Dazed Democrats, including yours truly, are trying to understand why so many top pundits were wrong about yesterday’s presidential election. Not all of the political analysts were wrong. Ruy Teixeira, whose work frequently appears in these pages and at The Liberal Patriot and Washington Post, has been warning Democrats for years to stop doing ‘unpopular stuff.’ See also Ed Kilgore’s nuanced analysis in his recent TDS post.
There are already some good ‘election take-away’ articles floating around (see here, here and here, for example). Here are some points from James Oliphant’s “Takeaways From the US Presidential Election” at Reuters, via U.S. News:
The national exit poll of voters conducted by Edison Research underscored what public opinion surveys had long shown: Voters are in a bad mood and have been for some time.
Three-fourths of voters surveyed by Edison said the country was going in a negative direction. Of those voters, 61% went for Trump. Of the voters who called themselves “angry,” 71% backed the Republican.
Voters who said the economy was their top concern broke 79%-20% for Trump, according the poll.
It is once again the economy, stupid. No matter how frequently Dems deployed favorable ‘recovery’ statistics, voters weren’t feeling it at the gas pump and grocery stores.
Perhaps the biggest shocker: “Voters who believe abortion should be a legal procedure in most instances surprisingly only backed Vice President Harris 51%-47%, suggesting Trump’s efforts to blur his position may have partially negated one of her largest advantages….Trump opposed a federal abortion ban but said states are free to pass laws as restrictive as they choose. He also became a vocal advocate for having insurers cover the cost of in-vitro fertilization treatments.” It appears that “reproductive freedom” had a relatively short shelf-life and was not well-sold to the electorate.
It also looks like voters didn’t buy into all of the January 6th and ‘save our democracy’ memes as more important than their economic status. As Oliphant notes,
Perhaps most notably for Harris, the three-fourths of voters who said U.S. democracy felt “threatened” split their vote evenly between the two candidates.
While Democrats have pointed to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as proof of his authoritarian tendencies, Trump has argued that he was a target for politically minded prosecutors in the Biden-Harris administration.
Clearly, Harris couldn’t make that sale at a time when voters are feeling growing economic insecurity.
As regards the Trump campaign’s quest for more support from non-white voters:
In North Carolina, exit polls showed Trump boosting his share of the Black vote to 12%, from 5% in 2020. He garnered the support of 20% of Black male voters, the poll said.
According to the Edison national poll, Trump’s support among Latino male voters jumped 18 percentage points from four years ago.
Trump was up 11 percentage points with Latino voters in Nevada, according to the poll, and up 4 points in Arizona from four years ago.
He was projected to win in North Carolina despite exit polls showing a five-point slide in support among white voters compared to four years ago.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s support among white voters dropped three percentage points compared to four years ago, Edison said – and his support was down four points among white male voters.
Even so, white voters were on pace to comprise a larger share of the electorate than four years ago.
According to preliminary results from the national exit poll conducted by Edison, 71% of voters nationwide were white, compared with 67% in Edison’s 2020 exit poll.
“In Pennsylvania,” Oliphant adds, “Trump was maintaining close to the same level of support among white women voters that he enjoyed in 2020. That was also true in Georgia.
North Carolina, on the other hand, showed some real potential erosion for Trump. He dropped seven points among white women compared with four years ago, Edison said.
Trump’s campaign, conversely, paid significant attention to pulling in male voters, particularly young men, through social media, sports, podcasts and online gaming.
National exits showed Harris picking up less support among women – 54% – than Biden did in 2020 when he gained 57%.
In terms of age,
The national exit poll showed Trump slightly edging Harris among men between the ages of 18 and 44 and beating her solidly with men 45 and up.
In Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump was up five percentage points with overall voters under 45 compared with four years ago. In Nevada, he jumped six points with those voters.
Trump won new voters, a relatively small share of the electorate, by nine percentage points over Harris.
But at the same time, Trump appeared to be losing ground with older voters, according to the polls.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s share of voters 65 and older fell 11 points from 2020. In Michigan, he fell six points.
Trump won the 65-and-over vote over Biden in 2020 by three percentage points. In the Edison national poll for 2024, Harris and Trump were essentially tied.
Although this Reuters report did not address the immigration issue, it has been a major problem for Democratic candidates, particularly Harris. It would be instructive to see a tally of the ads attacking Harris for America’s border insecurity, despite the fact that Republicans refused to even consider a bipartisan immigration reform bill. Andrew Levison has written insightful strategy memos about the issue and its political implications at The Democratic Strategist.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-tale-of-two-machines…
“An influential faction of Democrats moved very deliberately, and semi-successfully, to expel Wall Street and Silicon Valley Democrats from the coalition.”
If this take is what ends up prevailing once again, then Democrats in fact don’t deserve to win.
Tired of reading that there is nothing different Kamala could have done.
She could have apologized for inflation, instead of following the party line of gaslighting people on the state of the consumer economy (rising consumer debt).
She could have said (at least implicitly) that she thought Biden made a mistake by delaying the closure of the border.
She could have said that she stands with America’s workers and manufacturers against Chinese imports.
She chose wrong.
For reasons that will continue to haunt Democrats.
The professional class’ commitment to globalization is next to intact. They only want to hide it for a while.
In fact, most of the “serious” thinkers from the party have been pushing for months for a return to Clinton/Obama centrism on fiscal issues.