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.