There’s something about an election that is both cleansing — especially for my pre-Election Day email inbox — and, most importantly, clarifying.
It’s also the ultimate test of lots of theories of the case — all sorts of them. Which gender gap would matter more? Which side had the best campaign tactically? Which one had the better message? How much does the basic fundamental rule of politics — the perceived state of the economy — trump everything? What matters more: class or identity?
Small shifts of the electorate, which turn defeats into victories and vice versa, can either shatter or cement various pieces of conventional wisdom based on the various theories of what moves the electorate in one direction or the other.
The real trick to any postelection analysis is to both respect the result and the voice of the voters in the moment while simultaneously realizing that what happens in one election doesn’t always mean it’s cemented conventional wisdom in perpetuity. After all, how many smart people post-2020, especially post-Jan. 6, 2021, who thought that was going to end Trump (and Trumpism with it) look pretty dumb today?
The reality is that both parties learn lessons from losing elections that apply only in the short term — say, from one presidential election to the next midterm or from one midterm to the next presidential election. But those lessons have shelf lives, and the problem with a lot of career political strategists (and yes, career political journalists!) is that we all can get trapped or captured by a trend that matters for two to six years but becomes obsolete soon after.
After 2004, Karl Rove was convinced he was building a permanent Republican/conservative majority, only to see that theory shattered in 2006 and then obliterated in 2008.
Plenty of Democrats involved with the rise of Barack Obama thought after his 2012 re-election that the multiracial coalition he put together was going to become a durable Democratic/liberal majority, only to see that vision shattered two years later with the 2014 midterms and then obliterated with the rise of Trump in 2016.
No mandate lasts, and no political movement is immune to eventual upheaval — that’s why democracy continues to be the best way for humans to learn to live together.
Still, some truisms always apply, like swing voters’ swinging based on their own personal situations, and that’s almost always via the lens of the economy. Here’s another one: Unpopular presidents’ parties rarely win midterms, let alone presidential elections.
And that’s the best place to begin in understanding what happened. Joe Biden’s presidency was perceived as unsuccessful, and that’s why Trump won. We can quibble about tactics, we can quibble about statistics, but perception is reality in democracies. This economy may very well be recovering and durable, but it isn’t fully healed, and those still struggling reminded everyone that what’s good for the stock market hasn’t necessarily felt good in their bank accounts.
It’s also hard to disaggregate Biden’s age and energy from his approval rating, because in an alternative reality where Biden is 20 years younger and capable of traveling the country and selling his policies, who knows whether the voters would have given him and the Democrats the benefit of the doubt?
Personally, I do believe the single biggest problems for the Democrats were Biden’s age and his inability to both do the job and sell what he was doing. The previous two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Obama, had unpopular starts like Biden, but they were both young enough and energetic enough to sell their ideas (and their re-elections) as ones that would lead to better outcomes. Clinton and Obama successfully turned the question of “are you better off now than you were four years ago” to “will you be better off in four years under our policies versus theirs.”
But there’s one other moment that’s worth singling out, one that totally misled the Democratic Party (and many of its partisan media allies) about the public’s appetite for Trump or even Trumpism: the 2022 midterms.
The midterm mirage
The biggest difference between the successes of Clinton and Obama, who got re-elected, and the failure of the Biden-Harris team to win four more years was their midterm experiences. Both Clinton and Obama got clobbered, forcing them to rethink some of their policies and how to sell them.
Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ “better than expected” performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to course-correct.
Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging.
The reality is that Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms for two reasons: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the GOP’s disastrous collection of candidates in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Toss in that more Democrats are now regular voters while more Republicans are irregular voters, thanks to the realignment of the two parties over education and class, and it was a recipe for overperformance by Democrats.
When Republicans were more the party of the suburban upper middle class, they had the midterm turnout advantage almost automatically. Not anymore — it’s why Democrats usually overperform in special elections, with more devoted “every election” voters right now. Presidential elections are equalizers on those midterm turnout advantages.
Had either Dobbs not happened or the GOP nominated more electable candidates, Republicans most likely win both House and Senate control in 2022, simply because of backlash to post-Covid inflation and a belief that Biden’s policies extended the issue, as well as a negative feeling about the overall job Biden was doing.
And a shellacking in 2022 for Biden and the Democrats that was more in line with 2010 (Obama’s first midterm) or 1994 (Clinton’s first midterm) would most likely have either forced a reckoning about whether Biden should run again (perhaps even inviting primary challengers) or forced Biden to course-correct more and more forcefully on economic and border security sooner.
But that isn’t what happened. In fact, the resurrection of Trump as the GOP front-runner for 2024 — which began in earnest in late 2022 — only hardened this (mis)belief among Democrats that anti-Trumpism, coupled with Dobbs backlash, would linger and become the easiest and safest path to re-election.
Obviously, hindsight indicates this was a giant miscalculation.
Democrats and democracy
One of the things the Democrats and many of their media allies have never grasped is that the “democracy” issue, as they see it, is something they have the luxury to be concerned about.
It doesn’t mean their concern isn’t wrong; it’s just that it isn’t the best message to use to rally the kinds of voters the Democrats need to actually win elections. Many voters, especially ones who swing between voting and not voting, see elections more transactionally, as decisions based on who they believe would make their own lives better. It doesn’t mean they are any less patriotic, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about the erosion of democratic norms, but it means that’s not their priority at the moment.
Violations of the rule of law are a concern to many voters, but some voters didn’t agree that obsessing over Trump’s violations was a concern that was the priority over and above, say, security at the border or the cost of living. Again, I don’t write that to seem dismissive about Trump’s attitude about the rule of law and lack of respect for it. I’m simply trying to explain why more voters don’t prioritize the issue the same way many on the left do.
And it’s why the first hint of direct criticism of the 108-day Kamala Harris campaign was her decision to close on democracy rather than on the concerns of the swing voters who see issues through the prism of what affects their lives more in the moment — the economy and personal security (which is really what the border issue is about, in my opinion).
While I think Harris was dealt a bad hand and played it about as well as she could have, for the most part, this decision to close with the idea that Trump is a threat, rather than on the issues many Democrats down the ballot closed on (Social Security, costs and the border), proved to be a mistake.
What voter who sees Trump himself as a threat needed persuading about voting in the last 10 days of this election? And if you hadn’t been persuaded that Trump was such a threat by now, would any amount of persuasion work in the last 10 days of a campaign?
But in fairness to her, while I think her campaign misfired on the closing message, tactically, it ran a good campaign — perhaps in hindsight a superb one on the ground. Just look at how well Harris held up in the battlegrounds versus the non-battlegrounds, which are basically a “control” group to test whether campaigns matter.
Harris is within 4 points or less in every one of the battleground states where vote counting is essentially finished. Meanwhile, in the non-battlegrounds, which were more affected by the basic “mood music” of the election, Democrats were shellacked. This should serve as a wakeup call to the party, though, that it doesn’t have a 50-state party infrastructure at the moment.
Democrats are too organized around tactics and spend way too much time trying to most efficiently find paths to win, rather than building a party from the ground up that might actually someday expand their opportunities.
If you want to see an example of what that world could look like for the Democrats if they actually had a 50-state strategy, look no further than Nebraska’s Senate race and the near-upset of Republican Deb Fischer by independent Dan Osborn.
He ran a left-leaning populist campaign, built a robust organization and might have pulled the upset if this had been a midterm turnout, rather than a presidential one. Notably, he didn’t have or want a “D” next to his name. Many Democratic strategists who live on the coasts ought to spend some time with Osborn. At a minimum, they’ll learn how to communicate better in red America.
The long trail leading to these results
For what it’s worth, while there are a few other nits to pick regarding the Harris campaign (yes, Josh Shapiro probably would have been a better VP pick; yes, she should have leaned harder into border security sooner and leaned further away from Biden quicker), this campaign wasn’t won or lost in the last 108 days, nor was it won or lost based on the running mate pick.
Biden’s decision to try to run, rather than bow out much earlier, sapped any ability Harris or any other Democratic nominee might have had to spend more time traveling the country, more time talking to media of all stripes, more time to flesh out more detailed proposals, more time to find ways to separate herself from her unpopular running mate and more time listening to actual swing voters.
Every extra week Harris could have gotten most likely would have improved her chances of, at a minimum, pulling a reverse 2016 and running the table in the Rust Belt to narrowly eke out a 270-268 Electoral College win even while she was losing the popular vote. But there was only so much she could control given the position in which Biden put her, his party and, frankly, the entire country.
But even a narrow win by Harris wouldn’t have solved some of the longer-term problems the Democrats face. In fact, perhaps losing now will accelerate the changes the party needs to make both in its focus and its leadership. Winning may have only delayed this inevitable reckoning.
In fact, in hindsight, it’s possible the narrow 2020 victory (powered more by Covid backlash than anything else), as well as the 2022 overperformance, only masked the long-term problems that were finally exposed by this 2024 result.
And that brings me to the larger challenge facing the Democrats: their core brand. They’ve become perceived as the party of cultural elites and the party of the educated upper class — basically the polar opposite of the coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson built over the mid-20th century. For a period of time in the Obama era, it appeared the Democrats had created a hybrid coalition of both educated elites and working-class voters of color.
It turns out that was temporary. As the 2024 exit polls are showing, class is trumping identity (pun intended). Just travel to south Texas and check out those presidential results and you’ll see just how successful Trump has been in creating a multiethnic working-class coalition.
(By the way, it should also not be lost on Democrats that the last three times the party lost the presidential popular vote, in 1988, 2004 and 2024, their nominee was either a Massachusetts Democrat or a San Francisco Democrat, but I digress.)
The seeds of discontent with this version of the Democratic Party can be traced back a decade to Obama’s decision to anoint Hillary Clinton as his successor. Rather than finding either someone who was younger or someone more in line with his reformist instincts, he instead sent the message to his unique coalition that he’d gone full establishment. After all, is there anything more institutional and establishment than rallying around a political brand that was nearly a quarter-century old at the time?
From a certain perspective, the Democratic establishment, personified by Obama and decisions he set in motion all the way back in 2008, has done more to dictate its last three presidential nominees in 2016, 2020 and 2024 than anything else. The last time the Democratic Party didn’t put a big fat finger on the scale and simply let the voters decide who their leader should be was in 2008, with its decision to pick Obama over the establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, the party essentially cleared the field for Clinton (thanks in large part to Obama’s decision to anoint her). None of the next-generation rising stars who got elected in 2006 and 2012 ended up running. But into that vacuum stepped Bernie Sanders, who at the time was seen as nothing more than a progressive gadfly — but he found a constituency, or a constituency found him. He seemed to understand this working-class rage better than anyone else in the party at that moment.
The same forces that propelled Obama over Clinton in 2008 were the same forces arrayed against her in 2016, both in the primaries (against Sanders) and the in general election against Trump. (Look, for example, at the Obama-Trump counties in Iowa and how many of those folks supported Sanders in the Democratic caucuses in 2016.)
Remember the Bernie Bros of 2016 and 2020? Many of them are now Trump bros, including Joe Rogan.
Had a more grassroots-driven process been allowed in 2016 — or had Obama understood his own coalition better and picked a younger heir apparent as his running mate — the Democratic Party might be in a better place today.
Maybe Trump never wins in 2016, and maybe the party is still seen as the one that understands working people better than the other party. But Trump did win, and the Democrats didn’t learn the right lesson about 2016, instead giving in to reactionary impulses and organizing themselves as mostly an anti-Trump party. And while it appeared to work in 2018 and 2020, it ultimately didn’t help Democrats meet the voters where they are now.
So while folks nitpick at Biden and Harris for various decisions they made that might have affected a few voters here or there, it looks in hindsight like the decision to rally around Clinton in 2016 truly began the shift of working-class voters of all ethnicities to stop trusting the Democratic establishment.
It shouldn’t be lost on folks that when parties “settle” on nominees thanks to establishment decisions rather than let the primary voters fall in love and make this decision, they do worse in most presidential elections. Check out the losing candidates since 1992: Bob Dole, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Trump 2020 and Harris. All but Trump 2020 were either directly or indirectly anointed or helped to the nomination as much by what the leadership of their parties thought was necessary at the time as by voters. Perhaps it’s easier to understand why those establishment favorites all lost general elections.
What’s next
As for Trump, he has caught the car — again. And this time he does have a voter-driven mandate. The question, of course, is whether the mandate Trump thinks he has is the same as the mandate the voters want him to have. And that’s where things can go south on Trump and the GOP quickly.
While I know there are plenty of die-hard Trump supporters and die-hard Harris supporters, this election was yet another one that appears to have been decided by voters who voted against something they didn’t like. For the second time in three presidential elections, the country elected a person whom a significant majority of the country didn’t personally like. He’s a message, not a messiah.
The question is whether Trump understands that. Given everything he has survived, from the assassination attempts to legal accountability on several fronts, it’s most likely only a matter of time for him to behave like the person who quipped that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. And that’s the danger for him and the GOP, because his coalition can become durable only if he delivers for the people who padded it from being a minority of voters to being a plurality or a majority of voters.
If he turns the presidency into a giant kleptocracy and focuses on personal grievances or weird ideas (like trying to undo vaccines and fluoride in water), the first voters who will abandon him are the very ones who decided late to abandon the Democrats. These folks see him as their sledgehammer to the current establishment. But they aren’t going to want to see one establishment simply replaced by another one that appears interested more in self-enrichment or cultural supremacy.
Elon Musk may be popular with MAGA for the moment because it sees him as a vehicle to help defeat the identity-based cultural left. But if Musk becomes Trump’s personal oligarch and Trump showers him with all sorts government goodies at the core of Musk’s business interests, he will see all these new Trump voters flee as fast as they fled the Democrats.
Trump can have a successful second term only if he actually learns from his governing mistakes of the first term and understands why he was fired once in the first place. The potential good news for the Democrats is that Trump has never been someone who accepts the premise that he’s flawed, let alone admits mistakes.
And if the same Trump who governed in 2017 shows up in 2025, the Democrats may come back even more quickly than they did after the Michael Dukakis debacle of 1988.