Nathaniel Rakich and Amina Brown explain why “The 2024 presidential election was close, not a landslide” at 538/abcnews.go.com. An excerpt:

As we’ve gotten more data and had the time to put the 2024 election in perspective, the truth has become clear: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was close. With more ballots counted, Trump’s national popular vote lead is down to 1.6 points, and Harris could have won if she had done just a couple of points better in just a few states. Any argument that the 2024 election was a “landslide” is misleading. It relies on a combination of recency bias and using the wrong measuring sticks.

High expectations for Democrats in the popular vote, along with the widely circulated maps showing big swings toward Trump in virtually every county in the country, may have played a big role in setting those early narratives that Trump had notched an overwhelming win. Another was probably the media’s repeated warnings before the election that it might take days to project a winner. While that very easily could have come to pass, we may have overemphasized the point. It was also always possible that a winner would be projected on election night, which is of course what happened.

After it took until the Saturday after Election Day for media outlets to project that Biden had won the 2020 election, the relatively early projection in 2024 (ABC News projected him as the winner at 5:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday) probably made Trump’s win seem more decisive. But once again, that’s recency bias at play. The 2024 election actually took longer to project than all but three presidential elections since 1976. Apart from the interminable 2000 (when the race came down to a recount in Florida that didn’t end until Dec. 12) and 2020 elections, only 2004 kept us in more suspense.

….All in all, the idea that Trump won an overwhelming victory in 2024 is less grounded in the data and more based on a sense of surprise relative to (perhaps miscalibrated) expectations.

Why perceptions of the 2024 election matter

The debate over the closeness of the 2024 election may seem academic — Trump won; who cares if it was a landslide or not? — but it could have a very real impact on the ambitiousness of Trump’s second term. Boasting about the scope of his win, Trump claimed in his victory speech that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern — a narrative that caught on in the media and with many voters, too. In a mid-November poll from HarrisX/Harvard University, 71 percent of registered voters said that Trump had a mandate to govern, including 50 percent who said he had a “strong mandate.”

Trump is just the latest in a long line of presidents-elect trying to convert electoral success into political capital to pass their agendas. There’s just one problem: Political scientists who have studied the idea of presidential mandatesgenerally agree that they’re made up. It’s basically impossible to ascertain what voters had in mind when they went to the ballot box and whether a candidate’s win was an explicit endorsement for a specific policy or approach to governing.

And according to research by 538 contributor Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, there is no relationship between how often a president-elect claims a mandate and how big their victory was. In fact, Azari even found that presidents are more likely to claim mandates when they are in a politically weak position, as a sort of act of desperation to claim that their policies have public support.

But research has also found that, much like Tinker Bell, mandates can exist if enough people believe that they do. According to political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson, when there is a media consensus that an election carries a mandate, Congress responds by passing major legislation. Azari and Peterson have further found that politicians themselves, like Trump, can push Congress to action as well, simply by insisting that they have a mandate. And per Azari, when a president-elect insists that he has a mandate, it is often accompanied by major expansions of presidential power.

In other words, regardless of how close the 2024 election was in reality, Trump’s claims to a mandate suggest that Republicans are planning to govern like they won in a landslide.

Democrats would also likely claim a mandate, had they won the popular vote by 1.6 percent. But that wouldn’t be true, either. And with a margin of victory that small, you can blame almost any issue for Harris’s loss.

Trump should have nominated more Democrats and Independents for his cabinet to give non-Republican voters at least some buy-in. That would have been the smart move. Instead, he went the other way, the “in-your-face, Dems” route, pushed by the hyper-partisan ideologues in his orbit. Any hope that having Musk and Kennedy in his inner circle might temper their influence appears to be unfounded.

As a red county Democrat, I have long wondered how many actual Democrats really advocate “open borders,” public funding of transexual surgery or “defunding the police,” to name just a few of the albatrosses that have been hung around Democratic candidates’ necks in recent elections.

In my more conservative county, the answer is ‘not many’. Yet polls tell us that these beliefs are held by significant numbers of Democrats. I guess they are in the cities and suburbs and disproportionately in California. At the same time, however, it feels like spotlighting such excessively ‘woke’ policies and their adherents may give the public a false impression of the breadth of such beliefs among Democrats. I still suspect it is a loud, but tiny minority that amplifies this ‘woke’ vibe among Democrats.

In reality, the term “woke” as currently used, provides yet another example of a slang word originating in the Black community, then distorted and amplified by whites to mean something else. As originally used, ‘woke’ means ‘educated.’ Now it is used by conservative critics to disparage crazier white liberal attitudes.

The net effect is to slime Democrats as crazy-ass wokesters. Apparently, it’s not a tough sell, especially when a billionaire is flooding the zone with thousands of TV ads pushing that message.

At Vox, Andrew Prokop addresses the harm done by forms of ‘wokism’ in his article “Are progressive groups sinking Democrats’ electoral chances?” Prokop writes:

Specifically, they claim, progressive interest and activist groups have both moved too far left and grown far too influential in the Democratic coalition, pushing the party to adopt stances out of step with the median voter on a range of different issues. This, they say, has backfired electorally and will ultimately hurt the people the groups claim to want to help.

“Many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary,” former Democratic staffer Adam Jentleson wrote in the New York Times in November.

Other commentators — Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ruy Teixeira — have made similar points. Some, like Yglesias and Teixeira, have been criticizing the influence of such groups for years.

Yet this critique has been met with an impassioned backlash from progressives and leftists. Some, like Waleed Shahid, argue the blame is misplaced and the supposed power of these progressive groups has been exaggerated. “The Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces — corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants — whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans,” Shahid wrote for The Nation.

Others argue that inflation — a global phenomenon — was the main reason for Harris’s defeat, so a groups-focused diagnosis misses the point. And yet others argue that progressive groups represent morally righteous causes that Democrats should not abandon — for instance, that moderation would amount to throwing marginalized groups “under the bus.”

In “The key voter shifts that led to Trump’s battleground state sweep,” Steve Kornacki writes at nbcnews.com: “For President-elect Donald Trump, there’s a clear story that runs through each of the seven battleground states that he swept on his way to recapturing the White House….He managed to drive up even further what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base while harnessing historically broad nonwhite voter support to erode the Democratic base in cities and diversifying suburbs….And for Vice President Kamala Harris, the battleground picture is one of regression — a widespread failure to match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, with her gains largely isolated to areas centered on the wealthier, college-educated white voters who increasingly make up her party’s backbone.” Kornacki surveys the seven swing states, and writes of Pennsylvania: “Overall, Pennsylvania shifted 3 points to Trump between 2020 and 2024. But the movement was most pronounced in the eastern part of the state, where Trump posted seven of his 10 biggest county-level improvements compared to four years ago….Key to this: Deep inroads with Latino voters that helped Trump erode the massive advantage that Democrats depend on in cities throughout the region….In Philadelphia itself, Harris won by 59 points, 79%-20%. But that was down from Biden’s 81%-18% win four years ago, amounting to a net reduction in the Democratic margin of around 50,000 votes. That drop-off alone effectively erased more than half of Biden’s 81,000-vote statewide margin. Sixteen percent of Philadelphia residents are Latino, and a review of precinct-level results from NBC News’ Decision Desk found that Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods

“In smaller, Latino-heavy cities in eastern Pennsylvania,” Kornacki continues, “Trump made big strides, including double-digit improvements in the state’s three Hispanic-majority cities….Puerto Ricans are the main Hispanic subgroup in Allentown and Reading, while Dominicans are heavily concentrated in Hazleton, a city that was less than 5% Hispanic just 25 years ago….Trump also flipped Bucks County, which has a larger share of white voters without college degrees than the other three Philadelphia collar counties. And he drove up what were already robust margins in Pike County, where growth has been fueled by in-migration from New Jersey and New York residents….Democrats, meanwhile, were banking on even deeper support in the giant, higher-end Philadelphia suburbs. While Chester and Montgomery counties each went for Harris by double digits, her margin fell several points short of Biden’s in both. Her campaign had also identified emerging suburbs in the south-central part of the state, near Harrisburg, as growth targets. Instead, Harris merely treaded water in them.”

it looks like we are stuck with the Electoral College, which has given Republicans a significant edge in recent presidential elections, for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, Democrats should pay close attention to shifting demographics between the 50 states. Toward that end, James Cirrone cites “The five states Americans are moving to in droves” at The Daily Mail, and notes: “Americans are increasingly being pulled to the southern United States, with five states in particular attracting the most transplants….Florida and Texas had the most people move within their borders in 2023, according to a new migration survey from the National Association of Realtors (NAR)….Florida saw a net inflow of 372,870 people last year, while 315,301 went to Texas, according to the report, which analyzed US Census data….North Carolina welcomed 126,712 new residents in 2023, and has been established previously as another fast-growing state….Home to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina gained 91,853 more people last year….Georgia rounded out the top five, adding 88,325 people to its growing population….Tennessee came in at number six with a net migration of more than 76,000, followed by Arizona (57,814), Alabama (36,128) and Oklahoma (31,967)…. Ohio came in tenth and was the only state north of the Mason-Dixon Line to make the list, after drawing in a net migration of 28,718….Much of the dialogue around Americans moving south assumes they are searching for warmer temperatures and sunnier skies, but that isn’t the entire picture….According to the report, only one percent of those who moved said they did so because of climate-related reasons….The most common things that got people to pack up and go were ‘housing reasons’ (42 percent), ‘family reasons’ (26 percent) and ’employment reasons’ (16 percent)….The South has become the most populous region in the US, thanks almost entirely to Florida and Texas.”

In similar vein, read “Wealthy millennials are flocking to Florida and Texas—and no one wants to live in New York or California” by Jane Their at Fortune. As Their writes, “With no state income tax at all, Florida and Texas are the No. 1 and No. 2 destinations for high-earning millennials on the move, according to a report from SmartAsset. Using data from the IRS and the 2021 tax year, SmartAsset measured net migration patterns (the inflow of new high earners minus the outflow) among young professionals ages 26 to 35 bringing in at least $200,000 a year. Florida gained a net 2,175 people in this cohort; Texas gained a net 1,909….Meanwhile, the nation’s biggest economies, New York and California, withstood the biggest net losses at 5,062 and 4,495 young high earners, respectively. But they aren’t exactly desperate for young blood, as the two states are still home to the most young high earners by a vast margin….None of this may come as much of a surprise if you’ve listened to any of the anecdotal narratives that Florida and Texas have become the new New York and California as remote workers left their cramped urban apartments during the pandemic. The two southern states boast year-round warm weather, ample open space, and (of course) no income tax—ideal for young earners who are first and foremost focused on saving and contributing to their retirement accounts. It’s made the states enduringly ideal locations for those who don’t have to show up in their Manhattan or San Francisco offices to earn their hefty paychecks….Here are the top 10 cities where young professionals are moving, ranked by net gain:

1. Florida (2,175)

2. Texas (1,909)

3. New Jersey (1,048)

4. Colorado (754)

5. North Carolina (721)

6. Connecticut (660)

7. Washington (464)

8. Tennessee (441)

9. Arizona (321)

10. South Carolina (318)”

Some Nuggets from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s latest Washington Post column: “Whereas Trump’s apostasy on abortion was out in the open, it was barely noticed that the GOP platform also dropped its opposition to same-sex marriage — because roughly 7 in 10 Americans now support it. The right turned to highlighting transgender issues precisely because there is now broad support for so much of the rest of the LGBTQ+ rights agenda….Yes, the GOP succeeded in using the transgender issue to paint Harris as the “they/them” candidate. But on so many questions, the broad liberalizing trends of the past three decades are alive and well, and understanding how far progressive positions have advanced is central to recognizing that Trump’s narrow victory did not represent a sharp movement to the right akin to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 triumph. Trump’s combined margin in the decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was, as of Friday’s tallies, just around 231,000. That number does not justify apocalyptic electoral analysis….Of course, reproductive rights activists don’t feel like winners. Even after Missouri’s vote, 12 states, including populous Texas, still have broad abortion bans, and four more, including Florida, have bans after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. In conservative states, Republicans will continue to push restrictions, including new barriers to medication abortions…./Being mindful of the largely hidden liberal victories of 2024 does not mean downplaying the challenges Democrats face — or the dangers Trump’s genuinely radical agenda presents. But to acknowledge the gains is to see that the country Trump will lead is neither as supportive of his agenda as he claims nor as allergic to progressive change as many of his adversaries fear. One defeat, however stunning, does not discredit the value of persuasion and coalition-building. They take time. They still work.”

Caroline Vakil and Julia Mueller spotlight “5 pivotal 2025 contests that could also be Trump litmus tests” at The Hill, and write: “New Jersey Reps. Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer, former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, former Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka are among the Democrats who have jumped into the race….In Virginia, where Trump also improved upon his 2020 showing this year, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is limited to a single term…On the Democratic side, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) launched her campaign late last year. Though there’s still time for other candidates to crowd into the race, a Spanberger match-up against Earle-Sears would be historic, potentially paving way for Virginia’s first female governor.” In the New York City Mayor’s race, “The declared Democratic candidates include New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, state Sens. Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama White House aide Michael Blake and Democratic donor Whitney Tilson….New Yorkers are watching to see whether state Attorney General Letitia James (D) or former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will also enter the ring…..Democrats flipped control of the Virginia House of Delegates two years ago, giving them a narrow 51-49 majority. But Trump’s performance across the state and elsewhere during the 2024 election is raising questions about whether that favorable political environment for Republicans will carry into the next elections….Biden carried the state by 10 points in 2020, with Harris only carrying it by 5 points earlier this month….Partisan control is on the line in the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court election….The state’s high court currently has a 4-3 liberal tilt, but Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s retirement will bring it to an even 3-3 split….The last Wisconsin Supreme Court election in 2023, which also determined partisan control on the high court, shattered records in spending as groups threw tens of millions of dollars into advertising. Experts say they won’t be surprised if the same is true again this cycle.”

In “Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows,” Jessica Piper writes at Politico: “Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won. Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so….his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook….Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders …The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points….In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries….That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day….A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically….Trump supporters were also far more optimistic than Harris supporters across a range of policy areas, with some of the greatest divides coming on national security (75 percent of Trump voters were optimistic compared with 30 percent of Harris voters) and public health (73 percent of Trump voters optimistic compared with 33 percent of Harris voters).”

Robert J. Shapiro argues that “Kamala Harris’s Policy Agenda Kneecapped Her Chances” at the Washington Monthly. As Shapiro notes, “Ultimately, her heaviest burden was being nominated without a normal primary process that would have allowed her to hone a winning agenda. In a closely fought election, it’s incumbent on the lesser-known candidate to offer a compelling policy agenda, especially for weak partisans and independents….But the Harris campaign never came to grips with the three issues that voters cared about most—the continuing pain of inflation, the disappointment of voters without college degrees about their narrowing prospects, and the anxieties Americans feel about immigrants crossing the border without a legal right to do so. According to polls and surveys, substantial majorities expected and demanded that the candidates address those three concerns meaningfully….That’s how democracy works. Yet, the strategists who Harris inherited from Joe Biden’s campaign—which was faltering even before his unfortunate debate performance—tried to convince voters to focus on abortion rights and threats to democracy. They didn’t appreciate how downplaying the voters’ most pressing concerns could align Harris with the status quo. Worse, Harris’s team didn’t fully appreciate how the context for the issues they considered more important had changed….By making abortion access the touchstone of her closing argument, Harris also may have sent a message to persuadable voters that their frustrations about the economy and immigration were secondary….More importantly, in the end, the Harris campaign didn’t make a persuasive case that she had the ideas and strength to address voters’ real concerns, given her difficulty separating herself from an administration that voters believed hadn’t done enough about those concerns….The Harris campaign completed their self-damaging trifecta by missing the mark on immigration. Their approach was to trumpet the administration’s support for immigration reform on “day one” and the bipartisan compromise on immigration earlier this year. But since neither passed Congress, she ended up boasting about the administration failing to make a difference for the voters’ third hot-button concern….In a populist era, voters demand that a candidate offer concrete actions that could plausibly change the conditions and circumstances that frustrate and anger them and then display the personal strength to carry them out. Kamala Harris has that strength, but it wasn’t enough because her campaign never provided a convincing blueprint.”

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.”

From “The Left Didn’t Sink Kamala Harris. Here’s What Did” by Waleed Shahid at The Nation:

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s loss, many pundits and politicians are turning to a familiar scapegoat. Critics like Adam Jentleson, a former aide to senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, claim that “woke” advocacy groups made Democrats adopt extreme policies and drove voters away from the Democratic Party, sealing Donald Trump’s victory. But the truth is simpler—and more uncomfortable for the Democratic establishment. Despite the noise, voters didn’t reject Harris because of leftist rhetoric or activist slogans. They rejected her because she and her party failed to address the economic pain of working-class voters, who chose change over more of the same.

No one is saying that all the “woke” talk was popular. When there is a fairly close presidential election in which the popular vote margin in swing states is hovering around three percent, any factor could make the difference. It’s just that rapidly declining purchasing power for  consumers is the most powerful Democrat-defeater. Shahid argues further,

Contrary to establishment narratives, the Democratic leadership has often resisted advocacy organizations pushing for bold reforms on immigration, Big Tech, climate, debt, healthcare, rent, mass incarceration, Palestinian rights, and for policies like the Build Back Better agenda. This tension isn’t just about differing priorities—it reveals the actual balance of forces in the party. Corporate donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley pour billions into campaigns, shaping agendas to suit their interests. A consultant class reaps millions from flawed strategies and failed candidates yet continues to fail upward, perpetuating a pattern of mediocrity. They, not progressives, are the roadblock preventing Democrats from becoming a populist force that could disrupt the status quo and win back voters of all stripes.

It was these elements within the party that kneecapped the Democrats’ most ambitious efforts to help ordinary Americans. The Biden administration entered with huge plans, notably Build Back Better, which would have delivered immediate relief: expanded child tax credits, free community college, universal child care and pre-K, paid leave, and more. Progressives pushed mightily for Build Back Better to pass. It was centrist obstruction—namely Senators Manchin and Sinema—that blocked those policies. The result was a patchwork of long-term measures like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, whose benefits won’t be felt until 2025 at the earliest, if at all. By failing to pass Build Back Better, Democrats lost the chance to deliver easy-to-understand, tangible economic benefits and solidify their image as the party of working people.

And it was corporate Democrats—particularly lobbyists like Harris’s brother-in-law, former Uber executive Tony West, and David Plouffe—who held the most sway over Harris’s campaign. They advised her to cozy up to ultra-wealthy celebrities, Liz and Dick Cheney, and Mark Cuban, and avoid populist rhetoric that could have distanced her from the corporate elites who dominate the party. In 2024, the biggest spenders in Democratic Party politics weren’t progressives—it was AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACs, and corporate giants like Uber, all of whom poured millions into Democratic campaigns without regard for public opinion or the will of the people.

Shahid says that “the focus was on issues like democracy and abortion, which, while important, couldn’t by themselves capture the priorities of working-class voters.” Shahid adds that “The backlash against “wokeness” often rests on vague critiques, offering little more than cultural hand-wringing without any clear solutions.” In a close election, excessive ‘wokeness,’ punctuated with ads portraying the Democratic candidate in photo-ops as a clueless wokester, can defeat a campaign. But economic insecurity is a far more compelling and pervasive threat to middle class voters.

As Stanley Greenberg recently put it, “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.”

Put in poker terms, Harris was dealt a pair of eights, and she played her hand fairly well. But Trump had a couple of nines.

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.”