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.
