As was noted in the comments earlier this week, a post-mortem on the Democrats’ loss in 2024 was recently released by Welcome PAC: Deciding to Win.* The funny thing is that while people like James Carville (i.e., consultants) love this kind of thing, political science types aren’t as impressed.
Here are three examples (noting that Masket is the Director Center on American Politics at the University of Denver and is an expert on American parties, Bernstein holds a PhD in Political Science and is a former polisci professor turned analyst, and Morris is a well-known data analyst).
- Seth Masket: That Democratic post-mortem.
- Jonathan Bernstein: A Mantra for the Democrats. I would note that Jonathan referenced my post from Monday, and I would answer that my goal was not to suggest that focusing on democratic reform is a winning issue. I am making a governing/long-term need argument.
- G. Elliot Morris: The Strategist’s Fallacy in American politics
All of these folks note that the study is well done and impressive, and I would agree.
But I also agree with Masket’s subtitle: “A report reaches the conclusions it wanted to reach.”
I would have readers note Bernstein’s mantra (in the post) but also state that I thoroughly agree with this assessment of the report.
The truth is that there are two substantial biases at work causing trouble. One is the illusion that campaigns determine outcomes. The losing party almost always believes that they could have done things to change that, and in fact it’s always easy to find things that could have been done better. The truth is, however, that electioneering and messaging just aren’t that important.2 Republicans didn’t suddenly lose their ability to run a decent campaign in 2008; what happened that year is that a massive recession started while a Republican was president, and the party suffered. It’s just a mistake to think that the campaigns and candidates were why Barack Obama defeated John McCain that year. The same with 2024. The same with every election year.
The overlapping bias is that people whose job it is to work with words tend to think that proper use of words is more important than it actually is. Not just words, but ideas, images…all of that stuff.3
Elliot notes, among other things,
The report also spends little time discussing the role of inflation in Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024, and frames the economy as an exclusively Democrat vs Republican problem instead of acknowledging an incumbent vs opposition dynamic at play last year — a big mistake that I have covered before.
And also,
But my biggest problem with the report is with the conclusion itself. The report suffers from something I’m going to call the “Strategist’s Fallacy” in politics — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters. They implicitly assume all voters make choices and select candidates the same way elites do. This is wrong for several reasons, which I will explain.
[…]
The Strategist’s Fallacy, simply put, is the incorrect belief that voters think like strategists — i.e., that they hold concrete issue positions and ideological labels and match them up to candidates, like a customer picking an entree off a dinner menu — so the way to win is for a candidate to tweak their individual positions on policy. This mental model does not hold in reality, leading individuals to provide poor assessments of voters’ decisions and organizations to give candidates poor advice.
This fits, I would note, what I am constantly arguing about “messaging” and dovetails with my post on Monday.
As a general matter, I have a set of core objections about the approach that studies like this undertake.
- The country isn’t one big district wherein the median voter can be targeted. While I wish (and that is the appropriate political science term at the moment) that our electoral institutions produced electoral outcomes that better reflected national political sentiment, none of our electoral institutions do that. The Electoral College is the closest we come, and it filters national preference through 51 individual contests that are weighted to privilege some voters more than others.
- Like Bernstein and Elliot both note above, campaigns are not as important as candidates, consultants, or the public thinks they are. Context matters a lot, and the 2024 election cannot be understood without the context of inflation (and, I would argue, general frustration over the pandemic).
- Along those lines, Elliot is correct to highlight incumbency factors that are ignored in purely left/right analyses.
- Given the way that party leadership develops in the United States, as I noted yesterday, this strikes me as a not particularly useful approach. I mean, remember the 2012 post-mortem the GOP did? Yeah, Trump ignored that and then went on to reshape American politics, doing a lot of things that were the opposite of that report.
At any rate, I recommend all of the above posts.
One last passing comment on the framing, which includes the following.
Republicans also moved toward the center on several issues, including moderating their stances on Medicare and Social Security and dropping pledges to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ban abortion nationwide, and pass a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage
It seems to me that it is noteworthy that, despite not trying to repeal the ACA, the last month in particular has shown a real willingness to attack the ACA nonetheless by Congressional Republicans. The entire shutdown is focused on ACA subsidies that the GOP cut, for example, (and many GOP states never expanded Medicaid under the ACA).
Further, attempts at prohibiting same-sex marriage via an amendment (which would fail) may be off the table, but there are legitimate hopes in some circles of the GOP that SCOTUS will take care of that problem for them.
*It is no doubt a comment on my age and the way my brain works that “Welcome PAC” made me think of the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter. To my amusement, the first two stanzas (and arguably the whole song) could make for a bit of an ode to the common refrain that the Dems just need to move to the middle.
Welcome PAC
Your dreams were your ticket out
Welcome PAC
To that same old place that you laughed about
Well, the names have all changed
Since you hung around
But those dreams have remained
And they’ve turned around
[…]
Yeah, we tease him a lot
‘Cause we got him on the spot
Welcome PAC
Welcome PAC, welcome PAC, welcome PAC, Welcome PAC, welcome PAC
BTW: I hope this sidebar doesn’t sound too flippant or seem overly denigrating. My brain really did go here immediately, and the lyrics really do fit to me in an amusing way. Let me stress that the report has some quality information and analysis, even if I find the conclusions to be questionable.
