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.”

Jonathan Smucker urges “Democrats, next time try fighting for the working class: The Democratic Party’s decision to abandon working class voters is bearing the expected disastrous results” at aljazera.com. He begins by quoting his father: “I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”….At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are….My father would never dehumanise and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites – the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party….Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for – and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership….In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin….The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024….Ambiguous anti-elitism – again, focused primarily on cultural elites – is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians….It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.”

“The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters,” Smucker continues, “requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket….Even as Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust….The reality is that the Biden/Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish – and what more they attempted to do – primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way….Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal….Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.”

In “Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation,” John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker: “In March, I was a guest at a dinner discussion organized by a progressive advocacy group in New York. As the talk turned to Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, another attendee brought up the skewed media coverage of the President’s economic record, which seemed to be a source of vexation for nearly everyone around the table. I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation….At that juncture, I was still hopeful that, with the U.S. inflation rate falling back toward pre-pandemic levels, there was enough time for public sentiment to shift, and for Biden’s approval ratings to recover. It never happened, of course. According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump….Kamala Harris and the Democrats joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and a number of other incumbents that have been punished by disaffected voters. According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”….To be clear, I’m not arguing that economic factors were solely responsible for the U.S. result. Immigration, the culture war….But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave….William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”….Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on….The great irony, of course, is that the candidate who is promising to raise prices further by imposing blanket tariffs on imported goods emerged as last week’s victor.”

NBC News’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports in “After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party” that “Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans…. As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”….“The narrative that he was able to craft was almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook in terms of focusing on the economy and jobs, bringing manufacturing jobs back, getting tough on China, making sure that working families can put more money in their pocket,” said Liz Schuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the massive labor federation that includes 60 unions that together represent 12 million people….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”

A lot of Democratic voters are feeling disappointed and drained with an inevitable sense of futility that accompanies an electoral defeat. Many are wondering if they should even bother with political activism going forward. It can be dispiriting, especially after losing one of the most important presidential elections in American history.

You will probably hear some political activist friends say they are quitting and getting focused on other things. But now is the wrong time for quitting Democratic politics. Now is the time to get involved in building a stronger, well-rooted Democratic Party. Now is time to admit the errors of the past, but not to dwell on them. Now is the time to open up new directions for party-building.

Sick of presidential disappointments? Check out local races. Democrats are still behind in state and local government representation. Let’s get more Democrats elected to our city councils, state legislatures and congressional districts. Let’s elect more Democratic judges and prosecutors. Let’s get involved in local leadership development. Let’s find more young people to run for office. Let’s give more money to beginners in Democratic politics. Let’s sink deeper roots in our communities.

As a red county resident, I’ve noticed that meetings of our local Democratic Party are very short on younger members. I suspect County Democratic parties all across the U.S. would say the same thing. There should be more conscious exploration of ways to attract  young people. Some creative thinking and activism is needed here. Every county and state party should have a hard-working youth recruitment committee.

Another much-neglected area of needed activism is rebuilding the labor movement. It is no accident that Republicans have worked so hard to crush unions. In addition to their wanting to keep wages low, they know that unions provide Democrats with manpower and money. Weakening unions diminishes both.

Every worker should have union representation, and that should be more of a priority for all Democrats. Democrats should educate themselves about the labor movement and its fascinating history, and then resolve to do something this year to promote union membership in his or her profession or former profession.

A third project that merits more Democratic support is fighting voter suppression, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana. Georgia’s electorate is now about one-third Black, which was instrumental in Democrats winning two U.S. Senate seats –  and majority control of the U.S. Senate – in 2020-21. But Mississippi and Louisiana now both have an even higher percentage of eligible Black voters than Georgia. Rank and file Democrats nationwide, not just leaders, should make financial contributions to Democratic candidates and county and state parties in MS and LA.

These are just three possible new directions for Democratic party-building. There is plenty of room to explore other new paths for building local Democratic groups. Form issue-focused caucuses in local Democratic organizations for environmentalists, health care activists, anti-corruption projects, foreign policy concerns and many others.

Presidential races may be where big media is focused. But it’s not where the seeds of lasting change are sown. Democrats understandably focus much time, money and effort on presidential elections. But that’s not the most effective way to strengthen the party. Tall trees with shallow roots are the most likely to fall.

When I visited an Amish farm many years ago, I remember the tour guide saying that Amish farmers grew more produce per square foot than farmers anywhere else. One of the primary reasons was that they dug a little deeper than other farmers, which gave the roots a head start and more nutrients. The same is likely true for politics.

Lets dig a little deeper as Democrats, so that one day in the not too distant future, we will reap a bountiful harvest with a durable working majority that can move America forward.

If you want to know “Why Democratic Turnout Cratered and Why It Won’t Be Easy to Fix“,” check out Andrew Perez’s Rolling Stone article on the topic. As Perez writes, “On Monday, Rolling Stone spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for Democrats….Podhorzer, who chairs the Analyst Institute and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is an expert in data-driven politics. In a blog post Monday, he writes that the election results were not about Americans embracing Trumpism — but rather a continuation of a trend in U.S. politics: Elections are consistently “change elections,” because “Americans are simply fed up with the system not working for them.” That was the case before the Covid era — and even more so now….Further, he says, the election was no MAGA mandate: “If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for [Joe] Biden in 2020 just stayed home,” Podhorzer writes. “And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.”….Podhorzer suggests the 2024 election results were in part about media coverage that didn’t capture Trump’s threat, as well as Americans’ discontent with an economic system and job market that are more precarious than ever — with neither major political party interested in solving those issues….Rather than ask what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters, Podhozer says the better question is: “What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party?” The other related and necessary collective project, he says, is taking on a Supreme Court that has deemed itself Washington’s only “actual functioning legislative body,” and has fundamentally rewritten the rules of our democracy. ”

In Perez’s interview,  Podhorzer says, “The big difference, what was most alarming this fall, was how much less alarmed everyone was in the media and civil society than they had been four years ago. Four years ago, we had honestly forthright coverage of how bad Trump was, and very much less this time around. And although there were excellent side pieces on that, it was as if the people doing the daily reporting about the election didn’t bother to read it, and just covered it like it was a normal election. People were just not as alarmed….In nine of the last 10 elections, they’ve thrown out either the president or the party controlling the House or the Senate. That never came close to happening with that regularity before. Americans are just fed up with a political system that’s not responsive to their actual needs, or understands the challenges in their lives, or speaks to them, and they’re caught between two bad alternatives, in their minds, and this is the politics we get. All this stuff about, after the fact, doing a head count on this demographic group and that demographic group and all of that is confusing what the effective cause is….A very disproportionate share of those 2020 noncollege Biden voters stayed home. They didn’t move right; they moved away from the political process altogether. The inevitable effect of that is that the noncollege voters in 2024 were more Republican, simply because fewer noncollege Democrats bothered to vote. To be clear — I’m not saying that there were no conversions — there were, but that’s hardly the biggest part of the story. And to be clear this is not meant to suggest that Democrats have nothing to answer for — if anything they have more to answer for, since all they had to do was get them out to vote again.”

Podhorzer observes that “both parties completely ignore the value of job security and the security about the expectations that you need to think about raising a family or having a reasonable, good life. These are all things that the people in the leadership of both parties don’t experience at all. They’re blind to that aspect of what’s going on. And instead, they just look at data like GDP growth or unemployment or all of that, and don’t understand what’s important to them in their own minds — quality of life and relationships, how your kids are doing, their schools — is increasingly cut off for many voters. Instead, it’s then: “Well, why don’t they understand they just got a 10 percent raise after inflation? And they don’t know how good it is.”….in terms of [Supreme Court justices] putting their thumb on the scales, I think that really understates what’s going on. What was going on is that you had a portion of the business community, along with the wealthy, who never wanted to accept the New Deal, and who did not want to accept government intervention in their businesses at all, combined with the Southern, theocratic approach that never accepted the challenges to the social and racial hierarchy. They understood that they were in a position where undoing any of it couldn’t happen through a democratic process. You could not pass a bill in Congress to say, let’s let billionaires spend as much money in the elections as possible, and then when they get favors back from the government, that’s not corruption. You couldn’t get a bill in Congress that says, let everybody have firearms. The Supreme Court has been the actual functioning legislative body in this country for the last 16 years, and it’s because they keep grabbing cases to use as pretexts to legislate, and we’re just sort of standing by and letting it happen….I’ve been asked like 10 billion times how do Democrats win back the working class. Probably until I say it to you, you haven’t even heard someone say: What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party? The unexamined us and them in that sentence is the problem. [Democrats are] like, “What do we give them off the table?” The answer is a seat at the table….”

Here’s some revealing nuggets by Zachary Bass at Axios: “….Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who campaigned for Vice President Harris, was unsparing in his critique this week of a party that he believes “has abandoned working-class people.”….”While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders wrote, citing failures to tackle wage inequality and costly health care….

• Some critics say it doesn’t matter what Biden did: The Democratic brand is toxic because it’s associated — fairly or unfairly — with sneering elites and activists whose language alienates working-class Americans.
• “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who won re-election in a rural Trump district, told the Times.

….Post-election polling by the Democratic strategy group Blueprint found that swing voters’ top reason for not choosing Harris was a belief that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

• Harris and Democrats barely talked about trans issues during the campaign — but Republicans spent nearly $123 million on TV ads referencing trans athletes.
• “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” a narrator declared in what the Trump campaign and Harris allies both found to be one of the most effective ads of the cycle, including with Black and Latino voters.

….Some Democrats say there’s a far simpler explanation for the working-class shift: the ferocious headwinds of inflation, which have fueled incumbent losses around the world since COVID.

• Compounding the pain of high prices was the insistence that the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world” — a claim backed by data, but clearly irrelevant to personal perception.
• “People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists,” Gluesenkamp Perez said.”

From “Despite presidential headwinds, these Senate Democratic candidates won states Harris lost” by Arit John at CNN Politics: “As of Monday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin – who won the race to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – had won 24,000 fewer votes than Harris in the state, but her Republican opponent received 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won roughly 500 more votes than Harris, while Republican Eric Hovde missed out on 57,000 votes Trump received. And in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen trailed Harris by 3,000 votes, while Republican Sam Brown had received 70,000 fewer votes than Trump….In some races, the differences between the Senate candidates’ and Harris’ performances were more pronounced among subsections of the Democratic coalition. In Nevada, Rosen won 50% of the Latino vote, while Brown won 43%, according to exit polls. Latino voters in the state, however, were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with both candidates winning 48%. While Trump won independents by 2 points, Rosen won the group by 6….This year’s most endangered Democratic incumbents – Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – were seeking reelection in states Trump won in 2020 by 16 and 8 points, respectively. Tester lost his bid for a fourth term to Republican Tim Sheehy, trailing by about 7 points as of Monday afternoon (Harris lost the state by 20 points). Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno, was trailing by 4 points as of Monday, while Harris trailed Trump by 11 points….“They ran respectable races and damn near pulled it off, but it’s so hard to do, even in a closely run swing state,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Doing it in a red state is now probably impossible.””

“Overall,” John continues, “Democratic Senate candidates received more votes than Harris in about half of this year’s races, including in less competitive states such as Minnesota, Virginia and Missouri. Republican Senate candidates across the country ran behind Trump in about 80% of states. A notable exception was Maryland, where Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan ran nearly 9 points ahead of Trump and received more than 200,000 more votes. (Hogan lostto Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.)….In addition to Tester and Brown, Republicans are also counting Pennsylvania as a flip. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, where Democratic Sen. Bob Casey is trailing Republican Dave McCormick by 0.6% with 95% of the vote in….Even before Harris became the Democratic nominee, Senate candidates were running ahead of President Joe Biden. Candidates in battleground states sought to distance themselves from the president while also running on key parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, such as the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare patients and new projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law….In one ad, Baldwin noted that both Biden and Trump signed bills she introduced to bolster American manufacturing. On costs, candidates from Rosen to Casey vowed to take on “price gouging” from corporations….After the change atop the ticket, Democrats were more willing to campaign with Harris, who energized the party base in the early days of her 107-day campaign. Slotkin, Casey, Baldwin and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Senate nominee in Arizona, all spoke at the August Democratic National Convention. (Tester, Brown and Rosen skipped the convention altogether.)”

Geoffrey Skelley opines on the same topic in “How Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump carried” at 538:,” and writes, “the 2024 election represents a notable uptick in split-ticket results and downturn in same-party outcomes. Based on the results as they stand right now, different parties won the presidential and Senate contests in 12 percent of the states that had both contests on the ballot, the highest share since 18 percent of 2012’s presidential-Senate races had split-ticket outcomes….Naturally, this has led to easy headlines about split-ticket voting making a comeback. And there’s some truth to that, both in split-ticket outcomes and in relatively larger differences in the vote margins between presidential and Senate races in the same state. If we look at contemporaneous presidential and Senate races in which both a Democrat and Republican were on the ballot (including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont as Democrats), 2020 saw the narrowest gap in the margin of victory between the two major parties in these types of races since at least 1992 — 2.8 points in margin. Based on the present results, the median gap in 2024 will be higher, around 4 points — though still historically quite low, roughly half the almost 8-point mark in 2016….Yet only one of the four likely split-ticket outcomes appears to have come about because a big percentage of voters cast ballots simultaneously for Trump and the Democratic Senate nominee. In Arizona, which remains unprojected, Gallego has won nearly 6 percent more raw votes than Harris has, while Republican Kari Lake has won almost 10 percent fewer raw votes than Trump — a signal that a not-insignificant group of Trump voters backed Gallego….Now, a few other states did see sizable amounts of split-ticket voting between the presidential and Senate races that, potentially, stood to affect control of the Senate. In Montana, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester significantly outperformed Harris, winning 19 percent more raw votes than she did, while in Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won about 5 percent more. In Maryland, former Gov. Larry Hogan gave Republicans an unusually strong candidate in a blue state, and he won a whopping 24 percent more raw votes than Trump did.”

Consider “Latino Men Were the Big Defectors—but They Weren’t the Only Story: Here’s how Harris failed to replicate Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump” by TNR editor Michael Tomasky, cross-posted here from The New Republic:

How in God’s name did the Democrats lose yet another election to Donald Trump, after defeating him somewhat comfortably four years ago?

If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Even a little modest improvement in some places. In 2020, Trump won the white vote 58–41 percent. On Tuesday, he won it by less, 55–43. Among white women, Kamala Harris did a bit better than Joe Biden: Trump won white women 55–44 over Biden and 52–47 over Harris. The result among white men wasn’t statistically different: Trump won them 61–38 over Biden and 59–39 over Harris. For all the talk of defections among Black men, the exit polls say otherwise. Biden won them 79–19, and Harris carried them 78–20. She also won among independents, although by a few points less than Biden did.

Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44.

At the same time, the breadth of the Trump—and Republican—win doesn’t seem like it can be pinned solely on that. He won the popular voteby five million. He won every swing state that’s been called so far—not by huge margins, but also not by the razor-thin margins that characterized 2016 and 2020. He came closer in blue states—New Jersey, Illinois—than anyone in many years, going back probably to the previous century. And so far, all those MAGA senators have swept their Democratic opponents.

This is probably explained by the fact that the Trump vote, again, was underestimated by the polls—by around 3 percent, John Heilemann said Wednesday on Morning Joe. This was a huge debate during this campaign. I was among those who thought the pollsters, who had made that mistake in 2016 and 2020, were overcompensating this time around and undercounting Harris voters. I thought Harris would narrowly win white women, and win women overall by more than 15 points. I was wrong. (Her margin among women was just 10 points.)

So it wasn’t all Latino men, by any means, but in the exit polls, their vote is the only eye-popping shift. The “floating island of garbage” didn’t matter. May have helped, who knows. There’s no breakdown yet that I’ve seen of different Latino groups, but Trump’s Puerto Rican support apparently did not crater. He outright won heavily Latino counties in New Jersey, for example, that Democrats usually win on autopilot.

So the question is why. Cataclysmic as this result is, and what it’s going to lead to in this country over the next four years, I think people may have a tendency to get too hysterical in answering this question.

For example, Harris didn’t suck as a candidate. In fact, she ran a good campaign overall. I thought “We’re not going back” was powerful, and her optimistic tone made a good contrast to Trump’s darkness. She was overly cautious on some things. Israel apparently hurt her in Dearborn, but there was no widespread left-wing revolt against her. Jill Stein got a paltry 611,760 votes, versus 1,449,370 in 2016. Cornel West didn’t even register in the Associated Press tally I checked Wednesday morning. Likewise, few centrists ran away from her. Except for Latino men, and to a lesser extent Latina women, she held the Democratic Party together. Polls kept telling us that Democratic enthusiasm was through the roof.

I think she made two specific late mistakes—one was something she did, and the other was something she didn’t do.

The mistake she made was saying on The View on October 8 that she couldn’t think of anything she’d have done differently than Biden. Various exit poll results tell us that in a sense, she was seen as the incumbent, and she paid an obviously steep price for Biden’s 40 percent approval rating. That became a Trump commercial.

And maybe this was all that simple. As numerous people have now pointed out, every incumbent party in a developed country that had to deal with Covid and inflation, whether a party of the left or the right, has now been voted out.

But it also isn’t that simple. The thing Harris didn’t do: I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women. Who knows, that kind of thing could have made a difference.

But millions of men bought Trump’s idea of masculinity. How much outright sexism and racism drove the vote? We’ll never know. But enough. This is another mistake I and probably a lot of people on the broad left made. Sexism and racism (the former undoubtedly more of a factor here than the latter) will never disappear, but there seemed reason to think that by 2024, they’d be minor factors. They may well have barred the door.

I might add a third mistake: not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Another exit poll result that surprised me was that late deciders were evenly split—completely not what preelection polls were suggesting. I wonder if the pro-Trump late deciders were influenced by Rogan’s endorsement of him.

And nothing Trump did mattered. None of the lies, the hate, the microphone oral sex, the musing about Liz Cheney facing bullets. Nothing. As Alex Shephard argued here, Democrats have spent nearly a decade trying to convince swing voters that Trump was a unique threat to the republic, and they’ve failed.

Now, we will live with that failure, and with a fully unleashed Trump, and his idea of masculinity, for the next four years. I fear for the people he’s going to round up (and we should definitely take him at his word on that); for transgender people; for Palestinians, for whom it can get worse; for Ukrainians, for whom it can get far worse; for a lot of people who’ll be on the receiving end of his brutish policies. And we’ll see, in a year or two, how different a country the United States is going to be.

Some more Wednesday morning quarterbacking, this one from “Eight takeaways from the 2024 election” by Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg and Daniel Strauss, at CNN Politics: “Trump made gains with nearly every demographic group compared with his 2020 loss, CNN’s exit polls showed. And his apparent near-mirroring of the 2016 map would indicate that he paid no political price for his lies about fraud in that election, his efforts to overturn it, or the criminal charges he has faced since then….Though several states are still tallying their results, Trump’s road to victory in 2024 appears to have been nearly identical to his 2016 win….Both campaigns had long been focused on seven swing states: the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada….The final count could take weeks, but Trump also holds the popular vote lead. If that edge holds, he’d be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote….The only segment of the electorate with which Harris made notable gains over Biden’s 2020 performance was with college-educated women — the voters who had propelled the party’s strong suburban performance in the 2022 midterms….Harris performed much worse than Biden among voters who said they thought abortion should be legal in most cases — even though the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in between the two elections….

Bradner, Krieg and Strauss continue, “With Harris’ loss of the presidency and with the Senate coming under GOP control, the House could become the party’s last line of defense in Washington….What that would mean is, simply, that Trump would be unable to pass much, if any, legislation and perhaps more importantly would find himself hamstrung as he tries to wind back Biden’s policies….Trump’s margins in rural America appear to have been simply too large to overtake….Trump’s campaign pushed hard to court men, and particularly men of color. CNN’s exit polls showed it paid off….Chief among Trump’s gains compared with his performance against Biden in 2020: Latino men. Trump won that cohort by 8 points, four years after losing them by 23 points. It’s a result that showed his campaign’s efforts to court those voters paid off — and that the late focus on a comedian mocking Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally didn’t cause the damage Harris’ campaign hoped it would. The gains were concentrated most heavily among Latinos under age 65….Trump also made gains in key places among Black men, more than doubling his 2020 performance in North Carolina….Nearly three-fourths of voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way things are going in the United States, CNN’s exit polls found. Trump won about three-fifths of those voters….Harris slipped compared with Biden’s performance four years ago among young voters, independents, moderates and union households….”

From “Democrats Botched the Election—Six Mistakes That Led to Trump Victory” by Kahleda Rahman at Newsweek: “If Biden had exited sooner, Democrats might have held a very brief primary contest to choose a candidate that represented a clear break with the current administration and appealed to enough voters to defeat Trump….Instead, Democrats coalesced around Harris, and she won the nomination without Democratic voters having a say, in a process that some criticized as undemocratic….The choice of Walz had also disappointed supporters of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who they thought could have helped Democrats win the election’s largest battleground state. Trump won Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes this year….Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Newsweek in statement: “It is important for Democratic and other elected officials to recognize that Vice President Harris’ steep drop in support in key states compared to President Biden’s 2020 victory resulted, in part, from the deep frustration and disillusionment that many young, Muslim, Arab, Black and other voters feel with the Biden-Harris administration due to its steadfast financial and military support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”….Exit polling indicates Harris did worse with Latino voters than Biden did in 2020, with Latino men in particular shifting to Trump, who has pledged a mass deportation of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally….Social media may have also contributed to Trump’s victory….While the vice president embraced a digital-first strategy and limited interviews with traditional media, her campaign’s social media reach was likely dwarfed by the Trump campaign’s on X (formerly Twitter)….X owner Elon Musk spent months using the platform to amplify the Trump campaign’s message. He also hosted a $1-million-a-day voter sweepstakes in swing states….”It’s about time the Democratic Party come to terms with the fact that a vast majority of the American public lives in a media environment — from Fox to Twitter to podcasts — that functions as a Republicanpropaganda machine,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic strategist, wrote on X. “Ignoring this reality is no longer a tenable solution.”

In “Democrats keep forgetting the working class: As right-wing politicians scoop up the blue-collar vote, the left has its head in the sand,” Jamie Dettmer writes at Politico: “The former and now future U.S. president’s demagogue genius got him so far, but the Democrats offered him yet again the opening because they’ve increasingly lost touch with their traditional constituents: working class and lower-middle-income voters, who have very different preoccupations than those of most of the party’s leadership and activists. The Democrats have consistently failed to understand the reasons for working-class disaffection — let alone find remedies to offer them….The cleavage between Democrats and the working class has long been in the making, stretching back to the late 1960s when Richard Nixon assembled a resentful populist coalition of working- and middle-class voters with a blue-collar strategy based, in his words, on “character and guts.” In 1980, 47 percent of all blue-collar voters supported Ronald Reagan (44 percent of those from labor union households back­ed him)….Last year, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44 percent named Trump compared to just 12 percent for Biden.” The article sees the same basic problem afflicting Social Democratic parties  in Europe.

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:

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.

Emily DeLetter’s “Presidential election polls 2024: What polls are saying just 2 days before Election Day” shares some interesting data at USA Today: “With just two days before Election Day, polling suggests the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains neck-and-neck….National polls provide a snapshot of the country as a whole, and a majority of the national polls released Sunday suggest either a tie between the candidates or Harris taking a narrow lead….In a surprising turn, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points, a state that previously went for Trump in 2016 and 2020….The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which includes those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote was released late Saturday and conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31….Harris is leading Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters in Iowa, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of ± 3.4 points….This follows a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with four point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll, where he had an 18-point lead over President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time….“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

From “Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout” by G. Elliot Morris at 538: “In 2020, polls overestimated Biden’s margin over Trump by about 4 percentage points in competitive states. As of Oct. 30 at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, the margin between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump in 538’s polling averages is smaller than 4 points in seven states: the familiar septet of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That means that, if the polling error from 2020 repeats itself, Trump would win all seven swing states and 312 Electoral College votes….Of course, if the polls are off, it won’t necessarily benefit Trump. The direction of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and polls have overestimated Republicans plenty of times in the past. In a scenario where the polls overestimate Trump’s margin by 4 points in every state, Harris would win all seven swing states and 319 electoral votes….Based on how much polls have been off in the past, our election model estimates that the average polling error in competitive states this year will be 3.8 points on the margin.* This error is not uniform across states — for example, states with different demographics tend to have different levels of polling error — but, generally speaking, when polls overestimate a candidate, they tend to overestimate them across the board. In other words, the model is expecting a roughly 2020-sized polling error — although not necessarily in the same direction as 2020. (In 50 percent of the model’s simulations, Trump beats his polls, and 50 percent of the time, Harris does.)….Nationwide, our model expects polling error to be greater than 2 points in either direction 62 percent of the time. In other words, there’s only about a 1-in-3 chance that polls miss by less than 2 points (which we would consider a small polling error historically)….Of course, the probability of a blowout either way depends heavily on the popular vote outcome. If Harris wins the national popular vote by 3 points, she’s much likelier to win the states that will decide the Electoral College than if she loses the popular vote by 3….Meanwhile, our model reckons Harris needs to win the popular vote by 2.1 points to be favored to win the election because swing states are more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. And if she wins the popular vote by 4.5 points (Biden’s popular-vote margin in 2020), she is favored to win in a blowout of her own.”

Domenico Montanaro explores “10 key demographic groups that could decide the presidential election” at npr.org and writes: “The largest single voting group is white voters. Republicans have been dominant with them in the last 20 years, but with the growing Latino and Asian American populations, white voters have been on a sharp decline as a share of the electorate since the 1990s….Because of that demographic change, former President Barack Obama was the first candidate to win a presidential election with less than 40% of the white vote in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 when she got 2 points lower (37%). Biden won four years later and was above 40%….The October NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Harris winning 45% of white voters. If that were to hold, it would be the highest share for a Democrat since 1976. But Harris still only had a 2-point lead over Trump in the survey because of Trump cutting into margins with Black and Latino voters….Almost nothing now is a better predictor of how white voters will vote than whether or not they have a college degree. White voters with college degrees had long been reliable Republican voters. But that changed between 2016 and 2020, when Biden won them narrowly….Polling suggests Democrats’ advantage with them could balloon in this election….White voters without degrees, many of whom live in rural areas, are declining as a share of eligible voters in the country. But in key states, they still make up a larger percentage of eligible voters than whites with degrees. That’s true, for example, in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In every one of the seven swing states, white non-college voters made up a higher share of the electorate than in 2016.” Read the rest of the article for a more in-depth look at pivotal demographic groups right here.

Some insights from “Our Final 2024 Ratings” by Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “What has surprised us down the stretch, meanwhile, is that Georgia and North Carolina are both gettable for Kamala Harris. A week or two ago, we were taking it almost for granted that while these states would of course be close, they would break toward Trump at the end. This is now far from guaranteed. Trump himself was campaigning in North Carolina on Saturday, Sunday, and today. While we have heard some arguments as to why this isn’t that big of a deal, we do take this as something of a signal about that state, particularly when combined with our own intel and the stubbornly close polls. Nevada, also apparently super-close, saw Republicans get out to a lead in the advance vote, leaving it an open question as to whether Democrats could catch up….Of the Industrial North battlegrounds, our strong prior has been that Michigan was likely to be the bluest of these states. We are sticking with that prior belief despite obvious signs that Harris has not nailed it down….Pennsylvania may be the biggest wild card, and the most responsive to whatever has (or has not) changed in the final days of the campaign, because it ultimately does not have that much advance vote. Something like 70% or even more of the total Pennsylvania vote will be cast on Election Day, clearly the highest of the 7 key battlegrounds, according to calculations we made from turnout expert Michael McDonald’s overall turnout forecasts and reporting of votes cast so far….Our prior belief heading into the election season was that Wisconsin would be the hardest Industrial North state for Democrats to hold, both because it was the closest state Joe Biden carried in the region and because it skews whiter and more rural than the other two. Yet this does not seem to be the elite consensus down the stretch of the campaign nor is it what polling averages indicate: Harris is doing very slightly better in Wisconsin polling compared to Pennsylvania. This, in addition to the Keystone State having the most electoral votes of the 7 key states, explains the conventional wisdom that suggests Pennsylvania is the most important. We do also have to remember that 2016-2020 Trump polling underestimation was greatest in Wisconsin, although such a large error this time would suggest Trump winning the state by several points, which seems far-fetched….Some recent polls show Trump with narrower-than-expected margins in states like Kansas and Ohio, as well as Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where several polls suggest Harris is likely to outperform Biden’s 2020 showing. We also think it may have implications in neighboring Wisconsin, which is in some ways similar to Iowa, although that could be off-base. The abortion rights issue, especially salient in Iowa because of a new, 6-week ban there, could be having a major local impact, which could make the finding less generalizable to other states that don’t have such a ban in place. Or it could be that Trump strength with white voters is just being underestimated again, even by someone who has been excellent at detecting that support in the past.”

Ronald Brownstein explains why “Why working-class White women could be so decisive this fall” at CNN Politics: “Even as Trump struggled with other groups of women in his 2016 and 2020 presidential races, exit polls and other analyses showed that he amassed a big lead each time among White women without a college education….Those working-class White women loom as a critical, potentially even decisive, factor in Trump’s third White House bid. That’s partly because so many of them, polls show, are torn between personal disdain for Trump and discontent with the results of Joe Biden’s presidency, particularly over inflation and the border….But it’s also because these women are especially plentiful in the three former “blue wall” states that still constitute Harris’ most likely path to an Electoral College victory: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. To win those states, which she is barnstorming every day this week, Harris doesn’t have to win most of those women – Democrats almost never do – but she does need to remain competitive with them….“They are really tired of Trump, and they’d really like to move on, but they are also nervous about moving on, and they do think the economy was better for them under Trump,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. As for Harris, Lake said, “They like she would bring everybody together, they like her empathy. … But they don’t feel that they know her that well.” The sum total of these contradictory impulses is that, “They are really torn,” Lake said. “They feel very insecure about these choices….One measure of how much Democrats prioritize these blue-collar White women is the massive voter contact program that American Bridge 21st Century, a party super PAC, is targeting at them. The group is spending about $140 million to try to reach 3 million women, predominantly White women without a college degree, just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that Trump in 2016 knocked out of what I termed the “blue wall.””

Brownstein notes further, ““In general, the blue wall states are still the path of least resistance to 270” for Harris, said Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of American Bridge 21st Century. “But I think it’s pretty clear that women are the determinative demographic of this election cycle, and they have been the last few election cycles, so it’s not rocket science.”….American Bridge has pursued these blue-collar women through an extraordinarily long engagement that began in 2023 by regularly mailing them newspapers produced by an affiliated group. The effort has included multiple rounds of contacts and testimonial ads from former Trump voters delivered through every available platform, from television and digital to mail and streaming services. Beychok said one of the group’s strongest messages is reminding voters of the uncertainty and volatility that comes with Trump….Beychok said the group’s guiding principle is that even small gains with these women can prove decisive across narrowly divided states. “We may not get to 50.1 with them, but if we run a program to get what is available to us … it can be just as effective,” he said….The Republican presidential nominees won just under three-fifths of these working-class White women in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 races, while Trump pushed his share with them over three-fifths in both the 2016 and 2020 races, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Other well-respected analyses of the 2016 and 2020 vote likewise showed Trump winning about three-fifths of these women, with the Democratic targeting firm Catalist putting Trump just below that threshold each time, and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study putting Trump just underneath it in 2016 and just above it in 2020.”

“The GOP advantage in those national figures is inflated by its imposing advantage among these women in Southern states, where many of them are culturally conservative evangelical Christians who support the GOP in overwhelming numbers,” Brownstein adds. “Critically for Democrats, in the pivotal battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they have usually run a few points better with these women than they do nationally. In Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory, for instance, he only won about one-third of these women nationally, but he carried about 45% of them in both Michigan and Pennsylvania and won a narrow majority of them in Wisconsin, the exit polls found. By contrast, in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the exit polls found, stalled out at around 40% support from them in all three states, which contributed to her losing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of roughly 80,000 votes – and with them the presidency….Compared with Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 posted a small but critical improvement among these women in Michigan and Wisconsin, contributing to his victories there, exit polls found. Biden ran only about as well as Clinton did with them in Pennsylvania, where he flipped the state primarily by vastly expanding on her margin in the heavily college-educated suburbs of Philadelphia….Because Biden won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes, Harris has a cushion to sustain some erosion among men. But Lake, like many other Democrats, believes that to win the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds – and for that matter, any of the swing states – Harris will likely need to run at least slightly better than Biden did among women. “She is going to have to do better with women,” Lake said flatly. “She has to make up for the fact that she won’t do as well with the men as he did.”

In addition, Brownstein writes, “In a new analysis shared exclusively with me, William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, has calculated that these White women without a college degree will comprise a huge share of eligible voters in these pivotal states. According to his analysis of the latest census data, they will represent over one-fourth of adults eligible to vote in both Michigan and Wisconsin and almost exactly one-fourth in Pennsylvania. In all three states, he found they represent roughly as big a share of the eligible voting population as the blue-collar White men who are Trump’s strongest group and a bigger group of eligible voters than either White men or women with a college degree, or non-White men or women. Every vote from every group, of course, counts the same, but the blue-collar White women are a big enough bloc that even minuscule shifts in their preference, or turnout, could easily tip these precariously balanced states….McHenry said in his polling, significantly more of these blue-collar women say they were doing better economically under Trump than Biden. The latest national New York Times/Siena survey reinforces that finding: Among White women without a college degree, 54% said Trump’s policies had helped them personally, while a nearly identical 53% said Biden’s policies had hurt them, according to unpublished results provided by Siena….In the 2022 exit polls, a solid majority of blue-collar White women also backed abortion rights across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to results provided by the CNN polling unit. The Democrats’ problem is not that these women don’t support legal abortion; it’s that fewer of them prioritize it as much as their female counterparts who are college-educated, single or younger.” Brownstein concludes, “How a few thousand conflicted and ambivalent working-class White women in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin sift through these competing views may decide the states that remain the most likely to determine the next president.”