5 Theses on the 2024 Presidential Election
So, what happened?
[This article was written as a quick response to the election results, and is subject to further edits whenever I get around to it. This article represents my personal views, not those of any current or former employer.]
Donald Trump has become the first US president in 135 years to be elected to a second, non-consecutive term. Unlike his first term, he now appears to have won the popular vote along with the Electoral College vote, reminiscent of how George W. Bush went from a minority victory in 2000 to a sizable popular majority in 2004.
We should expect that a second Donald Trump presidency will be worse than the first one. Trump himself has only become more vindictive and demented. The staffers who will fill out his administration have the potential benefit of learning from many of the mistakes made during the former president’s first term, and we should expect that those who now surround Trump are more personally loyal to him than the Republican functionaries who staffed his first administration. Trump will likely have the ability to appoint even more conservative Supreme Court justices, locking the nation into a reactionary judiciary for decades to come. The Court has already granted Trump a major gift in the form of Trump v. US (2024), giving the President absolute immunity for whatever crimes he will choose to indulge in this time. And, as of writing, the possibility of a slim Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is the only thing separating us from another Republican trifecta like the one at the beginning of Trump’s first term.
It is in times like these that the blame game runs wild. Once Hillary Clinton’s narrow loss in 2016 became clear, it opened up years of in-fighting among the American center, center-left, and left about what was to blame. Was it voter suppression? Was it a failure of outreach to the working class? Was it misogyny? Was it Russian interference? Was it Hillary Clinton herself? The slim margins of the election — Clinton lost by 78,000 Midwestern votes out of a total of 137 million— meant that many different theories could reasonably explain the outcome, as any of them could have served as a final tipping point that put Trump over the edge.
We do not have that problem this year. Rather than losing by 78,000 votes, it now appears that Harris is set to lose by millions. This is a loss large enough that it would likely have happened even if many of the more marginal choices in this campaign season had been different. So while accusations are still flying in every which direction, I thought I would take this opportunity to lay out my preliminary explanation of what happened. Here are my thoughts on five factors that may or may not have affected the outcome this year.
1. It’s Mostly Inflation
There are a few key pieces of this puzzle which help us to explain what happened last night. First: Harris did worse than Biden almost everywhere, in both Democratic and Republican areas. Although a few suburban areas bucked this trend by moving in the Democratic direction, the overall picture was disastrous, with Harris losing much of her margin even in Democratic strongholds like New York City. Notably, however, her underperformance seems more concentrated in the eastern US than in the western US (I’m not quite sure what’s up with that yet).
Second, Harris underperformed Senate Democrats. In almost every state with a competitive Senate race this year, Harris did worse than the Democratic Senate candidate (based on the incomplete results we currently have available). In Texas, she got 42.4% of the vote while Colin Allred got 44.6%. In Ohio, Harris got 43.9% while Senator Sherrod Brown got 46.3%. Wisconsin? 48.8% for Harris, 49.4% for Baldwin. Michigan? 48.2% vs. 48.5%. Montana? 38.0% vs. 44.9%. Arizona? 47.2% vs. 50.4%. Florida — which is now a solidly Republican state — is the only example I’m aware of where Harris outperformed the Senate candidate, and even there it’s by 0.1 percentage points.
The first fact above tells us that the entire country turned away from the Democratic ticket this year, and the second fact tells us that this frustration was focused more at the national Democratic ticket than it was at more local Democratic politicians. Can anyone think of something new in US politics since 2020 that has affected everyone across the country in a negative way, and which the average person tends to (wrongly) blame on the President?
The years 2021–2023 saw the highest inflation rate that the US has experienced since 1991. When inflation hit its peak of 8% in 2022, it was the highest level of inflation the US had experienced since 1981. The disruptions this caused to the American economy were significant, but the disruptions it caused to the American psyche were far larger. 45% of voters said that their economic conditions had worsened over the last four years, which is shockingly even higher than the 42% who said the same during the global economic meltdown of 2008.
That inflation has played such a large part in the thinking of American voters has greatly frustrated some of my fellow policy wonks who have been desperate to point out that 1) inflation was going to rise during the aftershock of the COVID-19 pandemic no matter what anyone did, 2) the US has experienced less inflation than most other wealthy economies, 3) average wages likely rose faster than inflation depending on how you measure it (even though this effect is unevenly distributed), 4) at least part of the high inflation can be easily justified when looking at record low unemployment and rapid low-end wage growth, and 5) inflation is basically back to normal now, even if it hasn’t meant prices declining as many hoped.
Watching the debate over this topic unfold was immensely frustrating, as both sides were generally talking past one another. The economists were correct that the US economy has actually done very well over the last few years, given the odd circumstances. But none of that changes the fact that people have noticed their cost of living rise, and this has had a large impact on both their wallets and their brains.
To state the obvious, the average person is not a perfectly rational economic calculator. This is especially true for inflation. The average person does not think about money in inflation-adjusted terms. They exaggerate the relative importance of price changes in the goods they buy most often (part of the reason that so many memes online use fast food items to discuss inflation). They generally see wage increases as a result of their own hard work but price increases as a result of outside forces, rarely ever acknowledging the connection between the two. They do not recognize any of the positive things associated with inflation, like strong economic growth and lower unemployment, because they are more concerned with the cost of bread than they are with abstract notions of economic equilibrium. As a result, they believe that inflation can be reduced without any meaningful trade-offs. While inflation is a problem, it is a problem which we are prone to systematically misunderstanding.
Wonks have done ourselves few favors in explaining any of this, as many attempts at doing so have come off as callous sneering at regular people for being concerned about paying their bills. Worse yet, our focus on aggregate numbers erases a lot of the distributional problems with inflation, ignoring the fact that inflation hits each and every person slightly differently. Instead of subjecting themselves to the lectures of academic economists, people seek out a way to make the complexities of inflation simple enough to understand, and that means finding someone to blame it on. As with gas prices, the most common person to blame is whoever’s in charge at the moment. With Biden and Harris in the White House, this means voting for anyone who isn’t Biden or Harris.
Inflation is the incumbent killer. Many incumbent parties all around the world have done poorly this year, as this year’s elections represent a chance for people to express their discontent with the situation. In fact, compared to some of the other incumbent parties, Harris’ performance doesn’t even look that bad!
There are several tragic ironies to all of this. The first is that Trump’s policy proposals would make cost-of-living problems drastically worse than Harris’ proposals would. The scale of his proposed tariffs alone would lead to a historically large jump in prices for everyday goods. But this election hasn’t focused much on policy, and even when it has many of the proposals have been… unorthodox. Additionally, I don’t think that many voters could describe the relevant differences in the candidates’ plans; they simply voted out the people in charge because bad things happened while they were in charge.
Despite Harris’ half-hearted attempts to frame herself as an outsider this year, people knew she was the closest thing to an incumbent who was on the ballot. For many voters, this wasn’t a vote for a particular platform, but rather a referendum on the status quo (anyone else having 2016 flashbacks?) Donald Trump might not have won if the US had a multi-party democracy, but the Democratic candidate would still have lost.
The greatest tragedy of all is the effect that this will have on future responses to economic crises. The economic stimulus prepared by Joe Biden in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was larger and more robust than those in most other nations, and it worked: our economy recovered faster, saw less unemployment, and even made serious progress against poverty during the brief window in which COVID-19 emergency benefits were in place. This is especially significant when compared to Obama’s far-smaller stimulus package in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Biden’s administration learned from this failure and chose to go big. As a result, Biden’s recovery accomplished in five months what took Obama’s recovery years.
This is one of the greatest successes of Biden’s presidency, and he has been punished for it relentlessly. While the stimulus package’s contributions to inflation are often exaggerated in comparison to supply chain issues, there is no doubt that inflation is slightly higher than it would be had Biden not saved the US economy. Whatever the stimulus did add to inflation, it was more than worth it. But these election results will widely be read as a condemnation of responsible economic policymaking: from now on, whenever a President wants to respond to a recession aggressively, they will have advisors telling them not to, because when Biden did it the voters revolted. Politicians will now be afraid to commit to countercyclical stimulus spending, even when it’s needed to stave off a depression.
There is a very dark finding about human psychology in a 1997 paper about inflation. In his study, Robert J. Shiller asked people to choose between two scenarios: A) low inflation but high unemployment, and B) high inflation but low unemployment. Scenario A is where we were during the long recovery under Obama, and Scenario B is where we were during the fast recovery under Biden. Poll respondents consistently chose scenario A, by large margins. As Shiller notes, “The results show that most people in all countries would choose low inflation even if it meant that millions more people would be unemployed.” Last night’s election results will be read to mean the same thing, and we will all be worse off for it.
2. Thanks, Biden
Despite his commitment to a stimulus package far better than his predecessor’s, Joe Biden still holds a tremendous amount of blame for last evening’s results. His decision to run for re-election at all ran contrary to the hopes of many of his own voters that he would be a one-term transition out of Trumpism. The hubris of Biden’s decision became glaringly obvious during his debate with Trump, in which the entire American populace realized en masse that Biden was incapable of running a competent campaign.
The delusion and arrogance of Joe Biden’s advisors should be studied for a long time to come. Even after Biden managed to lose a debate against an absolute madman, many of those close to him continued to insist that he was not a sundowning old man and that he would beat Trump. The switch over to Kamala Harris came as a clear relief, a moment of reason in which Democratic operatives realized that their center could not hold. However poorly Harris may have done in this election, we can be confident that Biden would have done far, far worse. Yet even still, Biden’s presence haunted Harris’ campaign.
First and foremost, an immense amount of time was wasted. Trump’s operation has been preparing for this election for years, even if their bumbling antics may have slowed them down. Biden’s stubborn refusal to pass the torch to someone else until late June left Harris with only about four months to conduct a full presidential campaign. This is an extremely short amount of time to introduce yourself to voters, establish a reputation for yourself, create a popular platform unique to your candidacy, etc., etc. Her opponent, meanwhile, has basically been running for president non-stop for the last nine years.
Even once she was the candidate, being attached to Biden at all was a liability for Harris. She had no good response to Trump’s attacks questioning why she hadn’t gotten more done over her four years as Vice President (beyond the obviously correct answer that the VP doesn’t have the power to do much of anything). She also had no good explanations for why her views shifted so strongly in between her 2020 Democratic primary run and her 2024 presidential run (beyond the obviously correct answer that candidates are expected to say different things in the primary than in the general). She jumped straight from a competitive primary to a general re-election, without any of the time candidates usually have to readjust their stances.
The Harris campaign did make a tremendous mistake in hiring many of Biden’s campaign officials for her own campaign. These Biden staffers reportedly tended to discourage Harris from pursuing some of the most successful talking points of her campaign — namely, the “weird” branding — and instead encouraged her to run a traditional Diet Republican campaign like Biden’s.
But if you can point to only one mistake that the Kamala Harris campaign made this year, it was her repeated refusal to explain how she would be different from Joe Biden. Despite multiple questions to this effect during prominent interviews, she offered little to no reason whatsoever that voters could expect her to govern differently. This is a disastrously bad decision for anyone aware of Biden’s underwater approval ratings — if you’re going to substitute in a new candidate, you should make it extremely clear why they’re better than the old candidate! Yet much in the same way that Clinton couldn’t define what she was running on besides being the not-Trump, Harris did little to define what she was running on besides being the not-Trump and not-Biden.
I would wager that this is not entirely her fault. Even after all she did to not say a single bad word about him, Biden and friends were still whining that Harris wasn’t spending enough time defending Biden’s accomplishments. It seems as though Biden and his advisors were the only people in the entire country who were unaware that Joe Biden is unpopular, and that Harris should have run even further away from him. I have heard some blindly speculate that Biden asked Harris’ team not to put him down too much in public as a condition for him to step aside, in order to preserve his legacy. If it is true that Biden tied Harris’ hands in this way (and it is at least plausible), then Joe Biden put his personal ego over the well-being of the entire world. How’s that for a legacy?
Harris should not have hired Biden’s campaign staffers, and, indeed, those staffers should never be trusted anywhere near a campaign ever again. Unfortunately, in this type of politics, people have a strange tendency of failing upwards.
3. No, It’s Not the Third Party Voters
Blaming third party candidates for their own shortcomings has been a Democratic tradition ever since 2000, when the entire party seems to have convinced themselves that Al Gore’s loss was attributable to the Green Party campaign of Ralph Nader. Despite numerous reasons to be skeptical of this explanation, hatred towards the left-wing third party has become an article of faith in Democratic electoralism. This was particularly noticeable this year, with the Democratic Party launching an initiative to explicitly discourage any progressives from voting for the Green Party.
For all of the Democratic anxiety provoked by the notion of a spoiler candidate, this does not appear to have been a significant factor in this year’s election. In Pennsylvania, a state that was absolutely vital to Harris’ strategy, Trump’s margin of victory appears to be larger than all of the third party votes combined, meaning that Harris would have lost even in the unlikely scenario that all third party and write-in voters went for her instead. This also true in Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina, making a Harris victory essentially impossible even if one did somehow rearrange the third party votes in Michigan and Wisconsin to make her win.
Although it would not have changed the national outcome, one place where there were enough third party votes to have theoretically mattered was in Michigan. The state’s uniquely large Arab and Muslim populations made it the epicenter of frustration over Palestine, a topic on which both major party candidates have endorsed continued support for wide-scale human rights abuses which likely amount to genocide. Combining the votes of three left-wing candidates who took a more humane stance on Palestine (Stein, West, and Kishore) gets you about 75% of the way towards closing Harris’ gap with Trump. Add in some write-ins and voters for other third party tickets, and one could reasonably argue that Harris’ feckless position on Palestine cost her the state of Michigan.
I hope (though I am skeptical) that all of this will force a reckoning among Democratic operatives about their favorite scapegoat. Not only did third party votes not decide this year’s election, but even in the one state in which they did matter, they were the result of the party’s own failures.
The Democratic Party cannot shame its potential supporters into voting for them. When a Democratic candidate fails, it is the fault of that candidate and the campaign they ran, not the fault of an insufficiently loyal electorate. If you want to minimize the risks of a third party spoiler, you should either expand your base to absorb them, reform our electoral system to eliminate the spoiler effect, or both. What you should not do is send Bill Clinton to Michigan to condescend to voters for caring about human life.
4. Don’t Believe in Destiny
It was not too long ago that many political commentators — including a younger version of myself, studying political science in undergrad — were preaching the gospel that “demography is destiny.” The nation was growing more racially and culturally diverse in a way that posed an existential threat to the Republican Party, which has geared itself towards maximizing its share of the white vote ever since the Southern Strategy. Democrats just had to keep on doing what they were already doing, and demographic change would gradually deliver them a larger and larger advantage until they became the dominant party.
Oops. Donald Trump — probably the most outwardly racist, xenophobic, and generally hateful Republican presidential candidate in modern history — has built a multiracial coalition. The gendered divisions of this election changed far less than many pundits expected: men did move to the right more than women, but only by a few points. On the other hand, exit polls suggest that the racial changes were tremendous. Between 2016 and 2024, Trump gained 41 points among Latino men, 20 points among Latino women, 11 points among Black men, and 5 points among Black women. Although we have less data on Asian voters, exit polls suggest a move to the right since 2016 there as well.
Simply put, the “demography is destiny” theory has been completely debunked. Everyone, including many early proponents of the idea like Ruy Teixeira, have now come to recognize that the Democratic Party cannot take its popularity among most communities of color for granted. But can the Party itself learn this?
Black voters have long been a victims of “electoral capture”: the Democratic Party is so clearly superior to the Republican Party on the issues that matter to Black people that the Democrats don’t actually feel any need to compete for Black votes. Comfortable in the knowledge that most Black voters find Republicans too repulsive to even be an option, the Democratic party has assumed that they will win the Black vote regardless of what they run on, leaving them with few incentives beyond boosting turnout to actively make appeals to Black voters.
When this year’s polls suggested that Democrats might be losing some of the Black vote, they scrambled for a response. Their lack of recent practice in actively outreaching to Black communities on a national level showed. In what is one of the most absurd moments of this year’s campaign, Harris even used her policy platform meant to appeal to Black men to please her donors in the cryptocurrency industry, framing Bitcoin ownership as a racial justice issue. While her campaign still did very well among Black voters, a gradual erosion in this once-consistent voting bloc is becoming undeniable.
The Democratic Party has also tended to pay too little attention to Latino and Asian voters, similarly assuming their majority support as a given despite the fact that these groups lack the historical connections to the Democratic Party that Black voters have. Research into Latino and Asian voters has noted that they don’t feel a strong connection to either party, and have traditionally just leaned Democratic for pragmatic reasons. After 2024, the Democrats can no longer rely on this strategy. The massive swing among Latino voters, in particular, has made it clear that the population cannot be won over simply by adopting the more pro-immigration position of the two parties. (It is noteworthy that the Democratic Party ran to the right on immigration this year, and then lost many Latino voters to the party which is even further right on immigration. I would not interpret this as a general anti-immigrant sentiment among Latino voters; I would interpret it as Latino voters having enough other issues on their mind that immigration did not singularly decide their vote).
I remember hearing of a few hushed conversations in Democratic Party circles among those who were worried that Harris’ identity as a Black and South Asian woman would scare off white voters. Rather than worrying about a candidate of color reducing support among white voters, they should have been worried about something else entirely: what if having a candidate of color doesn’t increase support among voters of color? What if voters of color have bigger demands than descriptive representation?
An electoral approach towards communities of color which focuses on symbolic in-group gestures is not enough. The Democratic Party needs to speak to every community directly about the economic and social issues affecting them, rather than just scheduling a stop at Howard University and then calling it a day.
5. Please Just Drop Liz Cheney Already
There is always a contingent looking to blame a Democratic loss on the party’s left, but those claims will be particularly nonsensical this year. Harris explicitly rejected all of the most left-wing policy proposals she endorsed in the 2020 primary, and on some issues (like immigration and foreign policy) she ran to the right of Joe Biden. At one point her campaign purposefully chose to downplay their economic populist messaging in order to appease donors. Furthermore, left-wing ballot initiatives didn’t do too bad this year — reproductive rights protections passed in most states who voted on them, and Republican states like Alaska and Missouri passed minimum wage and paid sick leave.
The problem is the exact opposite. The Democratic Party has been obsessively pursuing “Never Trump” Republicans for years now. This year’s Democratic National Convention featured multiple Republican speakers, Harris pledged to appoint Republican officials to her cabinet, and her campaign spent its precious final months doing a speaking tour with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (daughter of one of the most unpopular political figures in US history). What did all of this accomplish? Getting an even smaller share of Republican voters than they did in 2020.
The Never Trump movement has always been a mirage. It is true that there are Republicans with a strong dislike of Donald Trump, but their numbers have been dramatically over-estimated for years in our discussions about Trump, and they do not represent a meaningful portion of the electorate. The number of voters who could be talked into changing their vote by a Liz Cheney endorsement in particular is small enough to be counted on your fingers. While this group may be over-represented among the educated, well-off center-right Republicans which Democratic operatives encounter at dinner parties and the MSNBC sound stage, they have never been a meaningful political force.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: the median voter theorem is dead. Appealing to the mythical “center” of US politics is a highly inefficient route towards national electoral victory in the 21st century, something which the Republican party seems to have realized under Trump. If they want to reverse their fortunes, Democrats should spend less time trying to appeal to Republicans and more time trying to appeal to the people who actually vote for them — including both registered Democrats and many independents. I don’t know how many failures it will take for them to learn this lesson, but I hope that they do so by the time I’m done pulling my hair out.
There’s so much more to say about these election results, but at this point I’m sure I’ve already lost most readers. This is a bad outcome to a close election, and as much as we can dissect it, we’re going to have to live in it.
So, Now What?
We keep moving. Things will get worse, but we will continue to be there to push back, and we will be there when the opportunity arises to build something new. Take the time that you need to recover from the stress of this election and then recommit yourself to the only fight which has ever mattered: the one for a better world. I hope to see all y’all there.
From Howard Zinn’s “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”:
Deep in my psyche, I think, is the idea that because I was so lucky and they were not I owe them something. I owe them not to waste my gift, to use these years well, not just for myself (although I insist on having some fun; I am not a martyr, though I know some and admire them), but for that new world we all thought promised by the war that took their lives.
And so I have no right to despair. I insist on hope.
It is a feeling, yes. But it is not irrational.
