Matt Grossman conducts a panel discussion on “Class, race, gender, and the 2024 election” with four political analysts, Patrick Ruffini, Ruy Teixeira, Amanda Iovino  and Thomas Edsall at the Niskanen Center. If you’re a political junkie, you will want to read the whole thing. Here’s a sampling of observations from the participants: Iovino – “And really, as we’re looking through all of this, there’s no greater division in the country really right now than college-educated women and non-college-educated men. It’s really Mars and Venus in the old terminology….It was a 48-point gap with these non-college-educated men and college-educated women actually voting the exact inverse of each other, 61% of non-college men voting for Trump, 61% of college-educated women voting for Harris.” Edsall – “I think the interesting thing is whether the Democratic Party has now really passed a tipping point and whether the domination of the party by basically very liberal white Democrats has now reached the point where the party cannot go back and try to readjust its views on controversial issues in a way that would be designed to appeal to working-class voters….Trump seems to be basing his administration entirely on who is loyal to him as opposed to who can get things done that will be beneficial to building the Republican party. And I think he’s blowing an opportunity, and it may turn out that we will have a 2026 and 2028 elections where people simply reject the incumbent party. Ruffini – “We did a poll, our final pre-election survey, and we asked what was the thing you most remember from the last month of the campaign? And it was the McDonald’s thing.”

“And very few of Harris’s events, interviews, broke through,” Ruffini continues. “The events that she took two days off the campaign trail to do, either the big rallies or the big network interviews that she finally did, none of those broke through nearly as much as the images that Trump was able to project in those final closing weeks of the campaign….And Trump really had retained that advantage on the economy all throughout the election cycle, and particularly on the cost-of-living issue.” Teixeira – “I think the kind of mistake here is assuming that if your party has an image that is negative on issues like crime and immigration, on sort of racial and gender ideology, on sort of being too obsessed with climate stuff or whatever it might happen to be, being against fossil fuels, you can negate that simply by a couple months of advertising and not talking about it anymore….there’s a difference between that and being able to convince voters you truly have a different point of view and a different set of policy priorities, and you actively denounce, disengage, throw under the bus the people who’ve been advocating the stuff that is really unpopular, and that’s the proverbial Sister Souljah moment, right? You don’t just not talk about dumb stuff, you actually call out the dumb stuff and the people who say the dumb stuff, and that creates controversy…. Creating controversy is good when you want to make an impression about an issue like this and really unambiguously signal you are a different kind of Democrat. They never did that and they couldn’t do it with the kind of modest approach they had in the last few months of the campaign.”

At Brookings, William A. Galston discusses why “The polls underestimated Trump’s support—again,” and writes: “….the final FiveThirtyEight average showed Harris with 48% of the popular vote, almost exactly what she is likely to get when all the votes are counted. But the same average gave Trump only 46.8%, at least three points less than what he received….The same was true of the seven swing states. The final FiveThirtyEight polls missed Harris’ performance by an average of less than 0.5 points (two overestimates, seven underestimates) but underestimated Trump’s performance in each of the seven states, by an average of 2.6 points….One possible explanation is that there was a late surge toward Trump, and the CNN exit poll offers some evidence for this. Of the voters who said they made their decision during the last week of the campaign, 54% opted for Trump, compared to 42% for Harris. For those who decided in just the last few days, the breakdown was 47% for Trump and 41% for Harris….Combining the findings from the three most recent presidential elections, I conclude that today’s polling instruments and techniques are not well designed to measure the kinds of voters for which Trump has a distinctive appeal. Some have suggested that because many Trump voters seem to be staunchly anti-establishment and suspicious of authority, they may systematically refuse to answer pollsters’ calls. Another hypothesis is that the criteria pollsters use to determine “likely” voters screen out the kinds of people who are inclined toward Trump.Whatever its source, it is possible that this “Trump effect” will vanish when he leaves the scene. But it is safer to assume that the transformation of the Republican Party that he has engineered means a higher share of hard-to-detect voters than we saw before 2016.”

“Democrats should stop mocking Trump’s ground game and start learning from it,’ Astra Taylor writes at The Guardian and observes: “Trump succeeded, at least in part, because he is a man who will say anything and do anything to win. And of course he was boosted by conservative media – by Fox News talkshows, conspiratorial podcasts, manosphere influencers, deceptive deepfakes, targeted ads, and “First Buddy” Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X. But he also won because he had a strong ground game, even if it occasionally blundered and often looked different from what observers and experts expected from a get-out-the vote drive, including its use of “untraditional” and “micro-targeted” strategies aimed at reaching low- and mid-propensity voters who didn’t fit the usual Republican profile, including Latinos, Black men, and Asian and Arab Americans. The rocky launch of Musk’s new political action committee, America Pac, which hired canvassers in key areas, became a punchline, but it was last-minute outreach that supplemented other efforts. (And America Pac is no joke: Musk has invested $120m in the project and is already planning for the 2026 midterms and beyond.)….When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black leftist magazine Hammer & Hope, the right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding progressive student unions and networks and building up their conservative counterparts. The Charlie Kirk-founded and Republican billionaire-funded Turning Point USA claims to have “freedom chapters” at more than 3,500 colleges and high schools, which offer young conservatives a sense of belonging and community, leadership development, and pathways to political engagement, of which get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are just one part.”