It Matters That the Extremely Close 2024 US Election Results Were Not Due to "the Economy"
Three hundred sixty-four days ago was Election Day 2024. The polls going into the final weeks had been tight, but Donald Trump's increasingly erratic and outright weird behavior had led some of his top campaign advisors to start leaking stories -- clearly in anticipation of a bad outcome for their side -- in which they were blaming each other for campaign blunders. It is difficult to remember now, but Kamala Harris had meanwhile pulled together on short notice what looked very much like a winning, disciplined campaign.
For people like me, this all merely meant that the agony of the 2020 post-election period was about to play out again -- but worse. To my mind, the only thing that looked like a certainty was that Trump would be back in the White House on January 20, 2025, no matter what happened at the polls on and before November 5, 2024. When the results turned out to show a surprising bare-minimum win for Trump, that was in its way good news, simply because it meant that his reign of terror would at least begin without violence or social breakdown. (There would be plenty of time for that later.)
It was not at all surprising that Trump and the entire Republican Party would describe his very narrow victory as a landslide and thus a mandate. Of course they did. But it is just as true today as it was when the final votes were ultimately announced last year: Trump's 49.80 percent of the popular vote gave him a 1.48 percent winning margin, barely better than the four tightest presidential elections from 1892 onward -- JFK '60 and Nixon '68, plus non-majority wins for George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump himself '16 -- being less brag-worthy. In the Electoral College, Trump's outcome was the seventh worst out of 34 elections in that time period.
Moreover, Democrats managed to lose only three Senate seats on a map that had seven Democrats (and zero Republicans) in precarious positions, and they even picked up a House seat to reduce the Republicans' tiny majority there. In fact, "in 2024, the House majority was decided by just 7,309 votes across three districts ... out of 148 million votes cast nationwide," which mirrored the fact that if "114,884 working-class Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania voters [were] to shift from Trump to Harris, the Democrat would have prevailed." And I am deliberately not bringing up Republicans' massive voter suppression efforts.
Reminding ourselves of these facts is in some sense cold comfort, of course, because the new regime has been a steroid-fueled version of Republicans' longstanding pattern of using power to its fullest extent -- and then some -- even when they barely win. "But it was close" is not relevant in this context, because there is every reason to believe that there will no longer be real elections in the US for the foreseeable future.
The narrow outcomes in 2024 are, however, relevant to people who are trying to draw lessons for the future from those elections. That is, for people who are hoping that future elections will be run fairly enough to allow Democrats to have a chance to win, an accurate post mortem matters.
Unfortunately, in the year since last year's presidential election was called in favor of Trump, too many Democrats and media types have mistakenly described the election results as "definitive" or "resounding" or something along those lines. They have then compounded their error by saying that the election was all about economic issues: inflation, jobs, or whatever. Even the very left-leaning New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, in the midst of an excellent piece last month debunking the "mandate" claims from Trump, wrote this:
I should say there is one other view of the 2024 presidential election. In this vision, the election wasn’t a decisive win for Trump or an affirmation of the MAGA movement but a narrow, contingent victory for a former incumbent who was seen by a crucial part of the public as the path back to lower prices and a cheaper cost of living.
But Bouie simply skips over the more obvious explanations: racism and sexism. There was an extremely revealing 2024 exit poll that has unfortunately disappeared from the internet, but a lot of the information in that poll can be found in a column by Juan Williams, the resident non-MAGA analyst on Fox News. In "Latino men just didn’t want a woman president," Williams wrote this: "No, it wasn’t 'the Economy, stupid.' Speaking as a Black man born into a Spanish-speaking family, let me tell you what last week’s election was really about. It was about millions of men — many with my Latino immigrant background, some with my skin color — who don’t want any woman, especially a woman of color, in the White House."
Williams added that "Trump won 55 percent of Latino men nationally [and] 46 percent of all Latino voters, a 14 percent jump over his support against President Biden in 2020. ... And the key was his success with Latino men. Trump’s support from Latino men jumped by nearly 20 percentage points, from 36 percent in 2020 when he ran against Biden, a white man." He pointedly added this: "Initially, alarm over the male vote focused on the possibility that Harris was losing support from Black men. But when the votes were cast, Black men gave Harris the same level of support they had given Biden in 2020."
Williams is qualified to speak about particular racial and ethnic issues in a way that I clearly am not, so although I was interested in his explanations in the column for the massive shift toward Trump among male Latino voters, I cannot add to (or argue against) them. But the point is that the change from 2020 to 2024 was a very specific phenomenon. Only one identifiable group's change in voting decisions explains the change between elections, and it is not "minorities" or whatever flattening terminology one wants to use. The change in the Latino vote (meaningfully but not hugely among women, massively among men) alone explains the difference in the last two presidential elections.
Again, I have no authority whatever that would allow me to evaluate Williams's cultural explanations. Even people who could argue with the reasons that he outlines, however, are still left to explain the simple numerical fact that Harris would have won without this one decisive difference.
Why does that matter? Bouie claimed that "former incumbent who was seen by a crucial part of the public as the path back to lower prices and a cheaper cost of living." That is a rather difficult story to tell, however, when no other voting group changed its votes in 2024 by enough to change the outcome (and some even mildly shifted toward Harris from Biden's 2020 totals). By that theory, Black voters were less motivated to find a candidate who could bring back a cheaper cost of living. For that matter, some number of Latina voters did not move to Trump, even though they presumably would have liked to pay lower prices for consumer goods, too.
To be very, very clear, I am not endorsing any explanation for the differences that we saw in how demographic groups shifted or did not shift to Trump. I am saying, however, that the economic explanations that have become the mainstay of popular commentary over the last twelve months -- which, again, we hear from people across the political spectrum -- simply do not cut it. Williams might be partly or completely wrong, but at least his explanation accomplishes what such an explanation needs to accomplish by matching up with the evidence.
I suppose that it is possible that Democrats who are busily trying to find an economic plan to "win back the working class" (the White, male one, evidently) could yet find a way to do so. But can they convince people who would otherwise not want to vote for Democrats (for non-economic reasons) to return to their previous political home? "You hate us for what you call 'woke stuff,' but what if we could convince you that we could do what Trump only promised regarding the economy?"
Again, maybe there is something there. And it is certainly better than the move by some Democrats to performatively abandon people in the Democratic coalition who most need a voice. Even so, the Democrats' economic message has always been coherent and relatively pro-middle class, whereas Trump's -- and, we should not forget, the Republicans' long before Trump came along -- is about magical thinking and making the rich richer. How much more clear and persuasive must non-Republicans be?
If the potential political gains that could flow from economy-driven strategies are limited at best, what is the alternative? There are two clear possibilities: (1) Try to actually change hearts and minds, that is, to find people who might be winnable on non-economic moral grounds (which could well happen after, say, seeing children being zip-tied in Trump's anti-immigration raids); and (2) Expand the playing field, bringing in people who are allies but who have not yet voted. Doing that, however, almost certainly requires that Democrats not pander to non-winnable Trump voters, because doing so will take the wind out of the sails of potential new voters.
The Republicans very much understand this, which is why they have spent so much time setting themselves up as the party of permanent minority rule. They have made clear that they understand how unpopular they are, and they have figured how to make none of that matter. If Democrats want to have a political future -- assuming that there even is a political future for anyone but Trumpists in the United States -- it matters that they stop buying into the confused explanations of what happened in 2024.
The election of 2024 was not a strong victory for Trump, and it was not "decided by kitchen-table issues." Acting as if either or both of those fictions are facts all but guarantees that the Democrats will waste time and misdirect their energy. They have far too little of both.
- Neil H. Buchanan