Other People’s Takes Are Good Too
I have been reading a ton of takes about this election (as have many of us). While I don’t yet have new fun analysis, I thought it might be useful to highlight some good/interesting takes, and summarize what I take from them. Note that what I took from it may not always match the intent of the original poster- but I haven’t summarized anything I think is utter garbage because why bother.
Equis on the Latino Vote
https://www.weareequis.us/research/prelimlatinovote2024
Equis is consistently really good for analysis on the Latino vote, I appreciate their evenhandedness. They dug into heavily-latino precincts and counties, which is the best early proxy for the Latino vote. It is worth noting this won’t capture everyone, and there’s some argument to be made that “heavily latino area” is different than “Latino voters”.
The big takeaway is that “this looks and sounds like a realignment”- Latino voters swing towards Trump and away from Democrats. It doesn’t look like this is particularly turnout/mobilization related. It might be an effect that is strongest with Trump on the ballot (downticket candidates overperformed Harris in Latino areas, but that might be state related and not Latino related, unclear), but it’s clearly there.
They cast some uncertainty on how “sticky” this realignment will be, and completely avoid speculating about *why* this is happening, which is a fair choice this early on with no voter file data. I expect them to have really good polling on the issue soon.
In the aftermath of 2020, there was a big fight in progressive analytics spaces about if Latinos were shifting against Democrats or not. I think at this point we can dispense with the argument, because this is very clearly happening. I’m most inclined to pin it on an expression of underlying conservatism, particularly on abortion, and the lower salience of racism from the Republican party. The immigration/border stuff is also clearly relevant, but I do think the economy is probably the biggest factor driving Latinos towards Trump.
Michael Caley, the writer of “Expecting Goals”
https://www.expectinggoals.com/p/what-happened-in-the-2024-election
Gotta say I did not expect really good election analysis from what seems to be a soccer analytics blog, but this piece is great.
He highlights that swing and non-swing states behaved differently in this election, which is something I’ve been seeing in my own analysis. It looks like turnout is up from 2020 in swing states, but down in both blue and red non-swing states (although I have been seeing particular cratering of turnout and support in heavily-blue states). Turnout also looks to be up in heavily non-college-white areas, and he sees a decrease in black turnout that I’m not totally convinced by. GA had pretty dramatic turnout increases, but we really can’t know until we get voter files back. He’s also seeing the weirdness in deep blue states- NY, NJ, CA, MA all swung significantly more Republican. I don’t have a great explanation for this yet, but it’s a bad sign if our Democratic strongholds are moving that dramatically.
Probably the overarching point of this piece is that this wasn’t a persuasion election or a turnout election, it was both. Again I’m not totally sure I agree, but that’s more a strategic disagreement than a question about his analysis. Both things certainly happened! But I think calling it a “turnout election”, even in part, drives Democrats to make leftward moves and investments in strategy that aren’t productive and aren’t going to help in the non-swing states where turnout did drop. Although, if I was a Republican right now, I’d probably be going all in on turnout.
Navigator on Reasons for Voting
https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-reasons-for-voting-for-trump-and-harris/
I am still a pollster at heart, but I’m more interested in election results than polling right now. Issue polling is extremely hard, and it’s too easy to make it tell you what you want to hear. I’m pretty much ignoring polling driving hot takes at the moment, especially if they’re like “my thing is popular I swear” (Chris Murphy is really guilty of this right now, with some spectacularly bad polling questions).
However, Navigator is good, trustworthy, and put out a post election survey with a broad range of even-handed issue questions that I found interesting. The big takeaway is that the state of the economy and inflation were reasons people found to support Trump over Harris, by double digits. This scans with everything else I’ve seen- it seems like the economy was a huge issue, and that people really, really hate inflation. Like so much more than I thought they did a year ago.
Harris won support on the ACA, healthcare, and a tiny advantage on “looking out for the middle class”. It doesn’t really seem like these were the salient issues of this election, unfortunately, and I worry that looking out for the middle class is just a less accurate economic sentiment question. Abortion, democracy, and climate were also important reasons to vote for Harris. I’m skeptical of this style of questions, because it elides which issues are most important to voters, and you get a lot of issues (like climate) cited as reasons to vote for a candidate when they don’t poll as a high priority to voters.
It looks like the $$$$ issues were the big drivers this year, and that voters firmly believed Trump was the candidate who would fix the economy, whatever that means. We’ll see how that goes for them.
Two different pieces on “Deliverism”
One meta point- as I see it, the dividing line between “popularism” and “deliverism” is the idea that under “popularism” you should do popular stuff, whether or not you think it’s inherently good policy, but under “deliverism” you should do good policy and assume it’ll become popular. I prefer the popularism framework because, as this election demonstrates, voters have idiosyncratic preferences, particularly around the economy, and you can’t always align “good policy” with “what people want”. Obviously helping people is the point, but if they hate what you’re doing, you’re not getting anywhere.
Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-democrats-big-and-failed-bet/
If you haven’t purchased The Hollow Parties you should, it’s great.
The recommendations here are straight out of their book- they say that the Democratic effort to deliver on policy couldn't make up for the decline of civic infrastructure, the transformation of parties to organizations that have little involvement with voters between elections, the decline of union halls and party headquarters, etc. And they call for a renewal of these things, a de-hollowing of the parties. I agree with their diagnosis, but I’m not totally sold that the de-hollowing (thickening? refilling?) is actually possible.
They highlight uniform swing and class dealignment as big issues, which I agree with. The class dealignment in particular, where Democrats are becoming increasingly the party of college educated voters, has been brutal to our self image. Plus, since it crosses ethnicity lines, it compounds our problems with voters of color.
The point I really love from this piece is that Trump’s GOP is functionally a big tent party. By forcing Republicans to embrace his weird, self interested, quasi-populist brand, he’s expanded their appeal across the electorate and made them tolerate more heterodoxy.
Sam Stein
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/why-deliverism-didnt-deliver-for
The “deliverism” arguments are all essentially the same question: Biden’s admin did a ton of theoretically-popular things, why wasn’t that enough? This piece posits that it wasn’t so much what the party did, but what it failed to do.
Ron Klain thinks we delivered things that were more “remote”- bridges, clean energy, chip fabrication, instead of closer to home issues like help with childcare and a sense of security. I don’t agree with this, especially the implicit claim that we would have done enough to make voters happy if it wasn’t for Manchin killing the care provisions of BBB. There’s not good evidence, in my opinion, that these “care” issues were meaningful to voters, and if they caused more inflation, we might have been worse off. Also the care provisions in BBB were a real failure of the Groups to prioritize and take smaller wins that could actually be implemented, and I don’t think that’s on Manchin.
There’s tension in this piece between the idea of “failure to explain”, i.e. that Democrats did enough but didn’t market it to voters well, and the idea that our “popular” policies may have not actually been very popular with voters in reality. In particular, one side of this argument explains declines with Teamsters as “failure to explain” which doesn’t seem right- we did deliver really big for them, it was highly public, their membership moved sharply against us, Sean O’Brien spoke at the RNC. It doesn’t seem like delivering is enough.
Eric Levitz on the Turnout Myth
https://www.vox.com/politics/387155/kamala-harris-2024-election-democratic-turnout-swing-voters
This is a frankly better version of my anti-turnout-myth take. He addresses the idea that “mobilizing their base” is what Democrats need to do to win, and the theory that driving up turnout among the base is the key to elections.
I’m not at all sold on a turnout solution to our electoral problems. Harris did receive fewer votes than Biden, but she got more in swing states, and aggregate turnout stayed high. It looks like turnout didn’t collapse anywhere it mattered, and Harris getting fewer votes than Biden is easily explained by vote switching. Swing voters are in fact real, we can see them in surveys, and we’re gonna need to win them back to have a path forward.
One thing I like about this piece is making explicit that a failure to grapple with what really happened- we lost voters to Trump- is going to set us up for repeated failure. As he says, “It is Democrats with more heterodox views — those who are progressive on some issues and moderate or conservative on others — that the party is most at risk of losing to either Republicans or the living room couch.” I agree, and I think that embracing heterodox moderation is our path forward.
Where I’m At
Democrats lost ground with voters without college degrees, and especially with Latino voters
This is probably related to a sense that Trump was better for the economy, and a preference for that economic focus over the social issues championed by Democrats
Turnout wasn’t down in states where it mattered, but it slid in deeply Democratic states
Simply doing good policies and hoping voters would reward that wasn’t enough
Good policy isn’t always popular, and voters HATE inflation
The current GOP functions as a big tent party, and Democrats with heterodox views are at greatest risk of swinging Republican unless we expand our tent
I’m going to keep reading, and I’m currently playing around with county level results to try and make more interesting conclusions fall out. More on that later. If you see more good analysis, feel free to DM it to me on twitter!
