At The American Prospect, Stanley B. Greenberg makes the case that “Donald Trump Won as the Champion of Working-Class Discontent,” and writes, “Donald Trump won the 2024 election because he was the change candidate who championed working-class discontent. He also successfully branded Kamala Harris, so voters worried about the kind of changes she would bring….Harris had been speaking to more powerful currents of working-class discontent, and that put her in the lead. She promised to help with the cost of living, blamed monopolies for inflation, and vowed to shift power from the billionaires to the middle class. But she became ambivalent about championing those changes. That allowed Trump to regain momentum and win….I do not believe Trump’s winning coalition will endure. Trump won a mandate on immigration, prices, and anti-“woke” policies, but he’s can’t maintain all of those priorities. Prices won’t rapidly fall unless there’s a damaging recession. His policies may raise interest rates, mortgage payments, and credit card debt. Tariffs may raise prices. And Trump is going to give the billionaires and big corporations the sweetest tax cut possible and make it as hard as possible for workers….The Biden administration acted impressively to address the pandemic and provide unprecedented levels of household support. Legislative action reduced health care expenses, invested in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, encouraged the climate transition, and made big corporations pay more tax. The regulatory agenda showed support for unions and checks on monopolies. But Biden’s job approval was taken down by inflation and migration, like so many other leaders around the world, though other elements of his presidency contributed to his having the lowest approval for a president seeking re-election in recent memory….OUR ELECTION WAS DOMINATED BY TWO ISSUES. The most important was the hard-working middle class being hit by high prices and the cost of living, while big corporations make super profits at its expense. The second was the border, and the perception that immigrants were both responsible for rising crime and prioritized for public services, while U.S. citizens went to the back of the line. Both issues saw a double-digit rise in their importance….Despite Trump’s effective campaign on his agenda, the cost of living was still the top worry by far—fully 18 points above immigration and the border….I could not get people to understand the significance of our base voters putting the cost of living 20 points higher than the next problem. If you don’t start there, they won’t listen. Working people are struggling to pay the bills each month or stay out of poverty. They are looking for empathy and for you to battle the bad guys.”

More election analysis from “The Working Class Has Left the Building” by Jared Abbott at Jacobin: “Remember back in 2016 when Chuck Schumer confidently asserted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”? If there was any doubt before, there is none now: Senator Schumer was wrong….All signs indicate that Donald Trump made substantial inroads among the working class in November. The best data currently available from AP VoteCast indicates that the Democrats’ share of non-college-educated voters fell from an already low 47% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris maintained strong support among college-educated voters, receiving 56% of their vote. Interestingly, given the Harris campaign’s considerable efforts to reach female voters, the data suggests that her support among college-educated women actually fell 4 percentage points relative to Joe Biden, whereas her support from college-educated men was only 1 point lower than Biden’s. Among college-educated white men, we even see a slight improvement over Biden in 2024….If we look at income rather than education, the change is even more significant: support for Harris among voters making less than $50,000 per year fell to 48%, a 6-point decline from Biden in 2020. By contrast, voters making more than $100,000 per year showed only a very slight dip in support between 2020 and 2024, from 54% to 53%.” Yes we know, exit poll data has all kinds of problems, so much so that some poll analysts consider them basically worthless. But for now, it is all we have until the Catalist data comes out next year.

Carmen Nobel addresses the question, “In the 2024 US election, which sources informed voting decisions the most?” at Journalists Resource: “Between Aug. 30 and Oct. 8, a team of researchers at four universities surveyed thousands of American adults and asked the following question: When making a decision about voting, including candidates for office and ballot initiatives, what is your most important source of information?….The online survey was conducted as part of the Civic Health and Institutions Project, which provides national and state-level opinion and behavior data on a wide variety of topics. Also known as CHIP50, the project is a joint collaboration of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University; the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Harvard Medical School; the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University; and the Department of Political Science and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University….Among the key findings of the latest CHIP50 survey, which collected 25,518 responses from Americans across the U.S.:

• Discussions with friends/family and news stories were the top two primary sources of election information in 2024, at 29% and 26%, respectively. Recommendations from clergy (2%) and social media (9%) were among the other primary sources.
• Democrats and Independents were more likely to rely on news stories as their primary source of election information than Republicans. A larger percentage of Republicans listed friends and family as their primary source of election information than did Democrats or Independents.
• Americans who had not attended college were more likely to rely on friends and family for election information than Americans with more formal education, who were more likely to rely on the news media.
• Asked specifically which news media sources were most important to them when making a voting decision, 41% of respondents selected national TV news as the top news media source.

“Across US states, the reliance on national news for election information was highest in
Connecticut (26%), Massachusetts (26%), and Nevada (25%), while the states where people were most likely to rely on local news were Hawaii (14%), Louisiana (13%), and South Carolina (12%),” the researchers write.

Michael Tester explains “How immigration swung voters of color to Trump” at 538: “Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration….There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes….As politicians and the media shifted from criticizing unpopular Trump-era policies like family separation to expressing concern about the record number of border crossings under Biden, Americans’ opinions moved in a similar direction….Those sizable shifts were not limited to any single racial or ethnic group, either. In fact, the chart below shows that the percentage of white, Latino and Black Americans who agreed with the statement “immigrants drain national resources” all increased dramatically from June 2020 through December 2023 in YouGov’s biweekly tracker surveys….This same trend appears in the 2016 and 2024 exit polls as well (the 2020 exit poll did not ask about immigration). The share of Black voters who preferred deporting unauthorized immigrants to offering them a path to citizenship doubled from 12 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, the share of Latinos said the same increased from 17 percent to 27 percent….We’ll need more post-election data to help pinpoint the causes and durability of Trump’s surging support from voters of color. But these preliminary findings strongly suggest that immigration attitudes are a big piece of the puzzle. They also dovetail with prior political science research showing that voters of color who had shifted to Trump from 2016 to 2020 had more conservative views about race and immigration….So, even though voting was less polarized by race and ethnicity in 2024 than it’s been in the past, racial attitudes and opinions about immigration are more important than ever in explaining many people’s votes.”