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that people who don't vote have, as a group, political opinions that are statistically identical to those who do. Things can be somewhat different during election campaigns, which is why pollsters go over to 'likely voter' polling from 'registered voter' polling, but outside of campaign season they're statistically insignificant.
People are simply like the people they are around, whether they vote or not.
When you go over to polling 'adults', i.e. the unregistered as well as the registered, there can be differences on the order of 3%. What happens is that you weight in more people in their early twenties (who tend to be fairly clueless about politics and the Parties, and as a group statistically reflect quite exactly their parents' opinions, so they only add noise into the polling) and people disproportionately disenfranchised due to felony convictions, i.e. working class or working poor black men in the South who tend to avoid voluntary involvement with all things government.
As for why Bush still has 40% support.... Well, somewhere between 29% and 32% of the country is what we shorthand as Christian Right. They're far more whites and rural than black or Latino or residents of cities. They are more elderly than young. But they cut across all kinds of demographics. They tend to have occultic (magical) beliefs and either very little education or rather deficient education- 'Bible' or 'Christian' colleges, if that, or the non- or anti-intellectual professions, i.e. 'business'. As they see it, Democrats have the unforgiveable flaw of being intellectualish, of being smarter and more adaptive and more able to forgive and forget and genuine, of being less locked into the miseres of the small town and agrarian or industrial life than they are, of not needing to maintain a system of graft and cronyism and miniondom and threats and partnership in crime to keep jobs and families and real estate together. Democrats don't understand that Tradition aka Christianity is all that keeps them from sinking, that bashing other people is important in the way it distracts from the misery beyond negotiation that fills their lives. They fear Modernity for the way it exposes them- as not knowing much, as not having learned or understood much, for having bought into sophistry that was pure crap, for revealing them as dupes and willing participants in wrongful stuff, for showing how arrogant and hollow and fraudulent they were and are. (Of course, they project these qualities on Liberals.) Modernity removes the racial caste and gender system that was the basis for their relative prosperity and why they haven't been called to account. Modernity removes the hard theism from legitimacy as a force for organizing the country to how they like it.
The other 8-11% are various kinds of other cases. There are the people who want the United States to remain a version of Victorian England forever. There are those whose patriotism is all about defending their pocketbook and raiding others'. There are the suckers for the minor occultisms- Objectivism, 'supply side economics', 'small government', Second Amendment misreadings, 'pro-Israel', demonization of minor criminality, misapplied blame for various traumas, and so on.
Don't worry, the decline rate for their politics and leaders is a remarkable 1% of the electorate per month. A little over a million voters per month are leaving this Republicanism behind and won't go back to it. Sadly we can't increase the rate at which they learn, so that the rate is higher, but living with Bush & Co running under 30% with the electorate a year from now is not going to be real rough on you or me. After the November '06 elections it's going to be rather more like torturing small furry animals (the leaders) or frying ants with a magnifying glass (their followers).
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