The Harris Campaign’s made a massive investment in ground-game. Unlike 2020, there was a huge number of volunteers and a vast network of activist organizations working on GOTV. I must admit I expected this to have a far greater – and decisive – impact.
The Harris Campaign’s made a massive investment in ground-game. Unlike 2020, there was a huge number of volunteers and a vast network of activist organizations working on GOTV. I must admit I expected this to have a far greater – and decisive – impact.
Places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia only shifted a couple points to the right from 2020, I think you can easily argue that the campaign and GOTV operations are what stopped us from seeing the massive swings there we saw in places like Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Texas.
Simon Rosenberg and a few other people have argued that the 2022 Midterms were actually two elections. I seem to recall that nationally/overall it was at least an R+3 election. Republicans improved their turnout in safely-Red and very-Blue states (i.e. a non-consequential Red Wave), while the Democrats had high turnout in competitive states and the vast majority of the districts that really mattered – i.e. no Red Wave whatsoever.
This seems to echo the points that you and NewEnglander are making about this 2024 Presidential Election.
FYI the election night count vastly overstated the degree of Illinois' shift. It was indeed a stunner when Harris was only ahead by 4 points in Illinois that Wednesday morning after the election and will regrettably remain a part of the storyline, but that margin has quietly increased to more than 10 points for Harris in the two weeks since. It's still a big shift the wrong direction but nothing like what it seemed.
did Harris actually invest in a ground game for reliably Democratic states? I thought her ground game was focused mostly on the swing states, and there, it worked - she got more votes than Biden in NC, GA, WI, and NV.
It's just that millions of people who don't follow politics but were pissed off about inflation showed up to vote against the governing party.
Sounds to me like those millions of people you're talking about that voted against the governing party are independents. Independents aren't by default always the most politically savvy group of voters and aren't necessarily beholden to any political party. They may not also tune in like Democrats, Republicans, etc. for races until later.
My guess is that Harris didn't give these voters (assuming they're independents) a compelling enough reason why she would need to be the next POTUS after Biden. As the voters weighed inflation and want to see who really is looking out for them, they needed to have a good reason to ensure that Harris was going to take care of this in her agenda.
A theory I have : because so much of GOTV work involves a continuity of voter files, the fact that we were largely out of action in 2020 with in-person GOTV really did set us back. 2022 being a midterm didn't make up the gap. The work this year caught us up to speed to some degree, but not enough to win. At least the strong work this year will help in the future, but it's a bad-tasting irony that 2020 netted us the Presidency while damaging the GOTV continuity.
What went wrong was that marginal voters were so angry about inflation that it would have taken a perfect storm for any Democrat to win, even against Trump. As others have noted, the Dem share of the vote slipped much less in the contested states than in the uncontested states, indicating that the Harris campaign was able to shift the baseline more than the Trump campaign was.
I hear you – but there is a vast gulf between the real economy and the "vibe economy". Here is a dramatic chart showing Republican voters suddenly feeling better about the economy, post-election, despite the reality not changing one iota.
The GOP base is unreachable. The task is to reach the marginal, mostly low-info, low-engagement voters who sat out 2016, turned on Trump over the pandemic and/or the economy in 2020, and turned on us over inflation this year.
I don't disagree but Republicans lying about their dissatisfaction with 2-3% inflation is separate from that discussion. The hope/expectation for the voters you mention is they bolt if/when Trump blows up the economy with his fixations on Tarriffs and mass deportations and other unworkable inflationary policies. We'll have a better idea of what to run on for the "low-info low-engagement" voter by the end of 25.
I think the outreach needs to start now (warning people about the Trump agenda on any outlet that will hear us out, etc) as opposed to waiting for people to see for themselves.
Yes, but, if people completely forgot how awful the Trump years were in just four years, will they remember this messaging four years from now? Not saying we shouldn't message, just wondering how effective it will be.
I think online liberals really overestimate the extent to which regular people found the Trump years (pre-COVID) awful.
He took the Obama economy and it kept humming, and when it looked like it might stall in 2019, he bullied the Fed into cutting rates, keeping things going until COVID hit.
Not being a liberal myself I can’t really speak to that, but you may well be right. Still, his approval ratings were down in the 30s at the end of his term, so there must have been things people didn’t like.
People dont like Trump the man. But ultimately, all the clown show stuff didnt have much impact on the real economy. Tack on peoples concerns about immigration, and that more or less is it.
By all means but we've been warning about him his agenda and his character for years. We'll have a better idea of what sticks in peoples minds when it's actually at risk of impacting their daily lives.
Shadow cabinet! Choose knowledgeable, highly-articulate people – and not necessarily just politicians.
Also: Messaging is extraordinarily difficult when there is a whole ecosystem (Fox etc) that isn’t even willing to let you voice your message to their audience!
We arent getting through the next four years without a recession in all liklihood. So the sooner Trump takes ownership, the more blame he will get when that recession comes.
With Trump’s announced policies, a recession (or depression) is all but certain. But I really don’t think a recession would be in the works had Kamala Harris won and been given Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
I've learned not to try to predict how the economy will react to various policy proposals. I expect you are right, but who knows - we will have to wait and see.
Also, I think we are in the slowing portion of the economic cycle right now. Like even if Harris had had Dem majorities I dont know that we get through 2026 without at least a minor recession. Our worst case scenario is probably that we are even closer than it seems, and that basically Trump inherits a recession like Bush did, and by 2028 things are back to strong growth.
Yep. I get pilloried on this regularly but I maintain this was a media-induced vibesession starting from earlier this year. I make a middle class salary and do most of the grocery-shopping for my family . . . .prices for me clearly fell over the past year. And like most Americans my income rose from pre-Covid times. This is seen in consumer spending-Americans are spending on vacations, dining out, entertainment more than they were in Trump's economy. If Americans were struggling so much from inflation a la 1977 you'd see it reflected in decreases in consumer spending, and that never happened even at post-Covid inflation's peak. Yes there were persistent price spikes for renters/those who took out big loans over the past two years, but that's far from a majority of the electorate.
It was a vibecession, but I dont know that it was entirely media caused. The reality is that prices did spike, dramatically, and while some good came down, alot of it didnt, and nothing that I know of has gone back down to 2019 levels - maybe gas in some places?
Didn't necessarily require a "perfect storm," but possibly an administration and campaign that tried to communicate effectively with the people directly on the issue.
That might have helped, but it would have had to start in 2021. Biden really only made a token effort at messaging throughout his term. Harris had just 3.5 months, which isn't nearly enough time to correct impressions formed over 3.5 years.
Precisely this! Because of the Biden Administration’s lack of effective messaging, the news media echoed three-and-a-half years of Republican shit-talking of the economy, thus creating a very negative "vibe economy".
Regardless of the positive reality, and positive measures for which Biden-Harris never received due credit, with regards to inflation and crime and the border, Kamala Harris was fighting a steep uphill messaging battle.
Again, the Biden Administration was out with positive messaging on the economy, IJJA, IRA, CHIPs routinely. Everyone wants a Monday morning whipping boy but there's no magic bully pulpit elixir Biden could've unleashed if the media-who wanted Trump back bad for revenues-didn't want to cover it.
I think the problem with saying that inflation is down is that doesn’t mean that *prices* are going down - it just means they aren’t going up fast. People are still in sticker shock about what things cost these days, and they aren’t really placated by “Well, it’s not getting worse…”
True, lots of people improvement requires prices to come down, i.e. actual deflation. Many might also be ignoring that their own salary has grown at a higher rate than inflation. But somehow lots of Republican voters believe, that after Trump won, the economy is now magically better. (Look at the Axios chart!) Go figure!
You are vastly overestimating how much "I feel your pain" is a good message when you are in charge of causing the pain.
Sure we could have done more to blame various people who werent Democratic politicians, but then the question, as Trumps people put it is - if you could do something about it, why havent you.
It strikes me as reductive in assuming that "anger about inflation" was the singular motivation for the Trump surge voters. If our only takeaway from November 5 is that Democrats caught a tough break that inflation didn't go down quickly enough, we can probably look forward to a lot more November 5ths.
I think Dems should do a lot of things differently, but if we have normal inflation from 2021 to 2024 and everything else is the same (including real income growth, as wages would be proportionately lower) I think Harris wins.
If you want to go there, you'll have to explain why a lot of those same voters (Latinos in particular) had no problem voting for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Not the same electorates. 2024 voters have been subjected to 8 years of Trump and Trump's supporters misogyny and racism. It's been normalized in a way it hadn't been before, at least among the voting population.
1. The electorates of 2012, 2016, and 2024 are exactly the same?
2. There is no effect from 9 years of Trumpism on the tone of our politics?
3. There were a lot of low-information voters who voted this time who didn't vote in other elections and may have motivations that differed from earlier electorates?
Yep I think it amounts to cope. Countries with far worse inflation have managed to beat away the far right the past two years, and they had candidates without Trump's baggage.
It wasnt just inflation. Inflation was just the most visible factor.
BIden was elected on a promise to return things to normal. But they didnt. Prices were still up. The Afghanistan withdrawal was chaos. New wars started that threatened to embroil the US. Trump was still around. Crime spiked (including notably stuff like car thefts that affect normal people in the suburbs).
I would put it another way - if Trump had won in 2020, and each side had the exact same level of everything else (money, GOTV, ads, non-paid messaging, etc), we would be talking about something approaching an 2008 level blowout where Biden was easily elected to a second term with something like 54 senate seats and a safe House majority.
Because the chaos was basically built into the post-COVID recovery and whoever was in charge.
Sure we need to be aware that the GOP is now free of the fetters of being the establishment and thats a major danger for Dems as the now establishment party going forward. But thats not why we lost in 2024.
Good points. This is the second time in the last half century that Democrats had really bad timing for their narrow win....with 1976 being the other time. And of course, if they'd won in 1988 and especially 2004, they'd really have had a bloodbath for the next few cycles.
The simplest answer is lack of time. Harris had less than 4 months just to build her campaign up from the ground. Worse yet, she had to separate herself from Biden while also establishing name recognition and a platform. Obviously, it doesn't help that her policy platform wasn't nearly as strong as it could have been, but time was the ultimate enemy. We also must consider that the incumbent president and party were unpopular due to high inflation and a weak job market. To be clear Harris, did close the gap significantly in swing states, but she still started far behind Trump and less than four months isn't enough time. Moral of the story: next time nominate your candidates formally and normally via the presidential primary, where they have over a year for the voters to be exposed to them.
Same with high inflation - that was in the past - it was around 2.5% on election day . The past inflation wave still hurt her. Trump has no inflation mitigation concepts - he may actually achieve the opposite.
He ran on an overtly inflationary, anti-growth platform. Tariffs are directly inflationary and will also drive up business costs. Deportations will drive up business costs by creating labor shortages, and also dissuade future immigration, exacerbating the labor shortage. Massive tax cuts will drive up demand while his other policies restrict supply. Perfect setup for double-digit inflation. The only way we'll avoid another bout of inflation is if he doesn't do what he ran on.
The business community seems to be counting on that. Ultimately, I suspect Wall Street gets its way. Tariffs and deportations will be limited, but Trump will do just enough to get credit with his blue-collar base.
I think one of the biggest problems we're going to be facing is that inflation has indeed quieted tremendously and Trump is going to be able to crow about lowering it, because no one remembers anything, apparently.
The market movements seem to indicate that they expect tax cut extensions and deregulation but not tariffs or deportations. Wall Street got almost everything it wanted the first time, but this admin seems to have a lot more nationalist zealots and fewer Wall Street types.
I think one of the main take aways from this election is in fact that the Wall Street types have basically lost the party.
Even the business men in Trumps sphere a wacky tech weirdos like Vivek and Musk, not traditional finance types. Like you arent going to see a Steve Mnuchin at Treasury this time around.
This is why you are starting to see the populists gain ground in the party. Freed of the constraints of pleasing businessmen (beyond maybe some simple tax cuts) they are free to run on anti-monopolist visions like Josh Hawley, or on regulating the food additive industry like RFK Jr.
Even their plan to destroy the federal government seem to be much more about Christian nationalism (in the case of defunding the DoEd) or simple revenge on a liberal voting block who MAGAs and the Elon's of the world think have had it too easy.
I will be stunned if RFK Jr really is allowed to heavily regulate the food additive industry, including drastically reducing the use of high-fructose corn syrup in a myriad of foods.
Likewise, I will be thoroughly shocked if Trump pursues an anti-monopolist program – perhaps by keeping Lina Khan in place as Chair of the FTC.
I would be shocked too - but the idea that the GOP presidents HHS sec pick is even floating these ideas is a drastic departure. Same with Hawley's focus on a variety of monopolies (not just tech).
Unemployment rate is quite low, but you also gotta factor in the fact that this doesn't include the people that don't report. Also many people are still not making enough money to keep up with rising cost of living from inflation. There's also the fact that increasingly more Americans work multiple jobs now just to make enough to keep up. Hell in STEM there's been over the past few months mass layoffs. Granted, Biden has managed to stem much of the layoffs somewhat, but not nearly enough to help Harris eke out a win.
We have other metrics that measure those people and they are all pretty much showing a super strong economy. Workforce participation for prime age workers is at levels we have only seen in the late 90s.
I'm not entirely sure how true that is and even if we do accept the economy has been doing well, which I think it has been, you still have to factor in inflation being at an all time high. It can simultaneously be the case that the economy is thriving and people are still struggling to make ends meet. Clearly, this was expressed by more blue collar workers across all races and younger folks entering the job and housing market. I do suspect it was inflation ultimately that sunk Harris. It's not unprecedented either. Stagflation was largely credited to Carter's defeat in 1980 alongside high gas prices. Fairly or unfairly, the party in power tends to pay dearly when you have a significant economic turmoil. If Trump was president presiding over high inflation, I'd suspect he'd lose too. In fact I'm willing to bet that inflation will worsen under him and by 2026 and 2028 voters will make him and the GOP pay heavily for it.
We dont have stagflation. If the people voting now had lived through that they would have largely scoffed off the 2021-2023 bout of inflation.
But yeah - it was inflation. The underlying economy sans the inflation is basically as good as it will get - 1999 levels. If we didnt have inflation we'd be due for a half a dozen movies about how the worst thing that could happen to a man is to have a good paying office job that is simply unfulfilling.
At the macroeconomic level, we do have a growing economy.
However, whether it be what I get in my LinkedIn newsfeed or reports I read, there are regular layoffs happening. They are mainly in tech companies, but not for reasons showing we're in a recession (we are not). It's because running business while companies can still grow has been made harder because of inflation. AI developments and tech companies are having to restructure and streamline operations all the time. Even large consulting companies (my industry) have had to deal with more than typical layoffs and that's in direct proportion due to the over investment during the pandemic. It's led to many complications.
Also, in 2024 it's become much harder to land a job quickly because of the fierce competition. It may differ from company to industry but I have heard many horror stories posted on LinkedIn about people taking longer than typical to get hired. Plenty of companies go through excessive rounds of interviews for candidates beyond what is typical.
The economy will likely cool down and get to a sense of normalcy once interest rates get lower but for now, it's still a complicated picture.
I think a lot of people here are overanalyizing. It's very simple. Trump quenches the thirst of those lowkey mad at the establishment. That's why Fetterman and Sanders appeal to people so much. Unfortunately Sanders message comes in a package that has always been anti-Democratic party which of course does little to motivate people to vote for it.
I think this is pretty definitive proof of the research suggesting that a ground game can be worth 2-3%. Thats about what she got when you compare the swing state swing from 2020 compared to the national swing.
Could an even better GOTV effort, perhaps with better and more up-to-date databases, have netted more? Say an addition 2–3% in the swing states, thus winning the Electoral College?
My guess is no. Like many things, there is diminishing returns (logarithmic curve) so each additional dollar will only lead to a smaller marginal gain.
The Harris Campaign’s made a massive investment in ground-game. Unlike 2020, there was a huge number of volunteers and a vast network of activist organizations working on GOTV. I must admit I expected this to have a far greater – and decisive – impact.
What went wrong?
Places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia only shifted a couple points to the right from 2020, I think you can easily argue that the campaign and GOTV operations are what stopped us from seeing the massive swings there we saw in places like Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Texas.
Simon Rosenberg and a few other people have argued that the 2022 Midterms were actually two elections. I seem to recall that nationally/overall it was at least an R+3 election. Republicans improved their turnout in safely-Red and very-Blue states (i.e. a non-consequential Red Wave), while the Democrats had high turnout in competitive states and the vast majority of the districts that really mattered – i.e. no Red Wave whatsoever.
This seems to echo the points that you and NewEnglander are making about this 2024 Presidential Election.
FYI the election night count vastly overstated the degree of Illinois' shift. It was indeed a stunner when Harris was only ahead by 4 points in Illinois that Wednesday morning after the election and will regrettably remain a part of the storyline, but that margin has quietly increased to more than 10 points for Harris in the two weeks since. It's still a big shift the wrong direction but nothing like what it seemed.
As I replied to the comment that you deleted,
did Harris actually invest in a ground game for reliably Democratic states? I thought her ground game was focused mostly on the swing states, and there, it worked - she got more votes than Biden in NC, GA, WI, and NV.
It's just that millions of people who don't follow politics but were pissed off about inflation showed up to vote against the governing party.
Sounds to me like those millions of people you're talking about that voted against the governing party are independents. Independents aren't by default always the most politically savvy group of voters and aren't necessarily beholden to any political party. They may not also tune in like Democrats, Republicans, etc. for races until later.
My guess is that Harris didn't give these voters (assuming they're independents) a compelling enough reason why she would need to be the next POTUS after Biden. As the voters weighed inflation and want to see who really is looking out for them, they needed to have a good reason to ensure that Harris was going to take care of this in her agenda.
A theory I have : because so much of GOTV work involves a continuity of voter files, the fact that we were largely out of action in 2020 with in-person GOTV really did set us back. 2022 being a midterm didn't make up the gap. The work this year caught us up to speed to some degree, but not enough to win. At least the strong work this year will help in the future, but it's a bad-tasting irony that 2020 netted us the Presidency while damaging the GOTV continuity.
What went wrong was that marginal voters were so angry about inflation that it would have taken a perfect storm for any Democrat to win, even against Trump. As others have noted, the Dem share of the vote slipped much less in the contested states than in the uncontested states, indicating that the Harris campaign was able to shift the baseline more than the Trump campaign was.
I hear you – but there is a vast gulf between the real economy and the "vibe economy". Here is a dramatic chart showing Republican voters suddenly feeling better about the economy, post-election, despite the reality not changing one iota.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/consumer-sentiment-republican-democrat-switch
How many Republicans are going to be celebrating 2-3% inflation in January?
The GOP base is unreachable. The task is to reach the marginal, mostly low-info, low-engagement voters who sat out 2016, turned on Trump over the pandemic and/or the economy in 2020, and turned on us over inflation this year.
I don't disagree but Republicans lying about their dissatisfaction with 2-3% inflation is separate from that discussion. The hope/expectation for the voters you mention is they bolt if/when Trump blows up the economy with his fixations on Tarriffs and mass deportations and other unworkable inflationary policies. We'll have a better idea of what to run on for the "low-info low-engagement" voter by the end of 25.
I think the outreach needs to start now (warning people about the Trump agenda on any outlet that will hear us out, etc) as opposed to waiting for people to see for themselves.
Yes, but, if people completely forgot how awful the Trump years were in just four years, will they remember this messaging four years from now? Not saying we shouldn't message, just wondering how effective it will be.
I think online liberals really overestimate the extent to which regular people found the Trump years (pre-COVID) awful.
He took the Obama economy and it kept humming, and when it looked like it might stall in 2019, he bullied the Fed into cutting rates, keeping things going until COVID hit.
Not being a liberal myself I can’t really speak to that, but you may well be right. Still, his approval ratings were down in the 30s at the end of his term, so there must have been things people didn’t like.
People dont like Trump the man. But ultimately, all the clown show stuff didnt have much impact on the real economy. Tack on peoples concerns about immigration, and that more or less is it.
By all means but we've been warning about him his agenda and his character for years. We'll have a better idea of what sticks in peoples minds when it's actually at risk of impacting their daily lives.
Shadow cabinet! Choose knowledgeable, highly-articulate people – and not necessarily just politicians.
Also: Messaging is extraordinarily difficult when there is a whole ecosystem (Fox etc) that isn’t even willing to let you voice your message to their audience!
By mid-late spring we will inevitably see the media do an about-face and start heralding the "historically strong Trump economy."
I'm already pre-annoyed.
We arent getting through the next four years without a recession in all liklihood. So the sooner Trump takes ownership, the more blame he will get when that recession comes.
With Trump’s announced policies, a recession (or depression) is all but certain. But I really don’t think a recession would be in the works had Kamala Harris won and been given Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
I've learned not to try to predict how the economy will react to various policy proposals. I expect you are right, but who knows - we will have to wait and see.
Also, I think we are in the slowing portion of the economic cycle right now. Like even if Harris had had Dem majorities I dont know that we get through 2026 without at least a minor recession. Our worst case scenario is probably that we are even closer than it seems, and that basically Trump inherits a recession like Bush did, and by 2028 things are back to strong growth.
Yep. I get pilloried on this regularly but I maintain this was a media-induced vibesession starting from earlier this year. I make a middle class salary and do most of the grocery-shopping for my family . . . .prices for me clearly fell over the past year. And like most Americans my income rose from pre-Covid times. This is seen in consumer spending-Americans are spending on vacations, dining out, entertainment more than they were in Trump's economy. If Americans were struggling so much from inflation a la 1977 you'd see it reflected in decreases in consumer spending, and that never happened even at post-Covid inflation's peak. Yes there were persistent price spikes for renters/those who took out big loans over the past two years, but that's far from a majority of the electorate.
It was a vibecession, but I dont know that it was entirely media caused. The reality is that prices did spike, dramatically, and while some good came down, alot of it didnt, and nothing that I know of has gone back down to 2019 levels - maybe gas in some places?
Didn't necessarily require a "perfect storm," but possibly an administration and campaign that tried to communicate effectively with the people directly on the issue.
That might have helped, but it would have had to start in 2021. Biden really only made a token effort at messaging throughout his term. Harris had just 3.5 months, which isn't nearly enough time to correct impressions formed over 3.5 years.
Precisely this! Because of the Biden Administration’s lack of effective messaging, the news media echoed three-and-a-half years of Republican shit-talking of the economy, thus creating a very negative "vibe economy".
Regardless of the positive reality, and positive measures for which Biden-Harris never received due credit, with regards to inflation and crime and the border, Kamala Harris was fighting a steep uphill messaging battle.
Take a look at the Axios chart to which I linked!
Re the chart, that happens every time. The right-wing media report only good news when the GOP is in charge and only bad news when Dems are in charge.
Again, the Biden Administration was out with positive messaging on the economy, IJJA, IRA, CHIPs routinely. Everyone wants a Monday morning whipping boy but there's no magic bully pulpit elixir Biden could've unleashed if the media-who wanted Trump back bad for revenues-didn't want to cover it.
Stop blaming the media for Biden's empty pulpit.
I think the problem with saying that inflation is down is that doesn’t mean that *prices* are going down - it just means they aren’t going up fast. People are still in sticker shock about what things cost these days, and they aren’t really placated by “Well, it’s not getting worse…”
True, lots of people improvement requires prices to come down, i.e. actual deflation. Many might also be ignoring that their own salary has grown at a higher rate than inflation. But somehow lots of Republican voters believe, that after Trump won, the economy is now magically better. (Look at the Axios chart!) Go figure!
You are vastly overestimating how much "I feel your pain" is a good message when you are in charge of causing the pain.
Sure we could have done more to blame various people who werent Democratic politicians, but then the question, as Trumps people put it is - if you could do something about it, why havent you.
That’s not the message I’m talking about. And who cares what they say. The folks who blame everything on the deep state?
It strikes me as reductive in assuming that "anger about inflation" was the singular motivation for the Trump surge voters. If our only takeaway from November 5 is that Democrats caught a tough break that inflation didn't go down quickly enough, we can probably look forward to a lot more November 5ths.
I think Dems should do a lot of things differently, but if we have normal inflation from 2021 to 2024 and everything else is the same (including real income growth, as wages would be proportionately lower) I think Harris wins.
If we have normal inflation Biden probably doesnt leave the race if inflation is 2-3% in the post COVID period.
So what else were the motivations of the trump voters and those that stayed home?
Hmm...what was different about Harris than every other major party presidential nominee we've ever had? Just can't put my finger on it.
If you want to go there, you'll have to explain why a lot of those same voters (Latinos in particular) had no problem voting for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Not the same electorates. 2024 voters have been subjected to 8 years of Trump and Trump's supporters misogyny and racism. It's been normalized in a way it hadn't been before, at least among the voting population.
Nonsense
What part is "nonsense"?
1. The electorates of 2012, 2016, and 2024 are exactly the same?
2. There is no effect from 9 years of Trumpism on the tone of our politics?
3. There were a lot of low-information voters who voted this time who didn't vote in other elections and may have motivations that differed from earlier electorates?
simple; your entire post
Why do you think he's wrong?
Yep I think it amounts to cope. Countries with far worse inflation have managed to beat away the far right the past two years, and they had candidates without Trump's baggage.
It wasnt just inflation. Inflation was just the most visible factor.
BIden was elected on a promise to return things to normal. But they didnt. Prices were still up. The Afghanistan withdrawal was chaos. New wars started that threatened to embroil the US. Trump was still around. Crime spiked (including notably stuff like car thefts that affect normal people in the suburbs).
I would put it another way - if Trump had won in 2020, and each side had the exact same level of everything else (money, GOTV, ads, non-paid messaging, etc), we would be talking about something approaching an 2008 level blowout where Biden was easily elected to a second term with something like 54 senate seats and a safe House majority.
Because the chaos was basically built into the post-COVID recovery and whoever was in charge.
Sure we need to be aware that the GOP is now free of the fetters of being the establishment and thats a major danger for Dems as the now establishment party going forward. But thats not why we lost in 2024.
Good points. This is the second time in the last half century that Democrats had really bad timing for their narrow win....with 1976 being the other time. And of course, if they'd won in 1988 and especially 2004, they'd really have had a bloodbath for the next few cycles.
The simplest answer is lack of time. Harris had less than 4 months just to build her campaign up from the ground. Worse yet, she had to separate herself from Biden while also establishing name recognition and a platform. Obviously, it doesn't help that her policy platform wasn't nearly as strong as it could have been, but time was the ultimate enemy. We also must consider that the incumbent president and party were unpopular due to high inflation and a weak job market. To be clear Harris, did close the gap significantly in swing states, but she still started far behind Trump and less than four months isn't enough time. Moral of the story: next time nominate your candidates formally and normally via the presidential primary, where they have over a year for the voters to be exposed to them.
Weak job market? That’s not accurate.
Same with high inflation - that was in the past - it was around 2.5% on election day . The past inflation wave still hurt her. Trump has no inflation mitigation concepts - he may actually achieve the opposite.
He ran on an overtly inflationary, anti-growth platform. Tariffs are directly inflationary and will also drive up business costs. Deportations will drive up business costs by creating labor shortages, and also dissuade future immigration, exacerbating the labor shortage. Massive tax cuts will drive up demand while his other policies restrict supply. Perfect setup for double-digit inflation. The only way we'll avoid another bout of inflation is if he doesn't do what he ran on.
The business community seems to be counting on that. Ultimately, I suspect Wall Street gets its way. Tariffs and deportations will be limited, but Trump will do just enough to get credit with his blue-collar base.
I think one of the biggest problems we're going to be facing is that inflation has indeed quieted tremendously and Trump is going to be able to crow about lowering it, because no one remembers anything, apparently.
The market movements seem to indicate that they expect tax cut extensions and deregulation but not tariffs or deportations. Wall Street got almost everything it wanted the first time, but this admin seems to have a lot more nationalist zealots and fewer Wall Street types.
We’ll see to what extent guys like Scott Bessent can cool the saucer on that front
I had to google him. He seems like a typical Wall Street type. I figured Trump would just pick some bitcoin bro for Treasury.
Steve Mnuchin was probably the best cabinet secretary from Trump I, but seemed to exert influence only on things Trump didn't care about.
Do we know Bessent will even be in the admin? Wasn't Musk pushing for Lutnick?
Yes, though it sounded like Bessent was frontrunner for some time (Lutnick isn’t a crazy person either, though)
I mean, wasn't Lutnick the one at the MSG rally foaming at the mouth at the idea of going back to the Gilded Age?
I think one of the main take aways from this election is in fact that the Wall Street types have basically lost the party.
Even the business men in Trumps sphere a wacky tech weirdos like Vivek and Musk, not traditional finance types. Like you arent going to see a Steve Mnuchin at Treasury this time around.
This is why you are starting to see the populists gain ground in the party. Freed of the constraints of pleasing businessmen (beyond maybe some simple tax cuts) they are free to run on anti-monopolist visions like Josh Hawley, or on regulating the food additive industry like RFK Jr.
Even their plan to destroy the federal government seem to be much more about Christian nationalism (in the case of defunding the DoEd) or simple revenge on a liberal voting block who MAGAs and the Elon's of the world think have had it too easy.
I will be stunned if RFK Jr really is allowed to heavily regulate the food additive industry, including drastically reducing the use of high-fructose corn syrup in a myriad of foods.
Likewise, I will be thoroughly shocked if Trump pursues an anti-monopolist program – perhaps by keeping Lina Khan in place as Chair of the FTC.
I would be shocked too - but the idea that the GOP presidents HHS sec pick is even floating these ideas is a drastic departure. Same with Hawley's focus on a variety of monopolies (not just tech).
There are way less Wall Street types around him this time though. We’ll see. That set still has a lot of influence with the Senate
Only if they can lend lots of Republican senators a spine!
Unemployment rate is quite low, but you also gotta factor in the fact that this doesn't include the people that don't report. Also many people are still not making enough money to keep up with rising cost of living from inflation. There's also the fact that increasingly more Americans work multiple jobs now just to make enough to keep up. Hell in STEM there's been over the past few months mass layoffs. Granted, Biden has managed to stem much of the layoffs somewhat, but not nearly enough to help Harris eke out a win.
We have other metrics that measure those people and they are all pretty much showing a super strong economy. Workforce participation for prime age workers is at levels we have only seen in the late 90s.
I'm not entirely sure how true that is and even if we do accept the economy has been doing well, which I think it has been, you still have to factor in inflation being at an all time high. It can simultaneously be the case that the economy is thriving and people are still struggling to make ends meet. Clearly, this was expressed by more blue collar workers across all races and younger folks entering the job and housing market. I do suspect it was inflation ultimately that sunk Harris. It's not unprecedented either. Stagflation was largely credited to Carter's defeat in 1980 alongside high gas prices. Fairly or unfairly, the party in power tends to pay dearly when you have a significant economic turmoil. If Trump was president presiding over high inflation, I'd suspect he'd lose too. In fact I'm willing to bet that inflation will worsen under him and by 2026 and 2028 voters will make him and the GOP pay heavily for it.
We dont have stagflation. If the people voting now had lived through that they would have largely scoffed off the 2021-2023 bout of inflation.
But yeah - it was inflation. The underlying economy sans the inflation is basically as good as it will get - 1999 levels. If we didnt have inflation we'd be due for a half a dozen movies about how the worst thing that could happen to a man is to have a good paying office job that is simply unfulfilling.
Here's perspective:
At the macroeconomic level, we do have a growing economy.
However, whether it be what I get in my LinkedIn newsfeed or reports I read, there are regular layoffs happening. They are mainly in tech companies, but not for reasons showing we're in a recession (we are not). It's because running business while companies can still grow has been made harder because of inflation. AI developments and tech companies are having to restructure and streamline operations all the time. Even large consulting companies (my industry) have had to deal with more than typical layoffs and that's in direct proportion due to the over investment during the pandemic. It's led to many complications.
Also, in 2024 it's become much harder to land a job quickly because of the fierce competition. It may differ from company to industry but I have heard many horror stories posted on LinkedIn about people taking longer than typical to get hired. Plenty of companies go through excessive rounds of interviews for candidates beyond what is typical.
The economy will likely cool down and get to a sense of normalcy once interest rates get lower but for now, it's still a complicated picture.
My (very large) employer is laying off, cutting benefits, and letting salaries slip.
And yet labor share of income is not so hot.
It looks a lot of the voters her campaign was reaching out to showed up for Trump instead!
I think a lot of people here are overanalyizing. It's very simple. Trump quenches the thirst of those lowkey mad at the establishment. That's why Fetterman and Sanders appeal to people so much. Unfortunately Sanders message comes in a package that has always been anti-Democratic party which of course does little to motivate people to vote for it.
I think this is pretty definitive proof of the research suggesting that a ground game can be worth 2-3%. Thats about what she got when you compare the swing state swing from 2020 compared to the national swing.
Could an even better GOTV effort, perhaps with better and more up-to-date databases, have netted more? Say an addition 2–3% in the swing states, thus winning the Electoral College?
My guess is no. Like many things, there is diminishing returns (logarithmic curve) so each additional dollar will only lead to a smaller marginal gain.