I’m on record as suggesting that Democrats not waste too much time on recriminations over 2024 while the wolf of Trump 2.0 is at the door. But there are some lessons relevant to the challenges right before them, and I tried to discuss at few at New York:
The ritualistic “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” that ensued after the Republican election victory of 2024 was cut somewhat short by the brutal realities of the real-life consequences of letting Donald Trump regain power with a Republican-controlled Congress and all sorts of ridiculous claims of an absolute mandate to do whatever he wanted. But, in fact, while factional finger-pointing might have been are a self-indulgent luxury an opposition party living under the MAGA gun can’t afford, there are some lessons from the election results that are important to internalize right now. Here are a few.
For much of the 2024 campaign, a lot of observers believed that the only way Trump could win was if Democrats failed to mobilize their party base, either out of complacency or because key constituencies were disgruntled with Joe Biden (and, to a lesser extent, with Kamala Harris once she became the presidential nominee). An enormous amount of money, time, and effort went into securing maximum turnout among young, Black, and Latino voters on the theory that if fully engaged, they’d win the day. And in the end, these constituencies did turn out reasonably well (a bit less than in 2020, but more than in 2012 or 2016). Trouble was, too many of them voted for Donald Trump.
No, Trump didn’t win Black, Latino, or under-30 voters overall, but his performance in all those groups improved significantly as compared to 2020. Among Black voters (per AP Votecast, the most reputable exit poll), he doubled his percentage of the vote, from 8 percent to 16 percent. Among Latinos, his percentage rose from 35 percent to 43 percent. And among under-30 voters, his share of the vote jumped from 36 percent to 47 percent. Meanwhile, the GOP advantage in the Donkey Party’s ancient working-class constituency continued to rise, even among non-white voters; overall, Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. The Democratic base fractured more than it faltered. And there were signs (which have persisted into early 2025 polling) that defections have made the GOP the plurality party for the first time in years and one of the few times since the New Deal.
While rebuilding the base (while expanding it) remains a crucial objective for Democrats, just calling it into the streets to defy Trump’s 2025 agenda via a renewed “resistance” isn’t likely to work. Many former and wavering Democrats need to be persuaded to remain in their old party.
Republicans have massive incentives to pretend that all their messages struck home, giving them an argument that they enjoy a mandate for everything they want to do. But the honest consensus from both sides of the barricade is that demands for change to address inflation and immigration were the critical Trump messages, with doubts about Joe Biden’s capacity to fulfill the office and Kamala Harris’s independence from him exacerbating both.
What we’ve learned in 2025 is that Trump has considerable public backing to do some controversial things on these issues. A 2024 poll from Third Way showed a majority of swing voters agreed that excessive government spending was the principal cause of inflation, a huge blow to Democratic hopes that rising costs could be pinned on corporations, global trends, supply-chain disruptions, or, indeed, the previous Trump administration. But this wasn’t just a campaign issue: Trump took office with some confidence that the public would support serious efforts to reduce federal spending and make government employees accountable. And the fact that (so far) his approval ratings have held up despite the chaotic nature of his efforts to slash federal payrolls is a good indication he has some wind at his back, at least initially.
If that’s true on inflation, it’s even truer on immigration, where solid majorities in multiple polls support (in theory, at least) the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. If the administration was smart enough to limit its deportation campaign to those convicted of violent crimes, it would have overwhelming public support. But Democrats should fully accept they didn’t just lose votes on this issue in 2024: They lost an argument that persists.
That is why it is critical that Democrats point to evidence that Trump’s own agenda (particularly his tariff policies) will revive inflation that had largely been tamed by the end of the Biden administration, while focusing their immigration messaging on vast overreach, inhumane excesses, and ethnic profiling of Latinos by Team Trump in its efforts to deport immigrants.
Joe Biden in his 2024 presidential campaign (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kamala Harris as his successor) put considerable stock in playing on public concerns about the threat to democracy posed by Trump as evidenced by his conduct on January 6, 2021, and his lawless behavior generally. While these arguments found traction among voters already in his corner, there’s little evidence they mattered much at all to the voters who decided the election in Trump’s favor. Indeed, a considerable percentage of voters worried about a broken political system viewed Trump as a potential reformer as much as an insurrectionist or autocrat.
At the moment, most office-holding Democrats and (more quietly) many Republicans are aghast at how Trump has gone about pursuing his agenda early in 2025, with a blizzard of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and a blank check issued to eccentric billionaire Elon Musk to disrupt federal agencies and intimidate federal employees. Again, Trump is drawing on long-standing public hostility toward the federal government and to the size and cost of government as a spur to inflation and a burden on taxpayers. Fighting him with alarms about his violation of legal and constitutional limitations on presidential power is unlikely to work with an electorate unmoved by Trump’s earlier scofflaw attitude. Voters must be convinced in very concrete terms that what he is doing will affect their own lives negatively. As with tariffs and the immigration policy, Trump’s tendency to overreach should provide plenty of ammunition for building a backlash to his policies.
In 2024, as in 2016, Trump managed to win because unhappy voters who didn’t particularly like or trust either presidential candidate (or their parties) in the end chose to produce a change in party control of the White House and of Congress. In office, Trump and his allies will try to perpetuate as long as they can the illusion that they are still fighting for “change” against powerful interests aligned with the Democratic Party, even though it’s Republicans who control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and also dominate the U.S. Supreme Court. The idea that Team Trump is a brave band of insurgents speaking truth to power is undermined very specifically by the fact that its chief disrupter, Musk, is the richest man in the world and the first among equals of a large band of plutocrats surrounding the president.
As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn observed during the transition to the second Trump administration, many of the same anti-incumbent tendencies that put a thumb on the scale for the GOP in 2024 will now work for the opposition:
“The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since [George W.] Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11 …
“Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?”
Based on his conduct since returning to the White House and his well-known narcissism, it’s not all that clear that the 47th president even cares about building public support as he ends his political career. That may give him the freedom of the true lame duck, but it also means Democrats can batten on his broken promises and the disappointments they will breed. The 2028 presidential candidate who may be in real trouble is the Republican who succeeds the 2024 winner.
Thanks, Steady and cmac, for saying what’s been on my mind for some time.
There are days when I think I must be insane:
How can I look at the available information and conclude that it indicates Bush did not win this election, when so few others look at the same information and come to the same conclusion?
Given the fact that he didn’t win the 2000 election, either, and that questions have been raised about the 2002 midterm elections that, as far as I can tell, have not been resolved, what does this say about our country?
Is democracy finished?
Has Jeb Bush already been selected as our 44th president?
If my worst suspicions are true, then what is the endgame? How far does it have to go before we can talk openly about whether or not it’s happened?
Maybe I’ve missed it but noone seems to be talking about the increasing number of absentee voters. I was at a conference with Warren Miskofsky in July where he acknowledged that as absentee voting increases, at some point exit polling will become meaningless. You can’t interview someone who isn’t there.
I suspect they’ve tried to adjust the numbers by creating another poll of early voters but the margins of error in that type of poll have got to be off the wall.
It’s not hard to explain why Bush supporters were more reluctant to talk to the exit pollers—–a significant proportion of them were aware that support for the president was viewed as intellectually indefensible by the elites of the society and these Bush supporters cared about the opinion of those elites. So they stayed in the closet. I certainly did all I could in Minneapolis to make clear my contempt for any brain that could believe George Bush was a viable choice for president.
As you have been showing all week, a significant number of Bush supporters already supposedly diapprove of him and his policies in opinion polls. Would that they could have thought clearly on Nov. 2!
Occam’s Razor.
It’s so obvious. The exit polls were correct. It’s interesting to watch so many otherwise-sensible people twist themselves into pretzel shapes to avoid acknowledging this. If we continue to ignore it, though, how much hope is there for the future of our democracy?
Thank you for asking exactly the right questions about the E/M exit poll report.
As someone who remembers from my teen years of early political awareness the first uses of exit polling to call races (from about 1970 on) with virtually no tabulated votes in, I have been extremely dubious about the E/M excuses that for some reason air-dropped from nowhere into the 2004 race, exit polling has suddenly become unable to execute its most fundamental logistics competently.
I’ve always been a pretty sober and moderate person politically (thus my screen name), e.g., pissed at McCarthy for not supporting Humphrey in the 1968 general, working for Ed Muskie over McGovern, Hart over Mondale, etc., and was a politically appointee in the Clinton Administration, but in this election I’ve had to go with Emerson that “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” When we can see repeated overt manipulation by avowedly partisan Secretaries of State and Boards of Elections, I don’t see anything implausible about covert manipulation of vote aggregators by avowedly partisan private corporations with the motive, means, and opportunity to do so. I know you, Mystery Pollster, and many other strong Democrats disagree, and I respect that, but the trout are starting to overflow the pitcher.
Think about your prior post, “How Did We Wind Up With Bush?” and the several earlier others here about the lack of any significant bump up in Bush’s approval rating or his major policies despite his election. I also found Bush’s national margin odd in that while Kerry’s margin in the states he won seemed to mirror pretty closely the average of the last state-by-state pre-election polls, Bush’s margins in many states (e.g. MO, TN, AR, NC) seemed to go from 2-5% in the last pre-election polls to 12-15% in the actual voting. Of course these were not “battleground” states so no one was going to be looking very closely at why., and I’ve never heard a plausible explanation or even serious examination.
I fully appreciate and agree with the critiques of Kerry’s campaign from the standpoint of his unwillingness (or persuasion by loser consultants not) to do an effective and forceful Clinton-type rapid response effort against seven months of relentless Bush lies about him, and the failure to learn from Gore’s campaign how much harder but more necessary the corporate media’s stenographic flacking for Bush would make such a response. So it’s clearly not implausible that Kerry lost.
But the polls continue to make it awfully hard to explain November 2 as a genuine and meaningful statement of national opinion. So again, I especially appreciate your asking these questions and urge you to pursue answers. Without more transparency and greater public access to the mechanics of the voting process proper, exit polling is the only check we have on the integrity of the vote. If never-radical 50-somethings like me are starting to question the mechanics of the consent of the governed, it deserves at least this level of continuing scrutiny.