the Trump vote) reality. Strauss’s solution is simple — and nakedly partisan:

He called on donors to nonpartisan nonprofits to also donate to political groups that focus voter registration spending on “specific, heavily pro-Biden populations” like Black Americans, while using more targeted techniques among other groups to filter out likely Trump supporters. Campaigns, parties or super PACs can more directly target who they try to register. They frequently hire canvassers who wear candidate or issue-focused clothing or use other messaging to attract their voters and repel others.

This should be a wake-up call to Republicans — and especially to Michael Whatley, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee. Whatley, to his credit, seems keenly aware of the two issues that decide elections these days: getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.

The 2020 presidential election was decided by fewer than 43,000 votes in three swing states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Thus, if the RNC is laser-focused on getting out the vote and protecting the ballot in those three states, as well as in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, the Democrats won’t be able to drag Joe Biden (or any other Democrat) across the finish line on November 5.