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.

Democrats are in mourning after the November 5 defeat, but it’s not a bad time to appreciate what the party’s presidential nominee accomplished, even though she fell short of victory, and I wrote about how far she came at New York:

On March 12, the presidential contest was locked into place. On that day, Donald Trump clinched his third presidential nomination and Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination. Biden’s accomplishment had been in somewhat greater doubt than Trump’s owing to his party’s deep concerns about his advanced age and unpopularity. Despite that, he had put aside some of his own and his party’s anxiety about his running for reelection in part because of fears that if Vice-President Kamala Harris were the nominee, she would be  incapable of beating Trump. Indeed, there had earlier been talk of Biden dumping Harris from the ticket to find a more appealing vice-president.

Suffice it to say that almost no one at the beginning of 2024 had Harris as the Democratic nominee on their bingo cards. Yet she seamlessly took over the party when Biden withdrew from the race following a catastrophic debate performance against Trump on June 27. She subsequently united Democrats, made big gains in the polls against Trump, and produced an incredibly close race that fell just short.

This sudden leap to the threshold of the White House represented a distinct contrast with the slow and steady progress Harris made earlier in her career. While Trump’s first successful run for office in 2016 was something of a lateral transfer from the heights of popular culture he had long commanded as a reality-TV star and a fixture of New York high society, Harris was then only just entering Washington. She had spent the previous quarter-century as a state and local prosecutor, rising through the ranks of California law enforcement and politics. Within three years, this junior senator was running for president, and the next year she was elected vice-president. During her years as a prosecutor, she was known as much for her interpersonal as for her professional accomplishments, becoming a staple of California’s more rarefied circles despite her own modest background as a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Harris’s views and interests fit her comfortably into the pragmatic-progressive wing of her state’s Democratic Party. But she showed some real toughness in winning her first statewide race in the tea-party year of 2010, narrowly defeating the popular Los Angeles district attorney to become California attorney general. By then, she was known as an ally of President Barack Obama, whom she had backed early in his 2008 candidacy when he was an underdog running against Hillary Clinton. Her 2020 presidential campaign was very much modeled on Obama’s historic effort, after a period of senatorial tempering when she was a notably effective member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But seeking a “lane” to the presidential nomination in a crowded field led Harris to take some notably left-bent positions that would later help Trump label her as an extremist, including support for single-payer health care, total commitment to LGBTQ rights, and criminal-justice reforms that extended to decriminalization of illegal border crossings. When her candidacy failed (after a brief moment of ascendence in 2019 when she scored major points against early front-runner Joe Biden over his one-time opposition to busing) amid signs of disorganization and strategic mistakes, her reputation as a rising political superstar took a hit. But her many assets were enough to make her a logical choice as Biden’s running-mate in 2020, and she did a fine job as a vice-presidential candidate, never upstaging her boss but not submerging her identity in his either.

While she will be eternally grateful to Biden for lifting her to the vice-presidency when other options were entirely available, the 46th president did her few favors once they were in office. Even as it became apparent that the new administration’s handling of migrants and asylum petitions was controversial and quickly unpopular, he placed Harris in the highly visible position of representing the new administration in Latin America, where she was sent on a hopeless journey to persuade refugees from poverty and violence to stay home. No, she was not “border czar,” but her association with the issue was indelible. She was also charged with being the public face of another administration initiative that wasn’t unpopular but was doomed: a drive to enact a national voting-rights measure over a Republican filibuster in the Senate. She finally got the chance to do something distinctive and in her wheelhouse when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Biden’s reluctance to talk about abortion in the frank language the wave of state bans and restrictions demanded soon led Harris to become the administration’s — and to a considerable extent, the Democratic Party’s — chief advocate for the restoration of reproductive rights.

But even as her public profile improved (along with her job-approval ratings), Harris had to negotiate without a hint of disloyalty the seas of Democratic unhappiness about Biden’s age, unpopularity, and signs of unfitness for another four years as president. When the crisis of his candidacy erupted after his disastrous performance in the June debate with Trump, Harris was ready. As steady pressure from Capitol Hill and around the country confronted Biden with his eroding support, she was even steadier in her support for her boss. And when Biden finally came to grips with the necessity of his self-sequestration as Democratic nominee, the moment came and went when the president and party might have seriously entertained the idea of choosing someone other than Harris as a successor via a “blitz primary” or some other gimmick for starting the nomination process all over again just before or even at the Democratic Convention in August. Biden, determined to control the nomination even as he abandoned it, never wavered in harnessing his withdrawal to a firm endorsement of his vice-president as his replacement, and after just a few days of uncertainty, the party, including every potential alternative to Harris, fell into line.

It was this all but miraculous switchover, which angry and confused Republicans called a “coup,” that in turn produced the sense of relief and excitement that made the DNC a lovefest and gave Harris the kind of almost-immediate lead over Trump (in fundraising, enthusiasm, and the polls) that Biden could never achieve.

Harris’s struggle against Trump was a tempestuous contest that steadily tightened as the former president hammered away at her on one level as a progressive (or as he calls her, a “Marxist”) extremist and at a much lower, personal level as a “low-IQ” diversity queen as unfit as Biden to serve and sharing the responsibility for his alleged policy failures. Her own campaign combined old-school Democratic base mobilization with a clear focus on converting anti-Trump Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, even as she continued her demands for the restoration of abortion rights and laid down an economic and immigration platform differing just enough from Biden’s to make her credible as a “change” candidate. As the race entered its final phase, Harris stepped up media appearances and began to stress her own version of the threat to democracy posed by Trump, focusing on his dangerous unpredictability and hinting at an age-based unfitness reminiscent of what Republicans said of Biden. Despite what happened on November 5, Harris almost certainly doing better than any Democrat could have anticipated in the doldrums of June.

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.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Next week, the election campaign will (finally) be over. It’s still basically a coin toss race. But it’s also clear that Trump is in a reasonably good position to win. The national margin for Harris has narrowed significantly; in Nate Silver’s average, it’s gone from 3.4 points around the time of the Walz-Vance debate to 1.1 points today. The same pattern can be seen in Silver’s swing state averages, where Harris’s margin has declined or Trump’s margin has increased over the time period. Or, in the critical case of Pennsylvania, flipped from a narrow Harris lead to a narrow one for Trump.

All this is good for Trump, even leaving aside the possibility that the polls are underestimating his support as they famously did in 2020 and 2016. And Silver’s forecast model currently leans slightly toward Trump (other models are closer to a flat 50-50 assessment). But as Silver himself emphasizes, even a 55-45 probabilistic assessment for Trump is closer to a coin toss than what people traditionally think of as a “favorite.”

So that’s where we are. How did this happen? How did Trump, widely-loathed and dramatically flawed candidate that he is, wind up with a coin-toss chance of winning his second presidential election? Put another way, how are Democrats falling short not just of recreating the Obama coalition but even the Biden coalition of four years earlier?

Examining the current demographics of the Harris coalition and comparing them to the demographics of Biden’s 2020 coalition provides a window into understanding how Trump has positioned himself for a possible victory. Here are four key points of demographic comparison, using the gold standard Catalist data from 2020 and crosstabs from the New York Times/Siena survey (rated A+ in Silver’s pollster ratings) and from the running demographic averagesmaintained by Cook Political Report (CPR).

(1) It’s still a working-class election. As I have previously noted, the key demographic to keep track of is the working class (noncollege) vote. How these voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

In 2020, according to the Catalist data, Trump carried working-class voters overall by four points but lost college-educated voters by 18 points. In the latest Times survey, Trump is carrying the working class by 13 points, a 9-point improvement over his 2020 performance. He is also losing the college-educated by 21 points, representing a 3-point slippage relative to 2020. But the net of these two changes is clearly in his favor. Indeed, given the preponderance of working-class voters in the electorate, to truly set off widening deficits among the working class Democrats would need margin gains among the college-educated that are 50 percent larger than their margin losses among working-class voters. That is not happening.

The Times data allow working-class performance to be broken down between whites and nonwhites. Among whites, Trump is carrying white working-class voters by 30 points, a 4-point improvement over his already-large 26-point margin in 2020 but losing college whites by 16 points, a 7-point deterioration relative to 2020 (CPR data show the same pattern but more muted). White college graduates are the major demographic where Democrats have consistently improved election-over-election since 2012. They look set to do the same in this election. If Harris is, in the end, able to overcome deteriorating working-class support it is likely to come from spiking support among these voters.

Looking at nonwhites, it is here that declining working-class support is most dramatic. Among nonwhite working-class voters, according to the Times data, Harris is currently leading by 26 points. That may sound like a lot but Biden carried these voters by 49 points in 2020. And Obama carried these same voters by 67 points in 2012! Thus Harris is running an astonishing 41 points behind Obama among nonwhite working class voters, an absolutely core demographic for Democrats.

As I have previously observed:

Since the latter part of the 20^th century, the left has had a plan. Well, not really a plan, it just kind of….happened. Call it, to use Thomas Piketty’s term, the Brahmin Left. That is his characterization of Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party…

For Brahmin Left parties, the temptation is great to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope they can retain enough of their working-class base to make the political arithmetic work. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the parties. But these parties have been increasingly battered by right populist competitors who are bleeding off more and more of the left’s working-class support. That calls the viability of the Brahmin Left model into question. There is a point beyond which the loss of working-class voters cannot be plausibly balanced by increased support among college-educated and professional voters and the model is fatally undermined.

We shall see if this is the election where that model finally breaks.

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(2) The rise of racial depolarization. There was already significant racial depolarization in the 2020 election, where Trump substantially improved his performance among nonwhites, especially Hispanics and, as noted above, the working class. We are seeing more of that in this election cycle, which should net out to Trump’s advantage. The Times data show Trump doing slightly worse among whites as a whole (an 11-point lead vs. 12 points in 2020) but much better among nonwhites (a 28-point deficit vs. 48 points in 2020).

Consistent with this, the Times data finds Trump trailing among Hispanics by just 10 points, 13 points better than his 23-point deficit in 2020 (which, in turn, was down from 39 points in 2016). Among blacks, Trump is being thumped by 69 points—but that is actually 12 points better than his 81-point gap in 2020. The CPR averages confirm this general pattern of gains from 2020, with Trump doing not quite as well among Hispanics but better among blacks.

(3) A declining age gap? A persistent feature of this election cycle has been relatively good performance for Trump among younger voters. In the Times poll, Trump is behind by 12 points among voters under 30 (this is identical to the CPR running average), an 11-point improvement over his 23-point deficit in 2020.

It is interesting to note that the 18-29 year old age group is now essentially a Gen Z group. Millennials are now almost all in the 30-44 year old age group. And here also Trump seems to be doing better. He is behind by only 5 points among this Millennial-dominated age group, compared to a 14-point deficit in 2020.

But among those 65 and over—now heavily dominated by Baby Boomers—Trump seems to have lost some ground, though not drastically. In the Times data, Trump is behind by a point among these voters, compared to a 4-point lead in 2020. The CPR average is slightly better for him, giving him a half-point lead, but still indicating a fall-off from 2020.

No matter which way you look at it, the data do seem to indicate a declining age gap. Comparing 18-29 year olds to those 65 and over, the age gap in 2020 was 27 points. Today in the Times data, it’s 11 points (13 points in the CPR data).

(4) A widening gender gap? There has been much talk about a widening gender gap in this election as women flock to support Harris’s candidacy and men seem to move toward Trump. This has generally been interpreted as a factor that favors Harris but that does not appear to be true. The simple math of a widening gender gap is that its political effect is determined by the relative movement of women and men in widening that gap.

In this case, the movement of men toward Trump is widening the gap not the movement of women toward Harris. In the Times data, Harris is carrying women by 12 points, actually slightly less than Biden’s 13-point advantage in 2020. But Trump is carrying men by 14 points, 8 points better than his 6-point advantage in 2020. Thus the gender gap has widened from 19 points in 2020 to 26 points today but this is entirely due to Trump doing better than before among men not a surge of support for Harris among women.

The CPR averages tell a similar story: a 12-point lead for Harris among women and an 11-point lead for Trump among men. Again: a widening gender gap (23 points) but entirely driven by increasing support for Trump among men. Indeed people seem to have forgotten that a key to Biden’s victory in 2020 was doing better among men while holding Clinton’s advantage among women. In that election, the gender gap was compressed but benefited Democrats. In this election, we may see the reverse, a widening gender gap that benefits Republicans.

This may seem strange in light of the extensive media coverage of very high margins for Harris among younger women, who appear to be leaning ever more strongly to the left. But it is not clear that women under 30 are giving margins to Harris that are much bigger than those they gave to Biden in 2020. And there is significant evidence that men under 30 may be poised to vote much more pro-Trump this election than they did in 2020. In any event, however the trends net out among young men and women they do not appear to be enough to change the overall story of a widening gender gap driven not by a pro-Democratic trend among women but rather a pro-Republican trend among men.

These data make clear how Trump may win. However, they do not mean he will win. As noted, the race is still basically a coin toss. If Harris wins, it would be no surprise if some of the demographic trends noted above turned out to be more favorable to her than they currently look: less deterioration among the working class; even higher support among white college graduates; a return of black and Hispanic support margins to close to 2020 levels and so on. This in turn could be driven by perhaps the Democrats’ best hole card: turnout. An excellent article by Nate Cohn lays out the contours of the Democrats’ potential turnout advantage:

As we’ve reported all cycle, Democrats excel among high-turnout voters, while Donald J. Trump is strong among relatively low-turnout voters. He’s made his biggest gains among low-turnout demographic groups like young men and nonwhite voters….but almost all of that strength is contained among those who sat out the midterms.

This is not simply about education: Even the college graduates who sat out the midterms were far likelier to say they backed Mr. Trump.

Of course, just because Mr. Trump leads among irregular voters does not necessarily mean he will win the irregular voters who decide to show up. In the midterms, Democrats managed to draw a disproportionately Democratic group of voters out of the pool of voters who didn’t vote in primaries. This time, it’s possible they could draw a disproportionately Democratic group out of the Republican-leaning pool of those who didn’t vote in the midterms.

Imagine, for instance, that the infrequent Black or young voters who say they back Mr. Trump in the polls generally don’t show up, while those who back Ms. Harris really do come to the polls.

This is a plausible story about how Trump may lose. But it does not mean he will lose. That will be determined by, as they say, the only poll that really counts. Stay tuned and don’t forget to vote.

In a crazy-close presidential race that may come down to Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris is getting some late help, and not just from the racist comedian at Trump’s New York City rally, as I explained at New York:

As you probably know, we’re in the final week of a dead-even presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, with Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes being the most desperately sought prize by both campaigns. Team Trump is already having a difficult week in the Keystone State thanks to a crude racist joke about Puerto Rico that one of Trump’s comedian buddies told at his wild Madison Square Garden rally, which is not going over well among the pivotal bloc of Puerto Rican voters in northeastern Pennsylvania. Now, Harris has gotten a helping hand in the same vicinity from none other than House Speaker Mike Johnson, as NBC News reports:

“House Speaker Mike Johnson took a dig at Obamacare during an event in Pennsylvania on Monday, telling a crowd there will be ‘massive’ health care changes in America if Donald Trump wins the election.

“’Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,’ Johnson, R-La., said in Bethlehem while campaigning for GOP House candidate Ryan Mackenzie, according to video footage obtained by NBC News.

“’No Obamacare?’ one attendee asked Johnson, referring to the law Democrats passed in 2010, also known as the Affordable Care Act.

“’No Obamacare,’ Johnson responded, rolling his eyes. ‘The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.’”

The Harris campaign immediately jumped on his comments, noting that Johnson had promised “one of Trump’s top priorities will be to repeal the Affordable Care Act and rip away health care from tens of millions of Americans.”

Health care is not at all an issue Trump wants Republicans talking about. The effort to repeal Obamacare was one of the less popular initiatives of his presidency and, not coincidentally, one of his biggest failures. It’s also one of the areas where Harris has outpolled him. He added to his problems during the September debate with his rival when he could cite only “the concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare despite having allegedly spent many years on his own yet-to-be-revealed proposal.

Worse yet, Johnson’s remarks very strongly suggest two things that are potentially dangerous to Trump in the eyes of swing voters: (1) He plans to make repealing Obamacare an immediate priority if Trump wins and Republicans control Congress, which likely means it would be rolled into a gigantic budget-reconciliation bill and steamrolled through to passage if possible, and (2) his party’s designs on health-care policy are radical, meant to replace the regulations central to Obamacare’s coverage guarantees with “free market” provisions almost certain to return the health-care system to the days when insurers aggressively discriminated against anyone old, sick, or poor. Johnson’s rhetoric will also give Democrats an opportunity to remind voters that the last “repeal Obamacare” package aimed to decimate Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for poor people and a key part of the country’s social safety net. Beyond that, Johnson seemed to to be telling Pennsylvanians a reelected Trump wouldn’t care if his health-care plans made Americans unhappy, per NBC:

“”We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people, it’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors and we need this across the board,’ Johnson said. ‘And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy and we’re going to fix these things.’”

Taking a “blowtorch” to health-care regulations that ensure coverage for preexisting conditions and limit price discrimination probably isn’t what swing voters hope for in a Trump administration billing itself as offering a return to American greatness. And the Harris campaign is surely grateful that Trump’s loyal congressional ally is making it known. Could that be the “little secret” Trump cryptically said he and Johnson would reveal after the election? If so, the Speaker spilled the beans at the wrong place and the wrong time.

 

It’s horse-racey, but it is as good an update on Pennsylvania polls in these closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign as you are going to find. Sara Dorn and Antonio Pequeno write in “Pennsylvania 2024 Trump-Harris Polls: Race Virtually Tied In 6 New Surveys Of Vital Battleground (Updated)” at Forbes:

TOPLINE

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are within one percentage point of each other in a half-dozen new polls of Pennsylvania this week, as the race remains essentially even in the swing state that’s likely to decide the winner of the 2024 election.

KEY FACTS

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.”

From “To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump” by Dustin Guastella at The Guardian:

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.

In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.

Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.

Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.

It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.

Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.

The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.

If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.

….Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.

The electoral college has become a gun held to the head of US democracy

Lawrence Douglas

Read more

If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.

Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.

“In other words,” Guastella concludes, “they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.”