1.47%
A reminder.
I understand the ongoing desire to lament Trump’s victory in 2024 and to engage in a constancy of blame over which issue or faction of the Democratic Party is to blame for where we are. While yes, it is possible that had Biden dropped out earlier that the results would have been different. It is possible that some magic message would have swayed the right voters in the right swing states to produce a Democratic president. And sure, there was almost certainly a better candidate than Kamala Harris (there is always a better candidate, especially when we look in the Land of the Hypothetical, so this is not a slam on Harris).
But I keep remembering that Trump won by 1.47% of the popular vote. That he won only 49.81% of the vote (meaning more than half of voters cast ballots against him). And yes, I know that we elect via the Electoral College, which he won by 58% to 42%. And yes, he swept the swing states.
I am not saying it wasn’t a real victory. It was. But the notion that it represents a massive repudiation of the Democratic Party, or that it was specifically about trans rights, or even the border, strikes me as all unsupportable positions.
It is, of course, impossible to re-run the race where Trump’s anti-trans commercials didn’t run or where Harris somehow said some magic statement on the topic. Would that have caused 1.7% of Pennsylvanians to switch their votes from Trump to Harris? Was there some message about the border that would have persuaded the 1.4% gap in Michigan to switch? Or how about a different message on Gaza in that case?
It always seems more like alchemy than chemistry to me when people spout off about how easy it would have been to brew the right concoction that would have won an election.
It continues to be pretty clear to me that inflation was the main driver of the outcome. Keeping in mind, of course, that it is the rare (if not mythical) voter who truly is motivated by only one factor. As I continually note, most voters come to every election pre-wired to vote for the D or the R in accordance with their past voting for the D or the R. Getting people to change from D to R or R to D is hard.
As I noted a couple of years ago, truly “independent” identifying citizens who do not show a strong lean toward either party are somewhere in the 7%-8% level. And these are citizens with a lower propensity to vote. One study by political scientist Corwin D. Smidt in a piece in AJPS found that about 6% of voters are what he called “floating voters” (i.e., swing voters).
In his conclusion, he reinforces what I often argue.
Despite a declining percentage of Americans claiming a party identification, Americans now exhibit the highest observed rates of party allegiance when voting across successive presidential elections. This decline in floating voter rates is primarily a result of all Americans being more stable in their party support, not switchers abstaining from voting. By making it easy for Americans to recognize party differences, polarization has reduced ambivalence and indecisiveness and provided a strong and consistent ideological anchor to Americans’ presidential preferences across time, even for independents and the less aware. Although independents remain slightly less stable in their party support across recent presidential elections, it is difficult to consider them similar to the independents of the past since they are as aware of party differences and as loyal in their party support as strong partisans were prior to polarization. Polarization has not strengthened their sense of partisan loyalty, but the clarity of polarization has effectively allowed independents and the politically inattentive to act as loyal partisans in their behavior.
As such, I am more persuaded that the outcomes of the 2024 election were linked more to inflation than it was to poor messaging on immigration or the unwillingness of the Harris campaign to be stridently anti-trans. I would note that the Democratic Party, and even the Biden and Harris campaigns, moved more rightward on the immigration issue. It did not win the election.
Along those lines, let me note the following from Gallup, roughly a month before the election.
So, only 1% of respondents stated that the economy wasn’t important, and another 9% said it was “somewhat” important. 52% said it was “extremely” important, and 38% said “very.”
I am thinking that the economy was pretty damn important in 2024. And we know that presidential elections are usually a referendum on aggregate public opinion about the incumbent administration. While one can argue that Biden had a successful term in office, he also oversaw the worst inflation the US has experienced in decades. People do. not. like. inflation.
And yes, as noted above, there are plenty of people with views on transgender rights, and maybe that was the issue for some of the 1.47%, but there is reason to believe that Trump would have won if that issue, and even immigration, were off the table.
Note that Trump was willing to make wild promises about grocery and energy prices that Harris would not make (because, let’s face facts, she was more honest than Trump).
It is actually far more likely that a huge chunk of the 1.47% believed those lies and voted for the guy promising lower prices than that they were primarily motivated by immigration policy or issues surrounding trans rights.
By the way, Trump keeps lying about prices.
On balance, I always balk at message-based arguments because they tend to reduce mass behavior to one (or maybe two or three) variables. While, again, there are perhaps individuals who respond to political issues in that way, it isn’t how most people make political assessments. And when looking at mass behavior, you have to look at the entire stew, not just individual ingredients.
There is more than just issues though. Lots of voters want a “strong daddy.” Others care about age related decline.
So it largely comes down to image projection.
Nothing in human history has been specifically about X. Everything is multifactorial.
A movie example: K and I were invited to an early screening of Sinners. I know one of the producers. He’s a fan. Afterward I was cross-examined and so, had to think about it. What worked? What didn’t?
Was there a single element that made it a great movie as well as a successful one? Was it the cast? Yes. Was it the music? Yes. Was it the genre-bending? Yes. How about that amazing Oner? Yes. How about the way this shot or that was framed? Yes. How about the Robert Johnson mythology? Yes.*
If I knew anything about sports I’d use a sports analogy. But I know enough to say, ‘No, it was not all about defense or passing or coaching or the weather.’ It is never about X it’s always XY and Z.
Side note: Do you actually believe people answer questions on race or trans rights honestly? Everyone knows what questions you can’t answer honestly, not to mention the ones you lie about because you want to repeat the common wisdom. Thus economy.
*Incidentally the one note I gave turned out to be wrong.
At 1.47%, it’s entirely possible that the difference was simply people who will never vote for a woman (especially not THAT one). Another significant problem that the Democrats will probably always have to battle is that it’s simply harder to circle the Democrat wagons and point all the rifles outward because of all the disparate interests Democrats represent.
BTW that photo keeps giving me flashbacks to Roadrunner cartoons: Australopithecus moronicus
It couldn’t have been about the economy because everyone that was screaming about the price of eggs and gas for four years no longer care about those things.
Yes. And I think one point that has gotten lost in most of the post-election analyses is that Trump showed his strongest improvements relative to 2020 in states Harris won–in particular solidly blue states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California. He didn’t come close to winning any of those states (NJ being one possible exception, but 252,000 votes is still a significant gap), he just did better than usual for a Republican in them, and sometimes around 10 points better than he did in 2020. In most of the key battleground states, however, he showed comparatively modest improvements from 2020:
+1.49 in Wisconsin
+1.87 in North Carolina
+2.88 in Pennsylvania
+2.43 in Georgia
+4.20 in Michigan
+5.83 in Arizona
What this suggests is that in most of the states where the real campaign activity was happening–the offices, the ads, the canvassing, the GOTV–Harris somewhat overperformed, and that it was the national environment which ultimately cost her, dragging her just behind the finish line in those key states.
This realization conflicts with a common bit of conventional wisdom we’ve been hearing, that Trump succeeded through more careful micro-targeting than she did. There are elements of truth to this (the impact of Gaza in Michigan is impossible to deny), but I don’t think they’re close to the main reason why she lost.
@Kathy:
That’s the “two penis jerk-off dance.”
I always assume he is picturing Putin and Kim Jong-il.
@Michael Reynolds: I suspect that most people answer most questions in careful consideration of the context and environment in which the question was asked. But I think most questions also have more than one “honest” answer. And myriad dishonest ones. Especially race and gender questions.
@just nutha: I meant include anti-female, anti-Black sentiment in the post. Thanks for bringing it up.
1) It’s ALWAYS about the economy, stupid (to paraphrase Clinton). The average person simply don’t care that much about the civil rights of others if they themselves are feeling stressed and worried about them and theirs. That says something pretty bad about humans as a species, but it remains true.
2) In the modern era the actual state of the economy is less important than the perceived state. One side has propaganda networks ginning up outrage (or tamping it down) on demand depending on what is politically convenient. And while the other side is hardly innocent when it comes to spin, the modern difference in degree between the two sides spin and propaganda reach is extraordinary.
3) The older I get the more I think issues simply don’t matter that much in elections. It’s all about the feels. And the more depressed I get.
@Kylopod: I’m more inclined to think that Trump inadvertently stumbled into the micro targeting phenomena that made the difference. Democratic partisans screaming the equivalent of “fwk the Gazans” and asserting that tens of thousands of civilian deaths hardly counts as genocidal probably didn’t help either. But those things are part of the circling wagons/disparate interests point from earlier. A Kinsley gaffe if ever there was one.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
It wasn’t Clinton who came up with that, it was James Carville in a memo to the Clinton campaign. You know, the same Carville who last year penned a column titled “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”
While I agree there’s a great gulf between public perception of the economy and the reality–a factor many of the forecasters failed to account for last year–that Carville quote has been so misunderstood over the years. He wasn’t saying there’s some inviolable rule that the economy determines every election, he was advising the Clinton campaign on how to craft its message most effectively. If the economy had been doing well, he’d have told them to focus on something else.
Still, it does seem to be a fairly consistent historical pattern that the incumbent party is usually voted out during periods of wide economic dissatisfaction. But this is a pretty depressing conclusion, because it suggests that the outcome of elections is largely out of anyone’s control. That’s why a professional campaign operative like Carville, whose entire career is built on his supposed ability to help candidates win, would never have suggested such a thing.
@Kylopod:
I think that there is very much someting to this. There is an illusion of control, but there is a lot less of it than people will admit.
People like Carville can make a career out of winning one election. I am not saying Carville doesn’t have certain skills; he does, but he is just one of many voices, but he gets amplified for one race in 1992 (when, to his point, the voters were dissatisfied with the incumbent because of the economy).
BTW, it seems likely to me that had the GOP put forward a more popular candidate that they would have won in much larger numbers. I know that is all counter-factual speculation, but as much these conversations tend to focus on the Harris loss, the GOP’s candidate wasn’t popular.
@Daryl:
Huh. The rapist strikes me as favoring anal penetration. So, you’d think he’d save Mad Vlad and the Pyongyang Butcher for his oral anus.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Absolutely. It’s the monkeys-on-typewriters situation: they don’t have to write Hamlet, they just accidentally stumble upon the letters W-I-N, and then they’re ensured decades on the Sunday shows until they croak. (Damn, I went so far without mixing my metaphors.)
I don’t intend to spend any time trying to figure out WHY Trump won by 1.47%. I thought Harris/Walz was a great ticket and I really liked their messaging. Coulda, woulda, shoulda – doesn’t matter and Trump never would have made it to the general election had the Republican Senate and SCOTUS done the right thing. (And I think the right thing being disqualification of a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and indicted insurrectionist isn’t open to debate.) I’m disappointed, but them’s the breaks.
But, we should be talking a lot about WHAT 1.47% means to the Trump agenda. He doesn’t have the mandate he claims. His party is vulnerable. His cult is cultish more than they are strong.
Don’t obey in advance. Don’t bend the knee. Don’t cave to Executive Order policy by fiat in absence of legislation. Resist.
@Scott F.:
I am not a fan of the mandate concept as a general matter, but am especially unimpressed with a 1.47% win with a sub-50% popular voter total!
@Steven L. Taylor:
Indeed.
Yet, count how often Vance, Bondi, Miller, Leavitt, Patel, et al., have said in recent weeks something along the lines of “we are only doing what the American people elected us to do” as justification for whatever radical actions the Trump administration is being asked to defend in the media or the courts. Rhetorically and practically, 49.81% equals 100% for Trumpers.
@Scott F.: It is a real problem and one I have been meaning to write about, in fact.
It’s important to remember that there are two necessary factors involved in “I voted for X because Y.” The first is caring about Y; the second, equally important, is believing that X can make Y better.
Kamala Harris lost, not because she was weaker on Y than Trump (for whichever value of Y you care about), but because the pro-Trump media machine lied hard and long and successfully about Y. Voting for Trump because you hate high prices is akin to voting for cancer because you hate pain — and yet tens of millions of Americans did just that.
It’s been frustrating and annoying to read the blizzard of post-election punditry about how Democrats can “win back” the voters they “lost”, including from Democrats themselves who ought to know better. It’s a misconception created by framing the result in terms of the proportion of votes won, as if every election has a fixed electorate and one side’s gain must be at the expense of the other.
Here are the recent Democratic presidential votes minus 2020:
2008 Obama 69,498,516
2012 Obama 65,915,795
2016 Clinton 65,853,514
2024 Harris 75,017,626
Harris in fact did quite well. In terms of % of the eligible voting population, she finished somewhere between Obama’s two victories, neither of which caused an outburst of liberal angst about Democrats “losing the working class”. The perception error arises only if people assume, for no plausible reason, that 2020 represented a dramatic new level of Democratic support which should be regarded as the new norm. But insert 2020 in the figures above and it’s obvious what an anomaly it was:
2008 Obama 69,498,516
2012 Obama 65,915,795
2016 Clinton 65,853,514
2020 Biden 81,283,501
2024 Harris 75,017,626
Biden attracted a whole lot of new voters in 2020. But he didn’t get them from disaffected Republicans! Quite the opposite, in fact. Look at the Republican candidates’ results for those same years:
2008 McCain 59,948,323
2012 Romney 60,933,504
2016 Trump 62,984,828
2020 Trump 74, 223,975
2024 Trump 77,301,997
Trump’s breakthrough year was the year he lost, not 2016. In 2020 Biden and Trump each persuaded more than 10 million Americans to get out and vote for them, most of whom presumably had never voted before. They stayed loyal to Trump and turned out again for him in 2024. Biden’s abandoned him in droves, and they didn’t come back for Harris. That’s the story of the last election. To the extent Democrats “lost” voters, they lost them mainly to apathy, not to Trump.
The 2020 and 2024 elections appear to have been decided by negative emotions: anger on the one side about Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his general incompetence; anger on the other about Democrats’ handling of the pandemic (caused by masterly MAGA propaganda that somehow Fauci and a bunch of other liberals were closing schools and making Americans wear masks etc) and then Biden’s handling of inflation and immigration. Anger at the other side has become the defining characteristic of US politics. It’s likely 2028 will be decided by whichever candidate gives the other the most material to use to generate fury against them on the part of swing voters.