I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.
Gareth,
As Ruy (and many others) have pointed out, professionals have drastically shifted from being strongly Republican to Democratic. This shift has already had profound effects – for example, making urban districts very difficult for Republicans to win (the minorities and younger professionals tend to live in urban areas in higher percentages, while managers tend to reside in the suburbs). Managers (as distinct from professionals) remain strongly Republican. This distinction is also important in deciphering the North/South divide, as the larger Nothern urban areas tend to be more skewed towards professional services (law firms, financial institutions, advertising, media, healthcare) while most Southern cities’ economies are focused on managerially dominated firms (retail chains, travel, food industries and so on). Of course, there are many large exceptions to that.
According to the 2000 national exit poll, Gore carried African-Americans 90-9 with 1 percent for Nader. Gore also carried Asian Americans 55-41, with 3% for Nader and 1% for Buchanan. I don’t have a breakdown for students, but Gore carried voters aged 18-29 by a margin of 48-46, with 5% for Nader, and 1% for Buchanan.
I agree with Publius that most voters establish a partisan preference in their first few elections, and are very apt to remain with that party. It would be very encouraging, and strong evidence for the emergence of a clear Democratic national majority, if Kerry and Edwards can keep anything like the 58-37 margin among students they enjoy in the Harvard poll, and extend it over the next two presidential elections to the non-students in the 18-29 age group.
I don’t have data, but it seems to me that Reagan ran well among younger voters, and that they were Perot’s best group as well as Nader’s.
What was Bush’s approval rating among blacks in 2000?
I read that Kerry was writing his own speech for the convention, which would then be gone over by speechwriters.
Can you imagine if Bush wrote his own speech? {giggle}
Ruy: Single most important poll result I’ve seen so far this campaign (and apologies if you already noted it in your very long post which I haven’t quite made it through):
LA Times question: Among those voters (about 60%) who know enough about Kerry to evaluate him, he leads by 10 points. Among those voters who do not know enough, he trails by 12.
Bingo. That’s what’s weird about all the recent polling. To me, this is fabulous news, unless Kerry totally blows the convention (not very likely, based on the speech he gave at the send-off rally in Denver today, which I attended). He leads strongly among those who are clued in, and many of those currently choosing Bush don’t know enough about Kerry AND ADMIT IT.
The race is still on — to define John Kerry. And the man himself has the first best shot at it this week.
HEY! I’ve been paying taxes since I was 17! Bush being gone would be my wildest dream. All I can say is that in my upper-midwest college on the Minnesota/North Dakota border it runs about 55% Kerry, 40% Bush.
Ruy, why ignore Asians?
I believe they’re going to be the largest demo in 50 years or so (overtopping hispanics) and they are mostly republican aren’t they?
It’s a myth that people get more conservative with age. Just look at people over 65- that’s the best Democratic demographic! What in fact happens is that predispositions just get stronger with time. Basicially if you vote for the same party your 3 first presidential elections, you’re pretty much hooked for life. So the political environment during someone’s late teens through mid-twenties are decisive for future political loyalties.
BUt will African-Americans and GenX’ers decideit is important enough to go and vote?
Howdy Ruy!
do you (or any helpful commenters) have the numbers for Bush’s 2000 support among young voters?
Aren’t the young usually a good demographic for Democrats? And isn’t it usually a life-cycle, not cohort phenomenon? (In other words, don’t young college students become conservative professionals when they start paying income tax?)
Now the key is getting all those disaffected college students to actually vote!