There’s been a lot of buzz about the fresh analysis of the 2024 elections by Democratic data hound David Shor, so I tried to summarize his findings and their implications at New York:
Arguments over how Trump won and Democrats lost in 2024 remain in the background of today’s political discourse: Trump fans are focused on exaggerating the size and significance of the GOP victory, and Democrats are mostly settling scores with one another. But there’s also some serious analysis of hard data underway. And this week, an election diagnosis from Blue Rose Research’s David Shor, who was interviewed by Vox’s Eric Levitz and the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, is drawing particular attention.
Shor’s findings largely confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump won in 2024, including three main points: (1) Trump made significant gains as compared to his 2020 performance among Black, Latino, Asian American, immigrant and under-30 voters; (2) Trump did better among marginally engaged voters than did Kamala Harris, reversing an ancient assumption that Democrats would benefit from relatively high turnout; and (3) inflation was the overriding issue among persuadable voters, even as Democrats overemphasized the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s return to power.
It’s Shor’s explanation of why these trends occurred that’s most interesting. Among every Trump-trending slice of the electorate, unique pressures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic inflation that followed undermined support for the incumbent Democratic Party. But there were some other things going on. For example, the non-white-voters trends reflected, Shor told Levitz, a delayed ideological polarization that had hit white voters decades ago:
“If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.
“But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.
“You know, white people only really started to polarize heavily on ideology in the 1990s. Now, nonwhite voters are starting to polarize on ideology the same way that white voters did.”
To put it another way, non-white voters were disproportionately loyal to the Democratic Party for many years, and that loyalty inevitably began to wear off. The intense ideological polarization of the 2024 election sped that process along, even though one might expect that Trump’s barely concealed racism and overt nativism would slow it down. Why didn’t they? Mostly, Shor suggests, because Trump-trending voters weren’t viewing or reading media coverage of the 45th president’s horrific views and conduct:
“People who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.
“And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.”
The massive impact of diverse media consumption is most evident in Shor’s analysis of the single-most-stunning finding about the 2024 results: the huge gender gap among young voters, with Trump doing exceptionally well among young men, as he explained to Klein:
“18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics …
“If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.
“If I were going to speculate, I’d say phones and social media have a lot to do with this.”
Klein suggests some very specific points of divergence between young men and young women that Shor agrees with entirely:
“It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.
“Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.”
Finally, Shor provides some definitive evidence that Democratic messaging about Trump’s anti-democratic characteristics fell on rocky ground. By an astonishing 78 percent to 18 percent margin, voters said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important than “preserving America’s institutions.” This finding suggests that in 2024, and right now, Democrats should exploit Trump’s broken promises about the economy and other practical concerns instead of focusing on how Trump has broken those promises. This isn’t a binary choice as much as a perspective on how to talk about outrages like Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, which negatively affects the benefits and services Americans rely on and is intended to benefit Musk’s fellow plutocrats via skewed tax cuts and paralysis of corporate oversight, as Shor told Levitz:
“Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party — namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs. It’s Paul Ryan–ism on steroids.”
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Minnesota will be close, but it is not “in play” in the usual sense. Polls are snapshots of a particular moment in time, and unless you know how to contextualize them — meaning you know something of the details of relevant political history at the local level — they have their limitations. MN is a good example of this.
I would really discount anything about 2002 results in Minnesota — remember, less than two weeks before the election, Paul Wellstone — our ticket topper was killed in a plane crash, and then followed the Republican induced flap over his memorial. The whole GOTV thing fell apart — it had been part of Wellstone’s campaign, and election law blocked all his funds. Turn out in key areas went south without it. Add to this the Independence Party (Jesse Ventura) which had recruited a former 5 term DFL member of congress, Tim Penny — to run for Governor.
In 2000 the Green were making their effort to get at least 5% of the vote so as to become an official party with automatic ballot access, and access to public funding for legislative and state candidates. This was their rational for support, and they did achieve that. They lost it in 2002.
The most recent poll in Minnesota gives Kerry a two point lead over Bush with about 8% undecided. The DFL has to work at it, without question, but assuming they have their act together this time (no statewide offices — no senate campaign) they clearly can deliver for Kerry. The caucus delivered well for Kerry, and everyone is pretty easy with that, even though much of the activist former Wellstone clan had worked hard for Dean.
I suspect every state needs to be characterized in these local dynamic terms, and without it, races can be misunderstood.
Well, I would put TN in red, WA and PA in blue though. I’m also not at all convinced MN is in play, hasn’t it voted Dem in like 5 straight presidential elections? Oregon also seems to have gone Dem 3 straight times, maybe I’m wrong. I would say Arizona, CO, FL, MO, NV, OH, WV, and WI are in play, but I think WV and WI lean our way.
I think it all comes down to if Kerry wins 1 of the following 3 – Ohio, Missouri, or Florida – any of those and he’s in. I’m an optimist; I see him winning FL and Ohio. But things could change.
Bush is in such bad shape for March, I’m pretty sure the elder Bush didn’t trail in ’88 until after the Dem. convention – and he wasn’t an incumbent.. I’m surprised all these pundits on the air act like he’s such a strong incumbent. I think he’s a very weak one. It it weren’t for his “war on terror” approval numbers, there’d be nothing propping Bush up.
Zogby’s analysis seems off to me, I’d put CO and TN in red, WA in blue, and PA in the toss-ups.
Yes I am, very much.
We need to keep the pressure on though, and keep the Rove team on the defensive.