There were a number of interesting takeaways from the latest detailed 2024 election analysis, but I focused on the very big picture at New York:
Researchers are just now gaining access to complete data on what actually happened in the 2024 elections via voter files and Census materials.
The progressive data firm Catalist just issued its report on 2024, and much of what it tells us is a familiar story by now:
“Overall, we find that the Democratic Kamala Harris / Tim Walz ticket retained key parts of the Biden 2020 coalition, but at lower levels among a specific, interconnected set of subgroups, including young voters, men, voters of color, less frequent voters, urban voters, and voters living outside the major battleground states. No single demographic characteristic explains all the dynamics of the election; rather we find that the election is best explained as a combination of related factors. Importantly, an overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.
“While these groups tilted toward Donald Trump and JD Vance, Harris retained support among more consistent voters, particularly in battleground states. Together, these dynamics allowed the Trump / Vance ticket to secure a narrow popular vote plurality and a sweep of the major swing states.”
The details, of course, are still interesting, particularly when Catalist gets down into the demographic weeds:
“Over the past several general elections, Democratic support has continued to erode among voters of color. Drops from 2020 to 2024 were highest among Latino voters (9 points in support), lowest among Black voters (3 points), and 4 points for Asian and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI) … As with other demographic groups, support drops were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support among young Black men dropped from 85% to 75% and support among young Latino men dropped from 63% to 47%.”
But sometimes important data points emerge only when you look at them from 30,000 feet. Given all that we know about the erosion of public trust in institutions, steadily negative perceptions of the direction of the country, a long-term trend away from partisan self-identification, and the savage and alienating tone of contemporary political discourse, you’d guess that voter participation would be sliding into a deep ditch. But it isn’t:
“The 2024 election was a continuation of incredibly high turnout following Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, particularly in the battleground states. Since the start of Trump’s first term, voters have remained highly engaged in the political process.
“According to data from the United States Election Lab compiled by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald … voter turnout spiked from 60% in 2016 to 66% in 2020 — the highest voter turnout in over a century, higher than any election since women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights era. Turnout dropped to 64% in 2024, but this drop was concentrated in non-competitive states, with some battleground states exceeding their 2020 turnout.”
So in a country where so many citizens seem to hate politics, voting is occurring (in relative terms) at historically high levels. Catalist doesn’t go into the possible explanations, but three come to mind right away.
First, despite recent Republican efforts to go back to a system dominated by in-person voting on Election Day, convenience-voting opportunities have steadily spread with voting by mail and/or in-person early voting available nearly everywhere, increasingly without conditions. In most jurisdictions, registering to vote has gotten easier in the 21st century, though, again, recent Republican initiatives to require documentary proof of citizenship and promote frequent “purges” of voter rolls definitely threaten to reverse that trend.
Second, competitive elections tend to produce higher voter turnout, particularly at a time of partisan and ideological polarization, when the stakes associated with winning or losing are heightened. Six of the seven most recent presidential elections have been very close either in the popular vote or the Electoral College or both. Control of either the House (2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022) or Senate (2002, 2006, 2014, and 2020) has changed in every midterm election of the 21st century. This level of instability over such an extended period of time is unusual and arguably galvanizing.
Third, the amount of money going into voter mobilization and persuasion in national election cycles has been steadily rising. The campaign-finance tracking site OpenSecrets has shown that in inflation-adjusted dollars, total spending has nearly tripled between 2000 and 2024 in both presidential and midterm elections. 2020 was actually the most expensive election ever with $7.7 billion (again, in inflation-adjusted dollars) going into the Trump-Biden race and $10.6 billion devoted to congressional campaigns. The slightly lower number for 2024 may have been attributable to the incredibly intensive targeting of resources on the seven battleground states, where, overall, as Catalist showed, turnout actually went up a bit from 2020.
These three factors do not, of course, take into account the much-discussed possibility that Donald Trump and his radicalized party are responsible for excited or fearful hordes of Americans going to the polls. But while voting patterns in Trump-era midterms are a bit different from those in the presidential elections when his name has been on the ballot, turnout has been elevated in the midterms, too. Indeed, the leap from a national turnout rate of 37 percent in 2014 to 50 percent in 2018 (dropping only a bit to 46 percent in 2022) remains one of the largest and most astonishing jumps in voter engagement in living memory.
Will these patterns change when (presumably) Trump leaves the scene in 2028? Nobody knows. But the anecdotal impression that Americans have grown tired of politics, and even government, during the Trump years hasn’t translated into unwillingness to vote.
Most of the Democratics running for President are calling for the repeal of the “Bush Tax Cut for the rich”. Has everyone forgotten that in 1963 President Kennedy gave a 20% tax cut to the 1% richest Americans? Makes the 3.5% Bush cut seem like small change to me. Besides, in 1963, the richest 1% were only paying 10% of total income taxes and today they are paying 37% of total income taxes. Looks like hipocracy to me!!
Thanks for posting Bush’s approval rating in this poll. It’s not on http://www.pollingreport.com
BTW, Dean trails Bush 51-46, which corresponds exactly with the likely/unlikely numbers. It’s also encouraging to read how Bush isn’t doing so well with independents. That’s a trend that was very pronounced before Saddam’s capture.
Chris Matthews was going on this weekend about popular and unbeatable Bush is. What a clueless fuck.
About the failure to publicize the poll results, democrats.com has encouraged people to send a graph to CNN of the trends in their own poll. This I have done (though I looked up CNN’s procedure for this first; it’s at http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form12.html?1).
I suspect that much of the media bias against Democrats is structural more than it is intended. I have noticed, especially on television, that “journalists” waste almost all of their coverage on the “meta-campaign”. In other words, they talk about the campaign, rather than about the statecraft for which the campaign exists.
A perfect example was the clownish performance of Ted Koppel at the Democratic debate a few weeks back. Koppel asked, for instance, questions about how much money the candidates’ campaigns had, how well or badly they were doing in the polls, etc. More recently, C-SPAN had coverage of a local Iowa political chat show, and the commentators were discussing the same sort of campaign nuts and bolts, with nothing about the actual conduct of government. This is appalling. It is infantile for the primary sources of public information to neglect the topic of statecraft so completely. You could make a “Davey and Goliath” episode out of this: “Davey misses the point of delivering news, but learns from his mistake.”
So how does this work against Democrats? Pretty simply, actually. Watching the way things are going now that the Republicans are mostly in charge, it is evident that Republicans, as a whole, are about as capable of running the country as second and third graders; if you included Lisa Simpson, then the grade schoolers would be vastly superior. If one party is more statesmanly than the other, and the information sources are unable or unwilling to discuss statecraft, then the more idiotic party is going to get better coverage.
It does my heart good to see polls indicating that Bush is not where he wants to be. But I think we make a grave error by gleefully proclaiming them as having much importance, especially at this point in time. If we sit back waiting for Bush to self-destruct, we lose again.
It’s time to start planning on how we can WIN the election. If we wait for Bush to lose it, we’ll be sorely disappointed yet again.
Greg,
Good point, and I have to ride my Dean hobby horse here: Democrats will not win by proclaiming to the world that Bush’s war is a huge success that’s made Americans much, much safer. This is just folly, especially when polls show that between 60 and 78 percent of Americans already believe that Saddam’s capture didn’t make us safer. Dean’s comment was controversial only within the deeply conservative confines of the mainstream commentariat.
Steve,
Yes, I too am frustrated by the relative lack of media coverage of polls that show bad news for Bush. In fact, I am in even more despair lately over the state of the media in our country. I thought perhaps that Gore’s mauling had to do mostly with personality issues — the Beltway Heathers just didn’t like him. But now, we begin to see how the press gangs up on all the Democrats (have you seen the AP coverage of the Sunday debate? covered extensively here in the blogosphere — kos, atrios, calpundit). Just depressing. I continue to write letters to the editor just to make sure somebody gets the message that Democrats are watching.
One of the more interesting aspects of this just released poll is how little publicity it received over the weekend. Any uptick in the Bush numbers is typically headlined in USA Today and the networks while this poll barely received a mention.
One of the more interesting aspects of this just released poll is how little publicity it received over the weekend. Any uptick in the Bush numbers is typically headlined in USA Today and the networks while this poll barely received a mention.
This bears out what I’d always assumed about Saddam’s capture – it would be politically insignificant. What we’re fighting in Iraq is much more complex than just “Baathist holdouts,” and involves Islamists and nationalists as well.
Exposing the deceptions in the case for war has to be part of the Democrats approach, of course, but the bottom line question is, after investing significant blood and vast treasure — has the Iraq War make Americans safer from terrorism? I think we Democrats have a very good shot at convincing people in the center of the political spectrum that the answer is a resounding “no.”
Greg Priddy