2024 Elections Results Deep Dive

When evaluating the top-to-bottom annihilation that voters handed the Democratic Party last month, two questions stand out as the most important.  First, was this election ever winnable for the party regardless of the nominee or the strength of their campaign?  And second, was 2012 or 2019 better reflective of the exact point on the calendar when the decisions were put into motion that ensured the bottom would fall out for the Democratic Party's brand?

The first question is probably a qualified "no".  Last month, I compared the Democrats' 2020 coalition to that of Jimmy Carter's illogical and unsustainable 1976 coalition.  Biden's 2020 victory was the last gasp of a party that had badly misunderstood the electorate and was about to be forced to govern in a volatile period where its wobbly coalition was vulnerable to coming apart.  The fact that Biden was a charisma-free leader with zero salesmanship skills dealing with a hostile and fragmented media landscape meant that his administration's accomplishments were tantamount to a tree falling in the forest and nobody noticing.  On election day, more than 70% of the country thought we were on the wrong track and the incumbent President had a 40% approval rating.  I suppose the incumbent party won the White House under similar conditions in 1948, but I suspect that's the only example in at least a century where a party facing these kinds of headwinds was able to prevail.  The fundamentals certainly didn't back up this degree of voter unhappiness, but the Democrats nonetheless had to face the electorate that they had on November 5.

Biden, or at least the octogenarian version of Biden, was a uniquely terrible emissary for the party and the fact that those surrounding him were game to hoodwink the country into believing he was cognitively capable of being the most powerful man in the world for four more years understandably left a bad taste in voters' mouths that rubbed off on Kamala Harris.  While Harris ran an honorable campaign for 107 days after Biden chose not to run for re-election, she didn't run a "great" or even "flawless" campaign as so many said.  Her skill set is as a prosecutor, so the debate format served her well against an imbecile like Trump, but like Biden, she lacked the characteristic that is most important in winning voters' support, which is salesmanship.  She foolishly took nearly a month off from public appearances before and after the debate, and by the time she got to the interview circuit, she was already losing.  It was clearly not a strength of hers, and just like her disastrous 2020 Presidential bid, one could see the gears grinding in her head when asked a question, desperately trying to recall canned talking points and failing to articulate any kind of vision for what a Kamala Harris Presidential term would look like.  She might have gotten away with this in a neutral political environment, but not when 72% of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction, especially with an expectations divide where the bar for credibility was an inch off the ground for Trump and up in the atmosphere for his challenger with constant upward adjustments.

So could anybody else have pulled out a victory?  Again, 72% "wrong track" numbers are tough sledding for the incumbent party no matter who is at the top of the ticket, but salesmanship matters above all else and given how flawed the challenger was, it shouldn't have required that creative of a pitch to disqualify him.  And, of course, part of good salesmanship is adjusting your pitch to change with the times.  In 2024, this absolutely required the Democratic nominee to engage with the podcasters.  "60 Minutes" and "The View" just won't connect you to Gen Z or even most millennials.

I underestimated the extent of this media transformation until consuming the election postmortems and discovering how absolutely disconnected younger people are to current events or any semblance of the world around them.  It's not as inexplicable that the youth vote went for Harris by only 1 point when you find out just how many voters didn't even realize Joe Biden was no longer a candidate for President in the weeks before the election.  It was with these voters that the Democrats lost the election, even though there was very little overlap between their position on the issues and the Presidential candidate that they voted for. With a media strategy adjusted for the times, these voters were absolutely gettable.  It was always gonna be excruciatingly hard, but it was never gonna happen by going on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" to call Trump a fascist or by traveling the country with Liz Cheney at your side. Low-information voters were looking to be sold on someone who could improve their lives, and an effective nominee would have at least made an attempt to make that sale.

As for my second question, did the Democrats lose this election in 2012 or in 2019?  

To recap, the 2012 election was the perfect storm that Democrats perceived would be the new normal. It was a year when black voter turnout exceeded white turnout, the only time in history that that's been the case.  It was a year when the Republican nominee was both a humorless dork and a private equity baron who was a cinch to demagogue as the worst boss you ever had.  It was a year when Obama had bailed out the auto industry, positively impacting a number of key battleground states, and ran against a guy who had called for it to go bankrupt.  And most critically, it was a year when Democratic performance among Hispanic voters peaked at more than 70% support.  

The Democrats had their future all figured out after that 2012 win, and it would come in the form of an impenetrable multiracial coalition.  If only they put their thumb on the policy scale through expansion-pack immigration to accelerate that pace of nonwhite population growth, it was entirely possible they'd never lose another Presidential election and even if they did lose in a worst-case scenario, the center of gravity was destined to shift leftward to the point that any future Republican President would never be allowed to govern as a Republican.  Donald Trump blew this consensus to pieces only four short years later, but given that the Democrats' nonwhite base held serve for Hillary in 2016, the donor class of the party was emboldened to double down on the "voters of color will be with us forever and for always" groupthink marching order in the cycles to come.

And that brings us to 2019, when said donor class shifted the center of gravity to some unrecognizable version of neo-progressivism that manifested itself in the most self-destructive messaging I've ever seen in politics. The Presidential debates that summer eliminated all daylight between the positions of left-wing activists on social media and the leading voices of the Democratic Party, with the expectation that voters of color who've long leaned socially conservative would rubber stamp any policy prescription dreamed up in Ivy League faculty lounges.  We were scolded for spending too little time talking about transgender abortions.  We were told "hell yes" that they were gonna "take away your AR-15s".  We were told inmates should still be granted the right to vote.  We were told that policing crime was racist.  We were instructed that Hispanics should be renamed "Latinx" and all people of color should be referred to as "BIPOC", whether they like or not.  We were told that our entire lives should be judged based on the politically incorrect Halloween costume we may have worn in the 1980s, with the social media mobs serving as our judges, juries, and executioners.

And most devastatingly, there was an overwhelming consensus that borders no longer mattered.  You see, in order for Democrats to hasten the pace of nonwhite population growth needed to render their opposition from ever winning another election, the line needed to be blurred to maximize immigration by whatever means necessary and at any possible cost to society.  A stage full of Democratic Presidential candidates raised their to show their support for decriminalizing border crossings, and later expressed their unanimous support for including illegal immigrants in their government health care plans.

Despite their best attempts at self-immolation by embracing so many positions with 65% disapproval ratings among voters--and a fresh batch of new ones with "defunding the police" being the rallying cry of many on the left after the George Floyd racial reckoning--Joe Biden still pulled out a victory in 2020, mostly because the economy cratered amidst COVID and the incumbent President's handling of it was rightfully perceived as inept.  But it was a soft and fleeting victory set in quicksand, put in further jeopardy when cancel culture didn't end, crime kept rising, racial guilt-tripping kept expanding, the transgender debate dominated our national conversation, and most saliently, when Biden spent three and a half years appearing as though he was keeping his party's promise for open borders.  And for all intents and purposes, they weren't wrong.  A policy of "asylum for all comers" is effectively open borders.

It's pretty clear to me the answer to that second question is that 2019 was the year that Democrats lost the 2024 election, although it's intractably linked to their wrongheaded takeaway from the 2012 cycle that voters of color would tag along unquestioningly for whatever ride Democrats told them they were gonna take.  None of this is to let Republicans off the hook for their unimaginably shameful conduct of the Trump years which was far more horrific than anything Democrats have done wrong in my lifetime, but setting that aside as much as is possible and speaking just in the abstract, Democrats deserved to be rebuked for being out of touch to an almost comical degree for far too long.  Democrats' willingness to write off large swaths of the population as beneath persuasion while convincing themselves that voters of color would be assuaged by crudely pandering to their identity and vowing to grow the ranks of "people who look like them" was reductive and insulting.  With all that was at stake this cycle, it's a terrible shame the Democrats had to learn this tough lesson this year, but it was inevitable that they were gonna reap what they sowed in 2012 and 2019 at some point.

I'll have closing thoughts at the end of my opus, but for now, it's long past time to get to the state by state breakdowns....

Alabama--Things went pretty much as one would expect in the Yellowhammer State last month.  I knew Republicans would manage to consolidate support even more strongly in the Deep South and that's exactly what happened.  Trump won Alabama by 30 points, one point stronger than my prediction of a 29-point win.  That's 5 points better than he did in 2020, which suggests he poached a decent share of the black vote as there just aren't that many white voters left to win over in Alabama.  But odd as it may sound, Democrats actually did manage to pick up a Congressional seat in Alabama last month.  Of course, they did it the old-fashioned way....through the courts!  For as loathsome as this Supreme Court has been, one area they've been rather shockingly deferential is in upholding the Voting Rights Acts, including the requirement for majority-minority districts where demographics permit it.  As a result, a second majority-minority district was forced upon Alabama lawmakers, stretching from Montgomery to Mobile, and voters did as expected and elected Democrat Shomari Figures to the House by 9 points in the new AL-02.  Alabama now has a 5-2 Republican delegation after years of a 6-1 majority.  Now the question is whether the Alabama Legislature acts to dissolve it in defiance of the Court's ruling, knowing that by the time the issue is resolved again, it will be time for another round of redistricting.

Alaska--The trendline for Democrats had been so good these last few cycles in the The Last Frontier that I was confident it would continue.  After Trump only beat Biden by 10 points four years ago, I predicted that margin would whittle down to 9 points this year.  Instead, along with the nation overall, it went the other direction, with Trump prevailing by 13 points.  That's still considerable improvement from the Bush years when Republicans regularly won the state nearly 2-1.  Unfortunately, the difference between the 2020 margin and the slightly darker shade of red in 2024 was probably enough to cost the Democrats their at-large representative.  Democrat Mary Peltola won a special election in early 2022 and then held it in the midterms.  She came up short this year, losing to Republican Nick Begich by less than 3 points.  This sets Peltola up as the frontrunner for a Senate bid in 2026 against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.  She would be the underdog, but if Trump's inevitable overreach impacts his party's approval rating, Alaska could become one of the more believable Democratic targets next cycle.

Arizona--It's true that you can tell a lot about a candidate's standing from their campaign activity.  While Arizona was listed among the seven battleground states, Harris was traveling there less frequently than any of the others in the final weeks of the campaign, offering some tea leaves that the outcome that materialized was probably foreseeable in their internal polling.  And it makes some degree of sense.  I predicted Trump +2 because I thought the Hispanic shift to Trump would outpace the upscale suburban shift to Harris.  It turns out both groups shifted to Trump, giving Trump a decisive win of more than 5 points.  One thing I was grateful to be wrong about was my prediction that the Presidential and Senate races would converge as it got closer to the election.  It turns out the polling spread between Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego was very real, only it was never close in the Presidential race and Gallego never had the big lead in the Senate race that polls suggested.  As a result, I stumbled into the right answer by predicting Gallego +2, which is exactly where it settled.  There must have been some serious ticket-splitting after all, most likely led by Hispanic men, and Democrats are undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief about that as they salvaged a Senate seat they otherwise shouldn't have won.  Given Harris's weakness at the top of the ticket, this clearly wasn't the year for tumbling vulnerable Republican incumbents David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani in AZ-01 and AZ-06, respectively, as Democrats had hoped.  The GOP continues to hold the same 6-3 advantage in the Congressional delegation as they did before election night.

Arkansas--It's been well over a decade since anything consequential has happened on election night in the Natural State.  Arkansas took a sharp right turn in Obama's first term and has never looked back, with white voters realigning to resemble their counterparts in the Deep South.  I predicted a 29-point Trump win, continuing the growth in margins that each Republican Presidential nominee has been getting for a generation, and I was close but still underestimated Trump by a point as he won by 30 points.  The Mississippi Delta counties that were still 2-1 Democrat in the Bush years are now just a bit better or just a bit worse than 50-50, realigning along racial lines.  Washington County, home to the university town of Fayetteville, seemed poised to flip blue this year but ended up getting redder along with the rest of the nation.   The state's 4-0 Republican Congressional delegation held with ease once again and the memory of Bill Clinton gets left further and further behind in the rearview mirror.

California--When I mused in October that I thought Donald Trump had a shot at winning the popular vote and maybe even getting to 50%, I was right in concept but my math was off as I insufficiently calculated the level of collapse that Harris would endure in the blue states to lose the popular vote.  One such example was the Golden State, where I predicted Harris would prevail by 25 points.  That would still have been a substantial decline from Biden's margin four years ago, but it didn't correctly measure up to her actual decline.  The votes are now FINALLY fully counted and Harris prevailed by less than 21 points.  Meanwhile, in the open seat Senate race, Democrat Adam Schiff put up an even more modest victory, at least by the recent standards of California.  I predicted it would be Schiff +21 but it ended up Schiff +18.  The county map reflects these declines for Harris and Schiff as well, more closely resembling John Kerry's California map of 2004 than anything seen recently.  The majority-Hispanic counties of the Central Valley along with the Inland Empire have flipped back to red, and it's not at all clear they're gonna go back for Dems.  For a while there, it looked as though there was no ceiling to the Democrats' insurgency in California, but it now seems as though 2016 and 2018 were "peak Democrat" for the state and that political gravity is starting to catch up now. With that in mind, Democrats seem to have come out okay in the House races, picking up at least two seats and possibly three.  Some potentially endangered Democratic incumbents that held on included Josh Harder (from Stockton-based CA-09), Jim Costa (whose Fresno-based CA-21 always has among the lowest turnout in the country), and Mike Levin (from suburban San Diego-based CA-49).  And embattled Democrat Dave Min held on by 3 points in the Orange County-based CA-47 open seat vacated by fellow Democrat Katie Porter.  But the best news for Democrats came from the three seats that flipped from red to blue.  The first to be called was CA-27 in northern Los Angeles County where Republican Mike Garcia, a long-time target for Democrats, was defeated by nearly 3 points by Democratic challenger George Whitesides. In Orange County, CA-45 also flipped from red to blue, very narrowly replacing Republican incumbent Michelle Steele with Democrat Derek Tran by a few hundred votes.  And in the very last race in the nation to be called, Democrat Adam Gray upset incumbent Republican John Duarte in the Modesto-based CA-13 by less than one-tenth of a percent, an impressive victory given Harris's weak performance in the Central Valley.

Colorado--The topline of the 2024 cycle represents another successful year for Democrats in Colorado, the latest of the party's uninterrupted decade-long winning streak in the Rocky Mountain State.  I predicted a 12-point Harris win and she ended up winning by 11 points, which is pretty amazing when recalling that Hillary only won Colorado by 5 points as recently as 2016.  Below the surface though, the same issues that plagued Democrats nationally managed to land a couple of punches in Colorado too, particularly the loss of support among Hispanics.  Whether it be the heavily Hispanic rural counties on the southern side of the state or the northeastern Denver suburbs in Adams County, the decline for Democrats was tangible, so much so in the latter region that it cost the Democrats a Congressional seat.  The CO-08 seat that the state gained after the 2020 census and was designed to be a very swingy seat that would be a tough hold for either party.  After Democrat Yadira Caraveo prevailed in 2022, she lost it to Republican Gabe Evans this year.  Maybe Dems can get it back in two years, but it depends a lot on how durable Republican gains among Hispanics prove to be.  Meanwhile, the western Colorado CO-03 seat that Lauren Boebert vacated stayed in Republican hands with a 5-point victory by Jeff Hurd while the carpetbagging Boebert gets to stay in Congress herself by winning the deeply conservative CO-04 in eastern Colorado by an underwhelming 12 points.  With the open seat in CO-05 staying comfortably GOP, the Republicans now split Colorado's House delegation 4-4, which isn't a bad showing for a state where the party is so clearly in retreat.

Connecticut--At least for a Midwesterner not intimately familiar with the demographics of the northeast, it came as a bit of a surprise to learn the Nutmeg State had the nation's largest population of Puerto Ricans.  So when it came to prediction time, it was easy for me to underestimate that contracting support for Harris among Hispanics would be felt in Connecticut just as it would in Florida or Nevada, as I instead abided by the dated stereotype of a WASPy electorate that would be turned off by Trump.  As a result, my prediction of Harris +20 overshot the runway rather decisively.  Harris still won by a comfortable 14 points, but it was another considerable backslide compared to Biden four years ago.  In the Senate race, I predicted two-term Democratic incumbent Chris Murphy would prevail by 18 points but he ended up running well ahead of the top of the ticket and winning by 19 points. Despite the slippage for Harris, there's no indication of an altered statewide trajectory, and the Democrats comfortably maintained their 5-0 House majority, with a 7-point win by Jahanna Hayes in CT-05 in northwestern Connecticut being the closest race of the bunch.

Delaware--It's been 14 years now since Christine "I Am Not a Witch" O'Donnell went down in flames in a Delaware Senate race, and the First State hasn't had an interesting election cycle since.  The Democrats comfortably win every race every time like clockwork.  So even with favorite son Joe Biden no longer on the ticket, it was easy to predict a decisive Harris win.  I predicted Harris +16 and was close as it ultimately went Harris +15.  The Senate seat, vacated by four-term Democrat Tom Carper, stayed in Democratic hands with the state's at-large House representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, who was one of the first two black women elected to the U.S. Senate this year.  The margin was tough to predict though as there was an independent running that I expected to run stronger and take votes away from the Republican, but he faded in the clutch.  I predicted Rochester would win by 24 points with the divided opposition but she still ran outran the top of the ticket, winning by 17 points.  Also making history is Rochester's successor in Delaware's at-large House seat won by Democrat Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of the House, a development for which Republicans have already predictably made asses of themselves.  Delaware also had an open-seat gubernatorial race this year, and for the ninth consecutive term, the Democrats held it with Matt Meyer winning by 12 points.

District of Columbia--The nation's capital has long been the bluest jurisdiction in the country and that streak stayed alive in 2024, although even here, Harris took a 3-point shave from Biden's number four years ago.  I predicted Harris +85 and came close with Harris +84.  We'll see how this holds up if and when Trump snuffs out the federal employment roster and replaces them with loyalist stooges as promised.  Maybe four years from now, DC will be a "swing state"!

Florida--It shouldn't have been hard to see a trainwreck coming for Democrats in the Sunshine State after several cycles in a row of the state trending more conservative than the country, a shift that was accelerated during the pandemic as the state swelled with conservative ideologues who didn't want to pay taxes. But polling always seems to be a cycle behind in Florida, with only the NY Times/Siena poll correctly predicting the double-digit Trump trouncing that was pending.  Of course, I predicted it as well.  I seemed bullish when I predicted Trump +11 but I was actually too conservative with my guess as it ended up Trump +13.  I underestimated the Senate race even more, expecting the particularly loathsome slimeball incumbent Rick Scott to underperform, particularly with south Florida Hispanics given his challenge from former Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.  I still predicted Scott to have a decisive 8-point win, but he ultimately got the same 13-point win that Trump did.  Trump and Scott's county maps were identical, with deep and enduring losses for Democrats in every corner of the state, and no place worse than its most populous county, Miami-Dade.  This comprehensive Democratic collapse was also felt in the House races, where targeted Republican incumbents like Anna Paulina Luna from St. Petersburg-based FL-13 and Maria Salazar from FL-27 in the Miami suburbs prevailed handily.  Any vulnerabilities in Florida's already lopsided 20-8 GOP House delegation in the foreseeable future are likely to be felt among the Democrats hanging on in the heavily Jewish Gold Coast of Palm Beach and Broward counties, where long-time Democratic incumbents Jared Moskowitz, Lois Frankel, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz all prevailed by single digits in districts that were recently 2-1 Democratic.  Moskowitz in particular seems like he could be in trouble moving forward, winning by only 5 points.  I suspect there's a demographic shift in these districts where Jewish retirees are slowly being replaced by anti-tax cranks from the Midwest.  With Marco Rubio being promoted to Secretary of State, there will be a special election in Florida in 2026 but there's little hope of Democratic victory even in the best imaginable environment.  As another poster suggested in the comments section recently, the Republicans could probably run Matt Gaetz and win in Florida these days.

Georgia--I suspect it surprised quite a few people when The Peach State dropped into the Joe Biden column in 2020.  But after nearly two decades of observing most of the black population of the rural South migrate to metropolitan Atlanta, coupled with the insurgency of Georgia's film industry, it didn't surprise me nearly as much that Georgia politics changed as quickly as it did.  So while I predicted Georgia to go for Trump by less than 1 point this year, that was primarily because I thought the country as a whole would shift further to the right in 2024.  In the end, Trump won Georgia by 2 points, but did so in an environment where he won the national popular vote by 1.2%.  In other words, Georgia is now barely more Republican than the country overall, which is pretty astonishing.  Suburban Atlanta was home to some of the relatively small number of counties in the country that swung toward the Democrats in 2024, suggesting that Georgia's overall trendline remains favorable to the Democrats.  Will this be enough to save Jon Ossoff in the 2026 Senate race against what's likely to be a top-tier challenger?  It's too soon to say, but Georgia remains one of the few states where Democratic fortunes seem unequivocally positive moving forward.  The state's geography doesn't lend itself to a friendly House delegation so the Republicans maintained their 9-5 majority, with the incumbents winning every seat by double digits.

Hawaii--There was never any doubt that the Aloha State would be as hostile to Republicans this cycle as they always are, but like so many other places, the margins were telling as Democrats underperformed previous cycles.  I predicted Harris would win Hawaii by 28 points, which would still have been a decline compared to Biden four years ago, but she undershot that prediction by several points with the final result of Harris +23.  In the Senate race, two-term Democratic incumbent Mazie Hirono seemed like a strong contender for the biggest blowout Senate victory in the nation against a penniless, fourth-rate challenger, but my prediction was even further off there.  I predicted Hirono +43 but the race only ended up as Hirono +33.  Still a huge victory, but a little underwhelming for Hawaii.  Both of Hawaii's Democratic House incumbents were easily re-elected and, of course, they may be about to get another former lawmaker appointed to the Cabinet with oddball, opportunistic former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. 

Idaho--It was business as usual in the Gem State this year, and that business was electing Republicans by massive margins.  I predicted a Trump +32 victory in Idaho this year and the state delivered with a Trump +35 win.  Ada County, the state's largest county and home of fast-growing Boise, came within a few points of flipping blue in 2020 but backslid to high single digits this year, with the rest of the state obviously following suit.  Even the college town of Moscow, Idaho, flipped to Trump this year.  And both Republican House members were re-elected handily as well.

Illinois--The election night numbers from the Land of Lincoln looked like a full-blown calamity for Democrats.  On Wednesday morning, Harris led by only 4 points statewide in a state where Biden won by 17 in 2020.  But the map didn't match the headline, with all of the suburban counties of Chicagoland going blue as well as most of the typical Democratic redoubts of downstate Illinois.  The only thing that made sense was that a bunch of Cook County had yet to be counted.  Sure enough, Harris's numbers have quietly rebounded since election night to within shouting distance of what Democrats would expect to see in Illinois.  Unfortunately for Democrats, I expect the election night narrative of a MAGA wave crashing upon Illinois will likely stick in the national narrative.  The final verdict was a Harris victory of nearly 11 points.  That's below my Harris +15 prediction, but as I said, the core held in all the places the Democrats needed for what passes for a comprehensive Illinois victory in the modern era.  Most importantly for Democrats, it meant that their lethal 14-3 Congressional gerrymander also held with the Democratic delegation all hanging on by comfortable margins which wouldn't have been possible if the election night numbers indicating a 4-point Harris win were correct.  Even Chicagoland Democrats like Sean Casten and Lauren Underwood whose districts stretch out into the outer reaches of the metro area prevailed by high single digits, as was also the case for Eric Sorenson in his earmuff-shaped district connecting Rockford and Peoria.  I'm surprised that courts uphold Illinois' Democratic gerrymander when so many less egregious gerrymanders coming from red states seem to get tossed.

Indiana--The Hoosier State continues to behave like the bright red state it's long been, airbrushing away its left turn of 2006 and 2008 where Democrats took over their Congressional delegation and Barack Obama won their 11 electoral votes.  There was no hint of competitiveness this year with Trump winning by 19 points, matching my prediction exactly.  Places like upscale Hamilton County north of Indianapolis where Democrats had hoped to make serious inroads voted more red than they did four years ago while the small cities and rural areas consolidate to a dark hue of red.  The open Senate seat vacated by Republican Mike Braun seemed like it could be a blowout for Republican Congressman Jim Banks against a low-budget challenger, but Banks' 20-point margin was only a tick better than Trump's, falling below my prediction of Banks +27.  The 7-2 GOP Congressional delegation also held, with Democrat Frank Mrvan's grasp of northwestern Indiana looking increasingly tenuous moving forward as the region gets less blue.  The most competitive race in Indiana this year--or rather the least uncompetitive--was the open gubernatorial race where the aforementioned Republican Mike Braun was seeking a promotion to the statehouse.  Despite some seriously shady AI-manipulated campaign ads that were deemed illegal by a court, Braun prevailed by more than 13 points.

Iowa--The response to the Des Moines Register's poll the weekend before the election showing Harris leading Trump by 3 in the Hawkeye State should have been boisterous laughter.  But given the reputation of the pollster, it was taken seriously and was the source of endless Democratic daydreaming and wishcasting about the state of the race in Iowa and nationally in those final three days of the campaign.  And it was all for nothing as the poll was wrong by even more than I anticipated.  I predicted an 11-point Trump win in Iowa and once again underestimated reality as Trump ended up winning by 13 points.  There was no subtle or silent shift in the farm and factory towns of Iowa or elsewhere in the Midwest.  Its residents were just as dedicated to Trump taking them off the tariff cliff as they were in the past.  Even the suburbs, a demographic that Iowa has less of than most other states, saw a modest shift in Trump's direction this year, leaving an Iowa county map that couldn't look further than the one we remember from the Bush or Obama years.  The state's 4-0 Republican Congressional delegation held too, the final hiccup being resolved last week.  I had expected freshman Zach Nunn to be the most vulnerable Republican in his Des Moines-based IA-03, but he prevailed by 4 points.  It was Marianette Miller-Meeks in southeastern Iowa's IA-01, who won her first term by SIX VOTES, who again had a photo finish.  With a lead of more than 800 votes though, Miller-Meeks seemed likely to prevail and just did.  At some point, I would think the fever will break and Iowa will become bipartisan again, at least in these two districts.  Statewide, expect it to look more like Nebraska than Minnesota for the foreseeable future.

Kansas--For the third or fourth time in the last decade, I overestimated the Sunflower State's realignment in the direction of the Democrats.  In my defense, there was always a larger wing of moderate Republicans in Kansas than in most Middle American states, as we've seen plentiful examples of their consolidation toward Democrats in recent years, particularly in metropolitan Kansas City and Wichita in 2022.  With that in mind, I thought my prediction of a 14-point Trump win was probably conservative and that Kansas might show even more leftward movement than most other states compared to 2020.  In the end, Trump did a little better in Kansas even compared to four years ago, winning by more than 16 points.  Little to no Democratic growth was evident in Kansas City or Wichita while the heavily Hispanic packinghouse towns in western Kansas managed to get even more Republican.  As expected, the Republicans maintained their 3-1 Congressional delegation majority.  

Kentucky--From one bright red state to another, the only question lingering around the Bluegrass State this cycle was how high the tide would rise for Trump.  It turns out quite high!  I predicted a gain from his numbers four years ago and settled upon a 28-point Trump win.  He blew past that and scored a 31-point margin of victory.  While its largest cities of Louisville and Lexington remain blue islands in the sea of red elsewhere in the state, the hints of competitiveness four years ago in the Bluegrass region surrounding Lexington were subdued again this year.  It's a pretty safe bet that adding Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to the ticket, as Harris was at one point considering, would have had a negligible effect anywhere in the state.  Republicans easily maintained their 5-1 advantage in the state's Congressional delegation.

Louisiana--My gut said the Deep South would be particularly unfriendly territory for Kamala Harris and that played out as expected.  I predicted Trump +21 in the Pelican State and he exceeded that by a point for a Trump +22 win.  It's been jarring over the decades watching the Louisiana map shed blue counties, er parishes, to where nearly all of what remains for the Democrats are the three majority-black population centers.  Fortunately for Democrats, the same Supreme Court ruling that forced an additional VRA district in Alabama forced another new district in Louisiana, and Democrats wrangled themselves another blue seat in LA-04.  The district connects Baton Rouge to Shreveport and Democrat Cleo Fields managed more than 50% in a crowded jungle primary field to avoid a runoff.  The Republican advantage in the Louisiana Congressional delegation has now been whittled down to 4-2, but keep in mind one of those seats belongs to the particularly oily new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Maine--It was mostly a good cycle for Democrats in the Pine Tree State, although I predicted a bit more hesitance toward a Trump comeback in New England than we ended up getting.  I predicted a 9-point Harris win statewide and she prevailed by 7 points, albeit with the state sharply divided between coastal and upstate with the ME-02 electoral vote going for Trump by high single digits once again.  In the Senate race, traditional Republican opposition as well as token Democratic opposition that once again arose to challenge Independent Senator Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, made it hard to predict that race's margin, even if there was never any doubt that King would win.  I had predicted an 11-point win for King but given the divided opposition, King prevailed by 17 points over his closest challenger, who was the Republican.  And despite the aforementioned Trump trouncing in the upstate Congressional district, incumbent Democratic Congressman Jared Golden found a way to win for the fourth consecutive time, his margin only about a half percentage point better than his Republican challenger.  This kept the Democrats in control of both of Maine's House districts yet again.  The big question heading into 2026 is whether Republican Senator Susan Collins chooses to run for a sixth term.  No matter how bad the national environment is for Republicans, Collins would be the prohibitive favorite if she chose to run.  If she retires though, Jared Golden would undoubtedly move to the front of the line to run for the seat, but there would be a lot of prospects from both parties and if decades of covering Maine politics has taught us anything it's that we shouldn't think we know what Mainers are gonna do next.

Maryland--Another blue state that election night analysts kept going back to as an example of MAGA inroads was Maryland, but like Illinois, it was a bit of a red mirage.  I remembered that a lot of votes were counted late in the Old Line State and that they tended to be overwhelmingly Democratic.  This played out once again, with Democratic margins in Maryland having grown several points since election night.  But to be sure, the state won't be as blue this year as it was for Biden four years ago, despite being a state whose demographic profile and proximity to federal employment that Trump promises to eviscerate implies that it absolutely should get bluer!  On the Presidential line, I had predicted a 33-point win for Harris.  Votes are still being counted as of this writing, but it looks like Harris will ultimately win by 29 points.  The Senate race had at least a little suspense with popular former Governor Larry Hogan running as the Republican to fill the open seat left behind by Democrat Ben Cardin.  There was never any doubt in my mind that Democrat Angela Alsobrooks would win, but it always a matter of margin, and my prediction was pretty damn close.  I predicted Alsobrooks +12 and it looks like it will end up being right on the nose as the final votes get counted.  That means the race diverges more between the top of the ticket and the Senate race in Maryland than any other state this cycle, but it's still an impressive win by Alsobrooks, the second of two black women elected to the Senate this year.  An aggressive Democratic gerrymander held again this year, with Democrats maintaining their 7-1 advantage in the Congressional delegation, but the weakest link of this delegation is MD-06, stretching from the western DC suburbs to rural western Maryland.  Democrat April Delaney was trailing her GOP challenger as of the election night count, but came back to win by 6 points.

Massachusetts--Another deep blue northeastern state, another concerning underperformance by Harris.  The Bay State has long been associated with liberalism and while there's some truth to that, the inroads Trump has made since getting wiped out here in 2016 are striking.  I had predicted a 32-point win for Harris, which would still have been down a tick compared to Biden's numbers in 2020, but Harris came in with an even softer 25-point win.  No Republican has won a single county in a Massachusetts Presidential election since 1988 and I suspected that that streak was in jeopardy this year when the county-level data was released, with Bristol County being the most at risk of flipping red.  The county data just came out this week and Bristol County held on for Harris by a single point. The Senate race was even more nominally competitive.  I didn't expect two-term Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Warren to perform as well as the baseline Massachusetts Democrat even against a token Republican challenger, but my Warren +27 prediction was still far too generous as she only ended winning by 19 points.  This is the third time Elizabeth Warren has significantly underperformed, in this case running 6 points below Kamala Harris.  While I consider Warren to be a major asset in the Senate, it's at this point hard to deny the perception that her personality is like fingernails on a chalkboard.  While the state's all-blue-counties-every-election streak was close to ending, Massachusetts easily maintained its 9-0 Democratic Congressional delegation for the 15th consecutive cycle.  By 2026, it will have been 30 years since Massachusetts last elected a Republican to the House of Representatives.

Michigan--There were plenty of reasons to be concerned about the Wolverine State this cycle, and those reasons all came to bear on election night.  I predicted Harris would prevail by 1 point but I became less confident about that with each new round of polling showing her performing no better in Michigan than in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Georgia, all states where Republicans would be expected to do a bit worse than Michigan most years.  In the end, it was Trump who prevailed by more than 1 point in a perfect storm of diminished black turnout and a deranged shift toward Trump among autoworkers and Palestinian-Americans in the Detroit suburbs.  It was hard to see this coming after the impressive Democratic sweep in Michigan in the 2022 midterms, but a combination of events and Trump's cult of personality persevered.  Pretty much every demographic group performed worse for Harris than they did for Biden four years ago  Fortunately, as was the case in several other states, enough Trump voters only cared about the Presidential line and failed to drag the Republican Senate nominee across the finish line.  In the open seat vacated by retiring Democrat Debbie Stabenow, fellow Democrat Elissa Slotkin narrowly prevailed despite the headwinds.  I predicted a 2-point win for Slotkin but underestimated how bad the electoral climate was in Michigan.  Slotkin prevailed by only 0.3 points, or less than 20,000 votes, in an electorate of more than 5 million voters.  Still, huge sigh of relief for Democrats who looked like they were gonna lose this Senate race by midnight on election night.  It was a mixed bag in the House delegation.  The open MI-08 seat in the red-trending Flint area stayed in Democratic hands with a comfortable 7-point win by Kristen McDonald Rivet.  On the other hand, Slotkin's old district stretching from Lansing to the upscale Detroit exurbs flipped to the GOP, with a 4-point win by Republican Tom Barrett.  And after a surprisingly close race in 2022 for MI-10 in Macomb County north of Detroit, Republican incumbent John James prevailed by a more decisive 6 points this year.

Minnesota--The core held for Democrats in the Gopher State once again this year, extending Minnesota's impressive, longest-in-the-nation streak of voting for the Democratic Presidential nominee for 13 consecutive cycles dating back to 1976.  I predicted Harris would win Minnesota by 5 points and she ended up winning by a little over 4 points.  While it didn't hurt to have the state's Governor Tim Walz on the Presidential ticket, there's also not much indication that it helped.  Inexplicably, Walz's hometown of Mankato shifted 4 points toward Trump compared to 2020 and Blue Earth County flipped from blue to red.  That was more than a little embarrassing!  Overall though, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area along with Minnesota's third largest city of Rochester circled the wagons for Harris at numbers pretty comparable to Biden's 2020 numbers and overcame continued erosion of Democratic support in rural Minnesota.  My prediction wasn't as accurate in the Senate race as polls repeatedly pointed to an astonishingly underwhelming margin for three-term Democratic incumbent Amy Klobuchar over her dreadful challenger.  I was convinced Klobuchar had overstayed her welcome outside of the Democratic base and would only modestly outrun the top of the ticket, predicting an 8-point margin of victory.  But Klobuchar doubled my predicted margin and won by 16 points, an outcome at least within shouting distance of her previous three landslides even with a far less comprehensively blue county map.  Minnesota's 4-4 Congressional delegation held with little fanfare.  Democrat Angie Craig in MN-02, based in the southern Twin Cities suburbs, was the only candidate in an even vaguely competitive race and she prevailed by 13 points, a victory much closer to Klobuchar's margin in her district than Biden's.

Mississippi--My instinct definitely served me well in predicting a poor reception for Kamala Harris in the Deep South and nowhere was this more clear than in the Magnolia State.  I predicted a Trump +20 victory, which by itself would have been a significant gain for Trump compared to four years ago, but Trump ultimately won by 23 points, the largest winning margin in the racially polarized state since 1984.  A number that high either means that black voters stayed home in disproportionate numbers or that there was some significant crossover voting for Trump among blacks.  Since they don't do exit polls outside of battleground states anymore, all we can do is guess, but a number of 40+% black counties on the periphery of the Mississippi Delta that have been going Democrat for the last four or five cycles flipped to Trump this year.  It was even more lopsided in the Senate race with Republican incumbent Roger Wicker coasting to victory for his fourth term.  I predicted a 25-point win for Wicker against token Democratic opposition but he prevailed by 26 points.  And unlike its neighbors Louisiana and Alabama, the courts weren't able to add Democratic seats for voters in Mississippi, so their 3-1 GOP House delegation persevered without breaking a sweat.

Missouri--Seeing how conservative the Show Me State has become in the last 20 years makes one scratch their head and wonder how it was a national bellwether for as long as it was.  Missouri is definitely Trump country and my prediction of an 18-point margin for Trump was on the nose, with a familiar county map featuring blue dots in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Columbia with an ocean of red surrounding them.  It was a similar story, if slightly less comprehensive, in the Senate race as loathsome Republican incumbent Josh Hawley secured a second term.  I predicted Hawley would win by 15 points but just barely overshot as he ended up winning by 14, predictably failing to pay a price for his shameful January 6 conduct.  Missouri's 6-2 Republican House delegation held with every incumbent winning by double-digits.  There was also an open gubernatorial race in Missouri this year and Republican Mike Kehoe managed to outperform both Trump and Hawley, winning by more than 20 points.

Montana--There was a perception a decade ago that the cosmopolitan influx into a handful of cities in the Treasure State would eventually turn the state's quirky politics a more reliable shade of blue.  The opposite has happened, with the resulting spike in real estate costs infuriating the long-time residents and leading them to circle the wagons around MAGA messaging.  I predicted a 21-point Trump victory but Trump had to settle for a 20-point win, exceeding his margin from four years ago.  But the marquee race in Montana this November was the Senate race, where three-term Democratic incumbent Jon Tester was a decided underdog to hold his seat.  I guess you could say he had a little more fight in him that I expected as I predicted a full-blown collapse, a 12-point victory for Republican Tim Sheehy, Tester's greasy challenger who accidentally shot himself and then said it was a combat injury.  For what it's worth, Tester held Sheehy to a 7-point win.  One wonders if there's a scenario Tester could have prevailed if he didn't have to run with Trump at the top of the ticket, but whatever the case, Tester's borrowed time ran out this year.  Meanwhile, Democrats contested the House seat in western Montana held by freshman Republican Ryan Zinke, but Zinke won by nearly 8 points and kept both Montana House seats in Republican hands.  And lastly, incumbent Republican Governor Greg Gianforte, famous for physically assaulting a reporter on the eve of a previous election, won re-election by the same 20-point margin that Trump won by.

Nebraska--There was more excitement than was probably expected in the Cornhusker State this year.  The Presidential topline was pretty predictable.  I called for a 22-point statewide win for Trump and he prevailed by 20 points, with the changing politics of Omaha and Lincoln keeping Republicans from having the kinds of blowouts they used to in the state a generation ago.  The legislature was apparently one vote short of doing away with the state's allocation of electoral votes based on Congressional district victory, meaning Harris still won one of the state's five electoral votes based on her victory in NE-02.  But polls overestimated Harris's margin in NE-02, which would have consequences downballot.  There were two Senate races in Nebraska this year, including a special election to fill out the term of Republican Ben Sasse who resigned.  Republican Pete Ricketts held the seat since Sasse's resignation and was re-elected handily.  I predicted a 28-point Ricketts win and he prevailed by 25 against a weak and penniless challenger.  But the race for the full Senate term generated much more excitement, to nearly everybody's surprise.  Working-class everyman Dan Osborn ran as an eclectic independent and caught fire in his race against two-term Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, who has never seemed to fully connect in her state.  For a variety of reasons, I expected Osborn to collapse in the clutch, predicting Fischer to ultimately prevail by 14 points.  But Osborn never collapsed the way I expected and Fischer prevailed by only 7 points, which sounds decisive but makes Fischer the first Nebraska Republican in 18 years to win by less than double-digits, and against a challenger with no major-party funding who was effectively running as a shadow Democrat.  The county map tells it all though, as Osborn only won four counties, all of which are among the state's most Democratic, suggesting that the majority of Republicans correctly viewed Osborn as the shadow Democrat that he likely was.  And lastly, I said above that there were downballot consequences to Harris's Omaha-area victory being smaller than polls suggested, and the biggest consequence is that Republican Congressman Don Bacon yet again found a way to survive.  Polls suggested that if one Republican incumbent in the country was sure to go down, Bacon was the guy, and yet he prevailed by a 2-point margin once again.

Nevada--For several cycles in a row now, the early voting patterns of the Silver State have offered a window into how things were going nationally.  For the first time in memory, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats throughout the early vote.  There were several credible reasons why we were told to take these data points with a grain of salt as Democrats began sweating their less-than-stellar start, but it turns out the anxiety was warranted.  I made my prediction for Nevada before early voting began and based on the Harris's campaign confidence about it and the Democrats' uncanny ability to pull out a victory in Nevada in every past close race, I predicted a Harris +1 victory.  As a result, Nevada was one of the two states I predicted incorrectly at the Presidential level, and if I'd waited until early voting numbers started rolling in to make my prediction, I'd have flipped it.  Trump did flip Nevada, and quite comfortably, winning by 3 points.  He ran up the score still higher in the cow counties while trimming Biden's advantage in both Reno and especially metropolitan Las Vegas.  Harris still won Clark County, but with its mix of working-class Hispanics and non-college whites, the region was a perfect petri dish for the 2024 version of MAGA and he held Harris to a low-single-digit win in the county with more than 70% of Nevada's population.  It's a very troubling development in a state Democrats were confident they'd moved decisively to their column a decade ago.  And just like in neighboring Arizona, Democrats dodged a huge bullet in the Senate race as they ran several points ahead of Trump and toppled a poorly received GOP nominee.  Polls had long suggested Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen was cruising to a safe re-election but I expected the races to converge and predicted a 3-point win for Rosen despite the lopsided polling advantage.  Rosen ultimately prevailed by only 2 points but ran far ahead of the top of the ticket.  Democrats also dodged a bullet by holding their 3-1 House advantage.  They took a Vegas-sized gamble and spread the wealth in 2022 redistricting to give their three incumbents districts that leaned blue but were not slam-dunks.  It worked out for them this year, with Dina Titus winning NV-01 by 7 points, Susie Lee winning NV-03 by 3 points, and Steven Horsford pulling out NV-04 by 8 points.  This configuration will likely be tested even more aggressively in 2026 with no Senate race and Republican Governor Joe Lombardo running for re-election at the top of the ticket.  The three Democrats could find themselves vulnerable without any clear turnout drivers for their party, unless they're able to seriously contest Lombardo.

New Hampshire--There were a few states where I misread the electorate this year, and the Granite State was one of them.  Just as Trump's bare-knuckle brand of politics proved too hot for genteel New Hampshire in 2020 when Biden won comfortably, I figured there would be no interest in an encore this year.  I started to question that take when a trio of polls came out showing New Hampshire was close, with Trump even making a campaign stop there in an attempt to expand the map.  In the end, my Harris +8 prediction was naive.  She won New Hampshire, but by an underwhelming 3 points, and in retrospect, it would have been worth Trump's time to more aggressively contest the state.  Downballot, both Democrats prevailed in the House districts, including in the open NH-02 seat in the western part of the state vacated by the retiring Ann Kuster.  Democrat Maggie Goodlander prevailed by 6 points.  New Hampshire also had an open gubernatorial race to replace Republican Chris Sununu.  It was expected to be competitive but former Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte cruised to a 9-point victory.  Granite Staters have been splitting their ticket between Democrats for federal office and Republicans for state office for several cycles now, and I'll be curious to see if the patterns converge, and which team they'll end up on if and when they do.

New Jersey--Election night reports of major erosion for Harris in blue states may have been exaggerated in Illinois and Maryland, but the Garden State was every bit of a dumpster fire as reported on November 6.  There were some tea leaves of this pending correction against Democrats, including Governor Phil Murphy's limp re-election margin in 2021, backlash to neighboring New York City's "congestion pricing" debate that would negatively affect commuters, and of course, the long-awaited toppling of Bob Menendez, three-term Democratic Senator and career criminal who was finally taken down for a corruption scandal even he couldn't wiggle his way out of.  With all of that in mind, I predicted significant shrinkage for Harris compared to Biden, settling on a 13-point Harris win.  That prediction fell far short, with Harris prevailing by only 6 points, the weakest showing for a Democratic Presidential nominee in New Jersey since 1988.  The big story in the shift toward Trump was, once again, Hispanics.  Be it Cubans, Puerto Ricans, or Dominicans, there was a double-digit stampede toward Trump.  From Passaic County (Paterson) at the top of the state to Cumberland County (Vineland) at the bottom of the state, long-time blue counties flipped MAGA red.   As was so often the case this year, the Senate race went more favorably than the top of the ticket, despite being an open seat vacated by aforementioned scoundrel Menendez.  Democrat Andy Kim, a House member from central Jersey, proved to be a solid candidate.  I expected he'd outrun Harris and predicted a 14-point Kim win. He managed to simultaneously outrun Harris by more than I expected yet not do as well as my overall prediction because of the Harris collapse, prevailing by nearly 10 points statewide.  Despite the weak Democratic showing, the Democrats held strong with their 9-3 Congressional delegation advantage, but any hope of toppling freshman Republican Tom Kean, Jr. in NJ-07 fell short by 5 points.  An open seat in the Paterson-area NJ-09 was surprisingly close with Democrat Nellie Pou prevailing by only 5 points.

New Mexico--When it became clear that Hispanics were poised to shift decisively toward Trump this year, I began to sweat the repercussions in New Mexico, the most heavily Hispanic state in the nation.  When Trump made a late October campaign stop in the Land of Enchantment, I began sweating a little bit more and bracing for potential competitiveness.  It was clear that there would be slippage for Harris compared to Biden's double-digit win, so I predicted a 7-point Harris win.  She won the state by 6 points, with the core in Santa Fe and metropolitan Albuquerque mostly holding and avoiding the fate of its neighbors who trended more decisively for Trump.  My instinct served me less well in the Senate race where the esteemed surname of GOP challenger Nella Domenici was concerning.  But two-term Democratic incumbent Martin Heinrich took the race seriously and ran a strong campaign.   I had predicted Heinrich would only win by 4 points but he outran Harris and won by an impressive 10 points.  The Democrats gerrymander held and they kept their 3-0 House delegation intact as well.  Gabriel Vasquez prevailed by 4 points in NM-02 in the southern portion of the state, the weakest link of the trio of Democratic seats.

New York--There are often times clues in midterms that foreshadow realignments in Presidential cycles, and it wasn't hard to see that coming in the Empire State this year.  Democratic margins were way down in 2022 and most people expected some of those losses to hold in 2024, myself included.  With an unpopular Democratic Governor running the state and an unpopular Mayor running New York City, coupled with the controversies over congestion pricing, rising crime, and having to deal with busloads of illegal immigrants delivered daily to their "sanctuary city", it's no surprise there was some pushback to progressive orthodoxy.  Trump's well-received campaign stops in the South Bronx and Madison Square Garden were are also canaries in the coal mine that 2024 wouldn't look like any other recent Presidential cycle in New York.  I thought I was being sufficiently bullish on the pace of Democratic erosion when I predicted a Harris win of only 16 points, but I didn't go far enough as Harris ended up winning by less than 12, barely half of Biden's winning margin four years ago.  You wouldn't have been able to guess that things were so bad just looking at the county map though as most of the Democratic losses were confined to New York City and Long Island.  And lest you think this drubbing at the top of the ticket portended further misfortune for Democrats downballot, you'd be wrong there as well.  Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand actually performed surprisingly well.  After her cringe-worthy 2020 Presidential campaign, I expected her brand would be damaged and she'd underperform Harris, predicting a win of 15 points.  Instead, she decisively outperformed Harris and won by 17 points, with as geographically comprehensive of a victory as you could expect in 2020s New York.  Democratic fortunes also managed to hold up fine in the House races, with all but one of the contested races going the Dems way.  As expected, Republican Mike Lawler of Poughkeepsie-based NY-17 squashed Democrat Mondaire Jones' attempted comeback by 6 points, but other than that, the party found a way to win despite the headwinds, picking up three seats for a 19-7 advantage in the state's House delegation.  Democrat Tom Suozzi, who won a special election to fill George Santos's NY-03 seat on Long Island, secured a full term by a 3-point margin, running ahead of Harris.  In the bluer neighboring district of NY-04, Democrat Lauren Gillen unseated Republican freshman Anthony D'Esposito by 2 points.  In the Binghamton-based NY-17 upstate, Democrat Josh Riley unseated Republican freshman Marc Molinaro by nearly 2 points.  And further upstate in Syracuse-based NY-22, Democrat John Mannion easily vanquished Republican incumbent Brandon Williams by 9 points.  All things considered, Democrats dodged some serious bullets in New York and put themselves in contention for majority control of the House of Representatives moving forward.

North Carolina--Given how well-funded her campaign was, it was certainly worth Kamala Harris's effort to invest big in the Tar Heel State, and even though Donald Trump's campaign was supremely confident about most of the battleground states in the home stretch, they admitted they were still a little uneasy about North Carolina.  But since North Carolina hasn't shown any indication of a continued trendline toward Democrats in more than a decade, I was pretty comfortable in my prediction that Trump would win by 3 points, consistent with the expected shift his direction nationally.  My prediction was right on the nose with a Trump +3 verdict, with the expected reddening of rural areas, particularly in the eastern part of the state, canceling out gains Democrats keep making in the big cities such as Charlotte and Raleigh.  Still, if there was any political environment where Harris should have been able to take advantage of, it was the current one where a fully discredited Republican gubernatorial candidate was on the path to a complete wipeout.  Indeed Democrat Josh Stein prevailed by 15 points over Republican Mark Robinson, but to be honest, Stein's county map wasn't nearly as comprehensively blue as I expected, and certainly not as blue as the map was the last time a Democrat scored a double-digit win in North Carolina, that being Kay Hagan in the 2008 Senate race.  Stein had enough coattails to sweep other downballot Democrats to victory in the rest of the statewide offices as well.  It was a different story in the Congressional races, however.  A turncoat legislative Democrat switched parties to give the GOP a supermajority and helped them orchestrate a mid-decade redistricting.  Doing so helped them snuff out three Democrat-held seats.  They almost won a fourth but freshman Democrat Don Davis squeaked out a re-election win of less than 2 points in his red-trending rural northeastern NC-01 seat, which I suspect will continue to be vulnerable in coming cycles with lower black turnout.  The GOP now has a 10-4 advantage in the North Carolina House delegation, and it can now be officially declared that without last year's GOP redistricting scheme, the Democrats would control the House of Representatives next year.

North Dakota--Long gone are the days of the Flickertail State's populist all-Democratic Congressional delegation that held through the Bush years and into the Obama years.  North Dakota is now a single-party state right up there with the most unyieldingly red states in the nation.  I predicted a Trump victory of 37 points this year and came very close as Trump ultimately won by 36 points.  Biden came close to flipping population center Cass County, home of Fargo, four years ago but it reverted to a high-single-digit Trump win this year.  My prediction wasn't so spot-on in the Senate race though, as I thought Republican Kevin Cramer would sail into a second term with a 41-point win against his perennial candidate Democratic challenger.  I was surprised that Cramer underperformed Trump, winning by 33 points.  Republican Governor Doug Burgum was termed out and ended up appointed to Trump's Cabinet anyway, but the seat stayed in Republican hands with Congressman Kelly Armstrong pivoting to the statehouse and winning in a 42-point landslide.  As expected, Armstrong's vacated at-large House seat also stuck with the Republicans, with Julie Fedorchak scoring a crushing 39-point victory of her own.

Ohio--Considering Michigan and Pennsylvania were on the knife's edge of flipping red this year, there was no doubt at all that the once perennial battleground state of Ohio would be far out of reach.  I predicted Trump would grow his previous margins into double digits and win by 12 points this year.  I overshot the runway just a bit as Trump prevailed by 11 points.  The main event in Ohio was the Senate race, where we would see if three-term Democratic incumbent and long-time working-class champion Sherrod Brown would lose his seat to oily Mercedes dealer Bernie Moreno at the hands of blue-collar voters.  It was no surprise to me that he did.  I predicted Moreno would win by 7 points but Brown's support proved a bit more durable than expected and held Moreno to a victory of less than 4 points.  Brown significantly outran Harris, but the wreckage of the Obama-era Democratic coalition in the Buckeye State is astonishing to witness.  The abrupt realignment of the Mahoning Valley gets all the headlines for why Ohio has become so impenetrably red, but the numbers out of the Ohio River Valley, the stretch of counties between Toledo and Cleveland along Lake Erie, and former bellwether Stark County (Canton) have collapsed to similar degrees, making it very hard to see how the math works out for future Democratic wins in the state.  But in comparative good news, Democrats continued to punch above their weight amidst the brutal GOP gerrymander for House races.  While Republicans still have a 10-5 advantage in Ohio's House delegation, the map was drawn with the potential for a 13-2 Republican advantage.  Once again, that didn't happen as long-time Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur defied the odds for another narrow victory in her Toledo-based OH-09, prevailing by less than 1 point in a tough GOP-leaning district designed to force her into early retirement.  And Democrat Emilia Sykes was re-elected to a second term by 2 points in her Akron-based OH-13 district.  Both seats will continue to be vulnerable moving forward, but for the time being, Kaptur and Sykes are keeping their party in contention for a House majority.

Oklahoma--Not much going on this year in the Sooner State other than the Presidential race, where the verdict was never in doubt.  I predicted a 36-point Trump win but he came up a couple of points short, winning by 34 points. For the sixth consecutive Presidential cycle, Democrats have failed to win a single Oklahoma county.  In 2020, Biden came within a point of victory in the state's most populous county (home of Oklahoma City), but Trump won by nearly 2 points this year and kept the GOP streak alive.  Beyond that, Republicans handily maintained their 5-0 sweep of the House delegation.  Nothing more to see here folks.

Oregon--While the Beaver State is not quite as lopsidedly Democrat as Oklahoma is Republican, it's almost as hard to imagine a scenario where a Republican could win statewide in contemporary Oregon.  This was obviously also true of Donald Trump.  I predicted Harris would win Oregon by 16 points, but she fell a bit short and won by 14 points, putting together a familiar map where the dominant blue counties are confined to the state's northwestern geographic quadrant.  The Democrats were also able to take full advantage of their Congressional gerrymander to pick up the seat that narrowly eluded them last year.  In OR-05, stretching from the southern Portland suburbs down to Bend, Democrat Janelle Byrum bested freshman Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer by 2 points.  Chavez-DeRemer has of course since failed upward into a probable Cabinet position for the Trump administration. Along with high-single-digit wins in OR-04 and OR-06, Democrats now control Oregon's House delegation 5-1

Pennsylvania--I had a bad feeling months ago about the Keystone State becoming Trump country again this year.  That's why I predicted Pennsylvania would go for Trump by 1 point and be the tipping point state that got him re-elected.  I was close as Pennsylvania was indeed the tipping point state, and ended up going for Trump by nearly 2 points.  Unfortunately for Democrats, their problems in Pennsylvania were not confined to an even more intense consolidation of working-class white support for Trump in steel and fracking towns.  The flip can more accurately be attributed to the huge swing in Hispanic support to Trump everywhere from Allentown to Reading to Hazelton.  Add in an underperformance for Harris in Philadelphia and its suburbs and you have the recipe for a Democratic wipeout up and down the ballot.  And that's exactly what happened.  Three-term Democratic incumbent Bob Casey didn't seem particularly endangered a few months ago but as Trump's strength in the state began to become clearer by early fall, I predicted a relatively close shave with Casey prevailing by only 2 points.  I became less confident about that after my predictions were made when poll after poll showed almost zero divergence between the Presidential and Senate contests.  In the end, Trump's coattails got Republican private equity baron Dave McCormick past the finish line by 0.2% (just over 15,000 votes), bringing an unceremonious end to Casey's career.  It was my only incorrect Senate race prediction, and the one race that prevented Democrats from getting an inside straight in the Senate races in five battleground states that Trump won.  The Democratic bloodbath resumed downballot with two House incumbent defeats.  Susan Wild lost her Lehigh Valley-area PA-07 seat to Republican Ryan Mackenzie by 1 point, and Matt Cartwright lost his Scranton-area PA-08 seat to Republican Robert Bresnahan in another 1-point race.  Democrats' hopes of taking out MAGA die-hard Scott Perry in his blue-trending Harrisburg-area PA-10 seat fell 1 point short of success as well, leaving Republicans with a 10-7 advantage in the state's House delegation.  In a very bad election year, Pennsylvania was the ugliest state for the Democratic Party and one wonders if it's poised to go the route of neighboring Ohio.  And the other big question is if this electoral disaster could have been averted if Harris had picked PA Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate instead of Tim Walz.  I doubt Shapiro would have helped Harris win the state in the Presidential race, but it's entirely possible his presence on the ticket would have at least made the difference in keeping Casey in the Senate and Wild and Cartwright in the House.

Rhode Island--As is the case in so many places in the country, the Ocean State is experiencing a bit of a realignment with its tony coastal communities getting bluer as its Hispanic and white ethnic working-class population shifts to the right.  I figured these trends would cancel each other out and Harris would win by the same 20-point margin that Biden did four years earlier, but as was the case in so many places, the blue-collar and nonwhite shift to Trump exceeded the managerial class shift to Harris, and Harris prevailed by less than 14 points, the worst showing for a Democrat in Rhode Island since Michael Dukakis in 1988.  In the Senate race, I figured three-term Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse would narrowly underperform Harris and score an 18-point win, but he actually overperformed Harris with a 20-point win.  If only Harris had won these states with the margins that Democratic Senate candidates did, she'd be President right now.  Democrats once again held on to both of their House seats in Rhode Island by comfortable margins.

South Carolina--Despite its long-standing reputation as a conservative stronghold, there's been a subtle trend toward competitiveness in the Palmetto State in the last generation, particularly in the Charleston area. With that in mind, I predicted a Trump victory of 13 points that was about in line with what Trump got in 2020.  But as was the case in so many places in the South, Trump hit the gas and pulled off margins unseen in decades, prevailing by 18 points and flipping a number of Black Belt counties in Jim Clyburn's backyard from blue to red.  The state's 6-1 Republican Congressional delegation also comfortably held.  It's hard to believe we're only four short years removed from going into election night thinking Lindsey Graham was even money to lose his South Carolina Senate seat.

South Dakota--I miss my young adult years when the Mount Rushmore State regularly had close and exciting races for federal offices.  We're undeniably a generation removed from that reality in the state that brought us Kristi Noem.  I predicted Trump would win by 29 points in South Dakota this year and was right on the nose, with population center Sioux Falls returning to double-digit margins for Trump.  The at-large House seat stayed in GOP hands by an even more lopsided margin.  With Noem heading for Trump's Cabinet, there will be a new Governor in South Dakota up for a full term in 2026.  It's a pretty safe bet that the state will elect him or her to a full term next cycle and give us just as little to talk about in 2026.

Tennessee--From one hopelessly and uncompetitively red state to another, the once-moderate Volunteer State kicked the Democratic Party in the teeth once again this November.  I figured the left-leaning population surge in Nashville would temper the rightward trajectory of the rest of the state just a little and hold Trump's victory to "only" 24 points.  But Trump found a way to squeeze even more support out of nearly every rural and suburban county and managed to win by a punishing 30 points, which is substantially higher than Reagan ever pulled off in Tennessee.  Given her token opposition from a random Democratic legislator, I expected freshman Senator Marsha Blackburn to narrowly outperform Trump and win by 25 points, but instead she matched Trump's 30-point margin.  The Republicans in the Tennessee legislature cracked Nashville and split it three ways in redistricting to ensure an 8-1 Republican majority in the state's Congressional delegation, with only the VRA seat in Memphis holding firm for Democrats.  I can't envision a scenario where a Democrat can win statewide in Tennessee again without a major electoral realignment.

Texas--I had always baked into my prediction for the Lone Star State this year that Hispanic voters would likely take a sharp turn to the MAGA right, but I bought into the hype that there was more of the Dallas debutante vote left to pick off that hadn't already flipped to Biden four years ago, and that that demographic would counter some of the Hispanic losses.  I predicted Trump would win Texas by 8 points, which was a couple points better than his victory in 2020, but I wasn't prepared for the bottom completely following out among Hispanic voters to the point that Trump would ultimately prevail in Texas by 14 points.  It's an astonishing indictment on Biden's stunning incompetence in controlling the border for three and a half years.  The realignment shows up most clearly along the Rio Grande Valley, where more than a dozen counties that had voted Democrat in every election since before Franklin Roosevelt flipped to Trump, including major cities like Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville.  But the collapse was far more comprehensive than that with huge rollbacks in Democratic margins in Texas's largest cities of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, where the losses really added up and wiped out more than a decade's worth of gains Democrats had made in Texas.  And while the Senate race was by no means close, hats off to Democratic nominee Colin Allred who outran Harris by 5 points.  Polls that hadn't modeled for the big red shift among Hispanics were showing Allred within striking distance of sleazy Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, but I never bought it and predicted Cruz would win by 6 points.  Cruz ultimately won by 9 points, but even at that Allred outran Harris more than I expected.  I think it's worth another try for Allred in 2026 whether John Cornyn runs again or leaves his seat open.  Republicans maintained their preexisting 25-13 advantage in Texas's House delegation, but given how ugly those shifts were in the Presidential race were, it's amazing that Rio Grande Valley Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez still managed to pull out wins by 5 points and 3 points, respectively.  Will this be the wake-up call Democrats finally receive about the political idiocy of lax border enforcement?  And can they stanch the bleeding at this point even if they did see the light?  Time will tell, but damn did this lesson come with a high price.

Utah--All throughout my boyhood years, the Beehive State held the crown as the nation's most Republican state, and it wasn't even a particularly close call.  Utah remained competitive for that designation throughout the Bush and Obama years as well, but then came the Trump realignment where a good percentage of Utah's conservative Mormon population decided they couldn't abide Trump's character.  Utah is still Republican, but in the 2024 Presidential cycle, there were 12 states that were more Republican.  I predicted Trump would fare a bit better than in 2020 and win by 24 points, but he fell a bit short even of that, winning by 22 points.  With a non-MAGA Republican running for Mitt Romney's vacated Senate seat, I expected a more traditional Republican result and predicted GOP nominee John Curtis would win by 32 points.  Indeed, Curtis prevailed by 31 points.  Curtis vacated his House seat to run for the Senate, but his seat remained in Republican hands and the 4-0 GOP House delegation was maintained thanks to an aggressive gerrymander.  In the gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Spencer Cox was re-elected with nearly 53% in a three-way race.  Considered insufficiently conservative by some, Cox got a third-party challenger from the right who took nearly 14% of the vote, but Cox still won handily.

Vermont--For the second consecutive cycle, the Green Mountain State is the bluest in the nation, and given its deeply rural pedigree, that certainly runs contrary to convention.  I predicted Harris would win Vermont by 34 points and was pretty close as she ultimately won by 32 points.  But just as was the story in the rest of the country, that margin was a few points less than Biden's victory in Vermont four years ago, showing particular weakness in the counties along the Canadian border.  I predicted that progressive independent Senator Bernie Sanders would win a fourth term by 36 points, outrunning Kamala Harris by a couple of points, but his 31-point win actually came in a point under Harris's margin.  At-large House representative Becca Balint prevailed by a similar margin to keep Vermont's House seat in Democratic hands.  But as has been the case the last four cycles, tens of thousands of ticket-splitters installed Republican Governor Phil Scott for a fifth two-year term by a nearly 52-point margin.  Astonishing as that may seem, it's worth mentioning that the moderate Scott endorsed and voted for Kamala Harris, so he's about as far from MAGA as a Republican can get.  More interestingly though, incumbent Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman was also defeated this year, suggesting there may be a bit of a backlash brewing to Vermont's progressive politics.

Virginia--One state where my instincts did not serve me well this year was the Old Dominion.  With Trump's promise to bulldoze the federal workforce in a second term, I expected he'd be uniquely unpopular in Virginia and that it would be one of the few states where Harris improved upon Biden four years ago.  That didn't happen.  I predicted Harris would win by 10 points with particular strength in northern Virginia nearest the Beltway.  Instead, one of the earliest tells that the night was not gonna go well came when Loudoun County fully reported with Harris's margin several points below Biden's four years earlier.  It appears it was the same old story, with nonwhite voters generally and Hispanics specifically shifting decisively to Trump.  Harris ended up winning Virginia by less than 6 points.  That would have seemed very impressive in 2012 or 2016, but it was assumed that Virginia had realigned into a safe blue state since then.  Interestingly, Harris actually performed near Biden's numbers in Tidewater and the Richmond area, but it was northern Virginia, where I expected her to clean up, where she underperformed.  The numbers disappointed in the Senate race as well, with two-term Senator and former Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Kaine running for a third term.  I predicted he'd win by 13 points, and while he did outperform Harris, his 9-point victory was actually less than what I expected Harris to win by.  And while the Democrats maintained their 6-5 advantage in the state's House delegation, they weren't able to go on offense and take out Republican Jen Kiggans in Virginia Beach-based VA-02 as they'd hoped.  In fact, it was more of a fight to defend their two Democrat-held open seats.  Democrat Eugene Vindman prevailed in the Fredericksburg-area VA-07 seat vacated by Abigail Spanberger by only 3 points while Democrat Suhas Subramanyam won by less than 5 points in his Loudoun County-based VA-10 seat in northern Virginia.  I don't think this means Virginia is reverting back to a red or purple state any time soon, but after this and Glenn Youngkin's gubernatorial win in 2021, it's also clear that Virginia's blue state journey isn't gonna happen in a straight line.

Washington-- The Democratic winning streak in Washington state extends back to the 1990s, and 2024 didn't disrupt that momentum.  In fact, it was one of the few states where Harris performed comparably to Biden four years ago.  I predicted an 18-point win for Harris and that was exactly the margin Harris won by.  I'm not entirely sure why in retrospect, but I predicted three-term Democratic incumbent Senator Maria Cantwell would underperform Harris and win by only 15 points, but Cantwell matched Harris's 18-point win.  The Democrats also cleaned up in the House races, maintaining their 8-2 delegation, including in the seat that is their weakest link.  Based in a Trump district in southwestern Washington, WA-03 re-elected Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez by nearly 4 points against the same MAGA diehard who she beat in 2022.  If Republicans ever nominate someone less out of step with the district, they have a good chance of flipping this district back.  Democrats had held the Governor's mansion in Washington for a very impressive 10 consecutive cycles leading up to this month and extended their streak to 11 after another win in 2024.  Democrat Bob Ferguson won by 11 points against the Republicans' legacy golden child Dave Reichert, who pretty much represented the beginning and end of the GOP's bench in the state.

West Virginia--At some point early in the Obama years, it hit me that the Mountain State would eventually become the most Republican state in the country due to the realignment over coal.  Technically, that still hasn't happened, but the formerly Democratic stronghold of West Virginia is by now the runner-up to the top of the GOP pyramid.  This cycle went entirely as expected.  I predicted Trump would win by 41 points and the final result was Trump +42, with all 55 of West Virginia's counties going red for the fourth Presidential cycle in a row.  And it remains bonkers that Joe Manchin won a Senate seat running as a Democrat in West Virginia as recently as 2018, but there was no question that the seat would flip red this cycle.  I'd heard good things about the campaign of this year's Democratic Senate nominee Glenn Elliott that I thought he'd at least outperform the top of the ticket.  I predicted Republican Governor Jim Justice would win the Senate race by 36 points, but he ended up winning by 41 points, only one point less than Trump.  Both House seats remained safely in GOP hands.  In the gubernatorial race to replace the aforementioned Jim Justice, Republican Patrick Morrissey prevailed by more than 30 points, restoring his reputation after losing to Manchin in the 2018 Senate race.

Wisconsin--One could say I misjudged the Badger State at least a bit this year.  While I figured it was more likely than not to go for Trump, I didn't expect it to be the least red of the seven battleground states.  That's what ended up happening though.  I predicted a 2-point Trump win and it ended up being  a 1-point Trump win, with the fast-growing Madison area and the Milwaukee suburbs trending narrowly bluer while the rest of the state kept moving just a little bit redder a little more rapidly.  Given the much more substantial shift to Trump nationally, however, Wisconsin held up better than I expected.  The Senate race went almost exactly according to my expectations though.  I expected two-term Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin to win by less than 1 point and for it to be the closest Senate race in the country.  Baldwin did indeed prevail by less than 1 point, but it wasn't the closest race in the nation.  She was one of four Senate race survivors in battleground states that went for Trump on the Presidential line.  The GOP's heavily gerrymandered 6-2 House delegation held, however, with incumbent Republican Derrick Van Orden prevailing by 3 points in WI-03, his rural southwestern Wisconsin battleground district.  It's always hard to predict what direction Wisconsin is moving next politically, especially given that this is the third Presidential cycle in a row--and the fifth of the last seven cycles (!!)--where the winner has prevailed by less than 30,000 votes.

Wyoming--West Virginia might be nipping at its heels, but for the fifth time in the past six Presidential cycles, the Equality State is the nation's most Republican.  For some reason, I lowballed my prediction a bit, guessing that Trump would win by "only" 42 points.  Trump ultimately reigned victorious by 46 points.  In the Senate race, I predicted a mere 40-point win for four-term GOP incumbent John Barrasso, but Barrasso cleaned up with a 51-point win, the largest of any Senate race in the country.  The House seat once held by Liz Cheney remained safely in the hands of Cheney's Republican successor Harriet Hageman.  Don't expect Wyoming to give up its "reddest state in the nation" designation easily!

 

These results immediately yield to the most obvious question for the postmortem.  How does the Democratic Party choose to react to what we all know will be an all-you-can-eat buffet of autocracy, plunder, wealth consolidation, and punching down in the next four years?  Is there any appropriate response to a career criminal and clinical sociopath being chosen by a near-majority of the electorate to lead the country for a second term, and having done so with their eyes wide open of his intentions to set off a domino effect of constitutional crises?  

The first step is to carefully choose battles, and the Democrats have thus far held their fire admirably even as Trump has assaulted the country with a fire hose of malpractice in his Cabinet selections.  But, as one example, when Trump trolled the country by choosing a child molester as his Attorney General nominee, Democrats sat back quietly and let Republicans own their guy, forcing them to fight it out amongst themselves.  There are at least a half dozen additional Cabinet nomination fights that will also require either some form of Republican-on-Republican violence or slavish acquiescence.  Either way, Democrats should just cast their votes and let the chips fall where they may.

Beyond that, once January 20 gets here, Democrats need to avoid beating baited into hysterics over Trump's two top policy priorities.  I suspect he's largely bluffing on the severity of his tariffs and will primarily use them as a crude negotiating tactic with our neighbors.  Democrats would be well advised to not preach doomsday scenarios until the tariffs are actually imposed and only if they are anywhere near the size that Trump previewed.  Democrats will almost certainly be vindicated if Trump follows through on the tariffs he's vowing, but if they're limited in size and scope, the economic impact and inflationary fallout will be minimal.

And even more importantly, Democrats need to avoid screaming bloody murder about illegal immigrant deportations because, again, I think Trump is bluffing about the scope of his deportation scheme.  There's no logistical way to export 15 million people without a quadrupling of the annual budgets of the federal agencies for whom deportations are in their purview.  And even the halfwits in the Trump administration recognize that our labor force would break down to the point of paralysis if all of those immigrants were abruptly removed from it.  I think it's a safe bet that he plans to deport a couple hundred thousand "low-hanging fruit" offenders, declare victory, and then assure us the problem is solved.  And that wouldn't be such a bad thing.  The threat of deportation is a useful tool in disincentivizing illegal immigration, and we need all of the disincentives we can get.  Obama and every President before him exercised this option regularly, with far more success than Biden had by doing absolutely nothing.  

I really hope Democrats finally understand that the country will not in any way condone illegal immigration.  This is a 70-30 issue, and for too long Democrats have been on the 30% side of the issue.  Unless and until real financial pain is felt by the extraction of illegal immigrant labor, Trump's deportations will be broadly popular.  The best Democrats can do in that instance is to say "we told you so" after the fact and keep fighting the good fight to expand legal immigration despite a united front of Republican opposition.  The Democrats set back the cause of expanded legal immigration for a generation by defending illegal immigration and backdoor "asylum" for the better part of a decade and losing the public's trust in the process.  The best they can do now is hope for Trump overreach and getting a fresh start to make a more mature case when the consequences come to pass.

Where should Democrats make a more aggressive stand?  It's a target-rich environment, starting with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's budget-slashing department which will inevitably cause real and visible hardship to a lot of people.  It seems likely they'll go after Medicare and Medicaid.  Shout this through a megaphone and take every step possible to let the people know.  

It's unclear what Trump's intentions with Obamacare will be, but it seems likely that his stated "contours of a plan" will involve taking another stab at killing it and throwing tens of millions of people off of the health care rolls as he nearly pulled off in 2017.  Don't let him get away with it without turning every possible stone and informing every possible voter that their blood is all over his hands.  

And while the reproductive rights issue was wildly overplayed by the Democrats this year, it still has salience.  When Trump makes inevitable moves to further take those rights away, call him out on it, loudly and proudly. 

Most of all, few items from Trump's Project 2025 agenda will be popular, but he's likely to attempt as much of it as possible anyway.  And certainly the one policy agenda Trump is certain to pursue is blowing a permanent hole in the deficit with yet another massive tax cut for millionaires and billionaires.  It will be just as unpopular as it was the last time when he does.  Make him own it.  Choose those battles.

The next question is if Democrats are capable of adjusting their strategies and their messaging in the aftermath of an electorate that blew their playbook to smitherines.  It definitely won't come easily.  They've likely lost the white working-class for the foreseeable future and are on the knife's edge of losing the nonwhite working-class.  Even if they make a full-throated effort to win them back, it'll be a tough sell, and if it doesn't yield immediate results, they're likely to fall back yet again on their Trump-era playbook of desperately trying to find as-yet unflipped moderate Republicans from the managerial class.  It won't be any more successful than it was in the Trump era, especially with plummeting college enrollment numbers, but if they see it as their only path to victory, they'll take it anyway.

Furthermore, the party so fully invested itself in the twin towers of "demographics are destiny" and "coalition of the ascendant" that they are truly defenseless after the attack.  Demographic change was their Plan A for electoral success.  There was no Plan B.  And there still isn't.  Unlearning a false lesson that has been doctrinaire for more than a decade will be as hard as deprogramming a brainwashed hostage with a decade's worth of Stockholm Syndrome.

Particularly if the party's donor class in academia begins to withhold funds for straying from leftist cultural orthodoxy, I fear they'll continue to circle the wagons around massive electoral losers like race hustling, lax border policy, and biological males competing in women's sports.  These are issues that I highly doubt will ever be embraced outside of sociology classrooms, and the Democrats' path to be taken seriously begins with a Sister Souljah moment to get some comfortable distance from them.  Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton tried to have one on the transgender sports issue the day after the election and it left Beltway Democrats and the donor class breathless with fury.  Not a great start for fixing what's broken.

A full 29% of Gen Z doesn't identify with the gender on their birth certificate, but as far as I can tell, pretty much everyone from Gen Z who does identify with the gender on their birth certificate voted for Trump last month.  It's a startling indictment on the Democratic Party that they nearly lost the youth vote to the 78-year-old crank on the barstool carrying on about how windmills cause cancer.  The rot in the Democratic Party's foundation goes beyond what simple cosmetic changes can fix.  If they end up choosing to sit back and wait for Trump to overreach in hopes of being voters' default option to be handed the reins to govern again, as I suspect they are most likely to do at least for the 2026 midterms, they'll be setting themselves up for future analysis of why 2025 was the year they lost the next election.

Election 2024 Quick Takes

At some point in late November or early December, I'll be back with my comprehensive breakdown of election 2024, painful as it will be to motivate myself to write.  But in the time being, here are some takeaways I've cobbled together in the last 48 hours.....

2020 was 1976 and 2024 is 1980--Four years ago, Biden put together an unwieldy and incoherent winning coalition structurally comparable to what Jimmy Carter put together 44 years earlier. It didn't make sense for any kind of governing mandate and showed signs of coming apart amidst an insurgent populist movement from the right that was capturing the imagination of an aggrieved working class. After a period of inflation, rising crime, and poorly timed foreign policy entanglements, the incumbent party had a low approval rating and was challenged by the face of that conservative populist movement. The unhappy public behaved the way unhappy electorates always do and installed the challenger. While the Dobbs ruling and general demographic changes since 1980 likely prevented Harris from facing an electoral wipeout to the same degree that Carter did, the Democratic Party is left with a shrinking, geographically limited and operationally useless husk of a coalition in the aftermath of the realignment.

She Couldn't Overcome These Fundamentals--A full 72% of the country was unhappy. Harris would have really needed to pull a rabbit out of her hat to overcome that. Biden had a 40% approval rating and could probably have been beaten by a ham sandwich. Harris wasn't Biden which kept her in the game but it was gonna be hard as his Vice-President to build up enough distance from him.

Follow the Registrations--The number of people registering as Republicans has gone up in the last four years and the number of people registering as Democrats has gone down. That should have been a much more obvious warning sign that this wasn't gonna end well.

Running on Democracy Was a Loser--I get the Harris campaign's dilemma here. They had to lean into what they figured was their likeliest path to victory, appreciating that courting one group would be to the exclusion of another. Given that Harris's party was already in power and her challenger had a slate of moronic but easily digestible populist policies, it would have been really tough to run on a package of deliverables and compete with him. So she went back to the playbook that Biden abandoned early on of begging voters to care about January 6th as much as Beltway insiders do. Attempting to disqualify your challenger is typically not the closing message of a campaign confident that it's about to win, but it was probably the best weak hand she could play. For the last few days of the campaign, I began to doubt myself and wonder if it was working, but my instincts were right.

At Best, Abortion Was a Zero-Sum Game--Exit polls would seem to confirm that running on Dobbs largely flopped. It may have prevented further losses in such a bad electoral environment, but women still shifted three points toward Trump compared to four years ago. And I'm not surprised men responded the way that they did. The critical mass of abortion messaging in all of this year's Democratic advertising left little time for saying anything to men beyond scolding them for not prioritizing women's reproductive rights. The result was the 2014 Mark Udall Senate result at a national level.

Where Does Reproductive Rights Messaging Go From Here?--Hard to see how this issue goes away but its salience was vastly overestimated. An "undecided voter focus group" on cable news included a couple of women who were torn between their preference for Harris over abortion rights versus their preference for Trump over the economy, but leaned toward Harris. When it was explained to them that their state (can't remember which) already protected abortion rights and wouldn't be affected by Presidential policy, the women changed their minds and decided they leaned Trump after all. As long as it was only women from other states being denied control over their own bodies, they were okay with it! I took a mental note of this conversation and connected the dots to the gun issue. Until voters are affected personally by violence, it's a "you problem" and has limited salience at the polls. I suspect this partly explains Harris's horrific underperformance in so many blue states, and it makes me question how the Democrats can update their messaging on the reproductive rights issue moving forward.

The Border Mattered--If Trump won, I was prepared to come on here and rage on about three years of astonishingly incompetent border policy being the primary driver, but to be fair, the issue's salience wasn't as abundantly obvious as I expected. Still, there's plenty of connective tissue here to the biggest demographic story of the night....the double-digit shift to Trump among Hispanic voters. After Obama's 2012 re-election powered by record margins from Hispanic voters, the Democrats got it in their heads that they were single-issue immigration voters motivated entirely by maximizing the share of the population who "looks like them". It turned out the only constituencies for lax border policy were the tech sector, Ivy League college faculty members, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Working-class Hispanics wanted no part of it.....and had kind of hoped the Democrats would be able to talk to them about something else in the past 15 years. Since they didn't, the Hispanics moved on to the other guys.

For the Love of God, Can We Stop Saying This?!--After several years of insisting upon calling Hispanic people Latinx despite their repeated requests for us not to, elites on the left and in the Democratic Party seem to have finally gotten the message. Now I humbly ask if we can scrub another poisonous term from our vernacular....."someone who looks like me". It's so reductive....and so counter to the mandate voters are sending us through a megaphone.

Selzer Torpedoes Her Reputation--Many of us in Democratic electoral analysis circles failed to take our own advice and beclowned ourselves worshiping at the altar of Ann Selzer's Des Moines Register poll even though it should have been painfully obvious that it was fake news. I stood by my Trump +11 prediction for Iowa, but even that was insufficient for the extent of the Hawkeye State's redness as the state went Trump +13. But I was guilty of some ninth inning daydreaming of my own about "what the Selzer poll means". In the end, it amounted to little more than fantasizing about what we'd do if we won the lottery just before we found out we weren't holding the winning ticket. Hopefully we won't be seduced so easily next time. As for Iowa, looking at its widening Republican margins compared to Minnesota and Wisconsin, it's clear that it is part of the Upper Midwest in geography only. Culturally and politically, it's poised to behave like the southern Midwest and Plains states.

Running Against a Magician--Donald Trump convinced half of his coalition to vote for him because they believed he was serious about the economic policies espoused in his campaign. He convinced the other half of his coalition to vote for him because they didn't believe he was serious about the economic policies espoused in his campaign. That's one helluva magic trick and I don't know how mere mortals can run against it.

How The Hell Do We Reach People in the 2020s?--In our fragmented media landscape, outreach to voters disconnected from the fast-shrinking legacy media bubble has become a herculean challenge. For most young people in particular, all information is filtered through the podcast bros and Big Tech's algorithms. We don't stand a chance unless we can figure out how to crack this information firewall.

The Future is Autocracy Revisited--Once again, Republicans break things and get rewarded for it. After bringing the state of our legislative branch to paralysis, the public got annoyed and the GOP presented them with the solution.....an authoritarian strongman who doesn't follow the rules yet cosplays with a copy of the Constitution in hand as he violates it. The public loves it so much they ask for a second helping. After Tuesday night, I don't see how challenging this dynamic within the confines of our constitutional system can ever again be expected to prevail in the court of public opinion. Either you get on the bandwagon and take advantage of your newly granted Presidential license for unlimited criminality to make the trains run on time or you get bulldozed by a challenger who does.  Either way, July 1, 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled the President is above prosecution, will go down as one of the most consequential and destructive days in American history, orders of magnitude worse than September 11, 2001.