Why? How?

Bringing the 2024 Election into Focus

I was optimistic that Vice President Harris would win this election. I saw plenty of reasons for optimism in voter registration and early vote data, showing enthusiasm among Democratic voters. The same was reflected in the Harris campaign’s record-shattering fundraising performance. And while all of that was real, it simply wasn’t enough. The reality appears to be that Democrats started this race in a deeper hole than we understood ourselves to be in, and while they fought admirably to get out, it simply was too much.

It will take some time to fully understand how this happened. We’ll need the full individual voter turnout data from each state, which won’t be available for weeks, and months in some states. We need to remember that exit polls are fallible, and will be re-weighted to the final election results and turnout data.

All of that said, I do believe we can draw some broad conclusions from this election, and I’ll go through all of that now.

We were so focused on winning each battle that we lost the war

This phrase has been bouncing around in my head for the past few days. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment, but first, I want to make two statements that I think are important to our understanding of what happened in this election:

1. The Harris campaign was facing substantial headwinds, stronger than perhaps anyone understood at the time

2. The Harris campaign fought those headwinds more effectively than any other incumbent party across the globe has in the past year.

To explain both of these points: John Burns Murdoch at the Financial Times wrote a piece that included this great chart that has been making its way around the internet in the past day or so:

If you look at this chart, you’ll see to the far right, each dot representing the vote share for the incumbent party (limited to “developed nations”) in elections this year, relative to their party’s vote share in their previous election. As noted, literally every one saw a drop on vote share. Yet the Harris performance was the strongest for any incumbent party, relative to their prior performance.

We’ll get into how I believe the Harris campaign accomplished this overperformance, but let’s keep digging into the global/national environment for a moment.

As we all surely remember, for most of this year, the oxygen in the room was sucked up by discussions in and by the media of President Biden’s age, rather than his record and accomplishments. Which, by the way, were substantial, as the United States economy saw a stronger and faster recovery from the pandemic than our global counterparts.

And so most Americans were seemingly unaware or unmoved by the successful efforts of the Biden administration to rescue our economy. Polling fairly consistently found a strange dichotomy: Americans generally felt like their personal economic situation was pretty good, yet they believed that the economy was in bad shape in general.

So what do I mean when I say “we were so focused on winning each battle that we lost the war”?

When president Biden withdrew from the race on July 21st, and endorsed Vice President Harris, there was a collective sense that President Biden trailed in the race due to his age (or perceptions therein). And while that undoubtedly was a significant factor in the race, I believe that the singular focus on that element obscured the deficit Democrats, as the incumbent party, faced on perceptions of the economy. And it was likely too late to fix it.

In a perfect world, Democrats would have spent the previous three years broadcasting the substantial accomplishments of the Biden administration, and the historic nature of the economic recovery they orchestrated. Yet, as Democrats tend to do, they focused on doing the work instead of bragging about it. A Politico/Morning Consult poll in late April of this year demonstrated the effect of this strategy, or lack thereof, in testing America’s awareness of the Biden record:

While the Biden/Harris administration compiled an impressive record of accomplishments, most Americans weren’t aware, and many even gave credit to Donald Trump. Which highlights another key point - Donald Trump was left largely untouched by the Democratic messaging machine during this time period, and thereby was able to rehabilitate his image to some extent, with voters having a more favorable view of Trump and his presidency in retrospect than they did while he occupied the office. Perhaps there was a calculation that his legal proceedings would disqualify him, I can’t say. But it is undeniable that Donald Trump was left largely untouched for most of the last 3+ years.

So, while the candidate change took the issue of age off the table, the Harris campaign was still left with the formidable global anti-incumbent headwinds, with an electorate largely unaware of their accomplishments. Three months would not be enough time to make up for 3 years of lost opportunity. And while they were running against the most deeply flawed opponent they could possibly face, he had been allowed to rehabilitate his image enough to serve as an avatar for the electorate’s malaise and grievances, as he has for the past 8 years. Both because the malaise and grievances were not adequately addressed, and because Trump wasn’t adequately disqualified.

The Harris Campaign

Vice President Harris entered this race with just over 3 months to turn everything around. And while her candidacy immediately inspired great enthusiasm and voter intensity, it would prove to not be enough to prevail in the headwinds she was facing. She was an incredibly strong candidate who did what very few could do. The voter registration surges and massive fundraising successes provide quantifiable metrics of her value as a candidate.

In the end, Trump was the beneficiary of a post-COVID anti-incumbency wave. The data from the non-swing states provides us with our best window into just how substantial this wave was. Dave Wasserman from the Cook Report summed it up best in this simple comparison of the partisan swing in the battleground vs. everywhere else:

These non-battleground states can be thought of as a control universe of sorts, where we can observe what the general political climate was without campaign intervention. What happened outside of the battleground? We won’t have the full picture for some time, but it appears likely that Democratic turnout lagged, and it is likely independents broke for Trump, while the battleground performed much closer to 2020, but small shifts in turnout and persuasion were in Trump’s benefit enough to deliver wins across the 7 states.

This first map demonstrates the partisan swings. You can see the biggest swings to Trump were in non-competitive states, both blue and red. I’d not pay too much attention to that California performance just yet, as they still have several million votes to count. But there were big swings to Trump in places like NY, NJ, MD, and IL. Meanwhile, the battleground states (with the potential exception of AZ and NV) performed very close to their 2020 margins. Just not close enough. But to be clear, this demonstrates that where the Harris campaign campaigned, they moved the move substantially. But again, they had started in a hole that was just too deep.

Meanwhile, in terms of turnout, MI, WI, NC, and GA saw turnout exceeding 2020. PA was very close, but will likely finish slightly behind. And while AZ and NV are still lagging, votes are still being tallied there. But in general, turnout lagged substantially in places that swung more to Trump, suggesting that Democratic base turnout was less outside of the battleground.

If all of this seems familiar, it’s because this was largely the same pattern we experienced during the 2022 midterms, though in that case Democrats over performed in the battlegrounds, and underperformed badly everywhere else. In this election the scale slid slightly to the right, seeing Dems underperform slightly in the battlegrounds, and badly elsewhere.

So how did the Harris campaign run so much better in the battlegrounds? They simply had a far superior campaign operation. They were better funded, and more experienced. Trump outsourced his GOTV operations to Elon Musk and others, and by many accounts their field operations were almost non-existent in key states. Meanwhile the Democratic field operation was the biggest and best funded in the history of this country. They did everything that they could have possibly done, yet again, the headwinds that we had allowed to build for the previous 3 years were simply too strong to overcome with a robust field advantage.

This is, to some extent, visible in the data that is emerging from the battleground states. This chart looks at vote totals by vote mode in three battleground states:

What you should take from this chart is that the Harris campaign did an excellent job from a turnout perspective, for the most part, in these three states. In Georgia Harris matched Biden’s massive margin among mail voters, cut Trump’s margin among early in person voters in half, and cut the Election Day deficit from 23% to 6%. Yet still lost, because the early in person vote grew substantially, while mail voting dropped. Similar patterns emerge in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

What About Abortion Rights?

I’ve been saying for some time that abortion rights, and the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade, has been the most salient political issue in this country. And while I still believe that to be the case, in this election we saw that many voters are not drawing a connection between their vote in candidate campaigns and the future of abortion rights. It is possible that they have, to some extent, believed the GOP disinformation campaign that would lead them to believe that the issue will only be decided at the state level and that federal elections won’t impact abortion rights. Abortion rights ballot amendments continued to win strong majorities in every state they appeared. I’d love to see more data to shed light on this situation, but at this point the divergence between ballot measures and candidate performance is a significant concern for me.

Misogyny and Racism

While it is difficult to quantify the impact of these two factors on this election, it is also impossible to argue that they didn’t have an impact. As I noted on X a few days ago, if you think misogyny didn’t have an impact, get back to me when you flip a coin and it comes up heads 60 times in a road. And for those who would point out that women have only been the major party nominee twice, the fact that you don’t think the fact that the coin only had heads on both sides 58 of the 60 times is an unquestionable confirmation of misogyny, I don’t know what to say to you. But I want to be clear about one thing - if you also walk away from this election with the belief that a woman (or specifically a woman of color) cannot win, then you are simply wrong. Vice President Harris’s performance, relative to the global anti-incumbent party trend, was incredibly strong. She inspired enthusiasm and intensity among millions of Americans, and without that, Democrats would have lost by even wider margins.

Going Forward

There is a lot more to learn from this election. It is still quite early (there are still likely over 10 million more votes to be counted as of today). We will be putting in the time analyzing the results and turnout history to better understand what happened, how, and why, and will be sharing our findings broadly when they are ready. Stay tuned.