The Left's Conventional Wisdom about Last Year's Election Results Is Still Wrong, No Matter How Much They Repeat It
With two weeks of holiday disruptions (and, one hopes, loads of joy and love) ahead of us, I expect this to be my last new Dorf on Law column of 2025. I have decided to use this space to return to a topic that I discussed in two columns last month: "It Matters That the Extremely Close 2024 US Election Results Were Not Due to 'the Economy'" (November 4), and "'Affordability Issues': Did Democrats Land on a Good Strategy for a Bad Reason?" (November 7).
Why go back to what is in some ways the oldest of old news, with possibly nothing good to come from brooding over the whole mess yet again? After all, no matter how it happened, Donald Trump ended up back in the Oval Office, and we are where we are today. And "where we are" includes, for me, having only minutes ago received a "Here's to healthy holidays" email from Medicare, signed by ... Dr. Oz!! Notably, he did not say Merry Christmas, so I guess the War on Christmas is now coming from inside the house. But I digress -- and depress.
In any event, as I wrote in my November 4 piece, the 2024 presidential race was a ludicrously close election, anything but a landslide and with no "mandate" for Trump. The problem is that Democrats and other non-Republicans seem to have landed on a story about why Kamala Harris lost last November that is completely at odds with (or at least unsupported by) the evidence. It was not "the economy" or "groceries" (as Trump weirdly put it: "I started using the word. The groceries."). The exit polling shows clearly that different demographic groups broke in starkly different ways in 2024 compared to 2020, and no one has offered an argument as to why economic angst would cause voting patterns to diverge based on demographics.
In addition to the exit polling that I analyzed in those November columns, the Roper Center provides some very useful breakdowns of voting in presidential elections, including 2016, 2020, and 2024. Here are the numbers for African-American voters in the last three elections: Clinton 89% over Trump 8%, Biden 87% over Trump 12%, Harris 86% over Trump 13%. The vaunted "Trump made inroads with Black voters" thing happened (if it happened at all) in an election that Trump lost badly to Biden, whereas the change in the following election was rounding error (for a group that is only one-eighth of the electorate), so "Blacks swung to Trump" was not a thing in 2024. Did Black voters not feel angsty about the economy? Why did they not change their votes in any significant numbers?
What about White voters (who were 71 percent of all voters in 2024)? Their Dem-vs-Trump numbers were 37-57 in 2016, 41-58 in 2020, and 42-57 in 2024. I guess White voters liked higher grocery prices? What about Asian voters? 65-27, 61-34, 55-40. But again, this is an even smaller electorate than Black voters, constituting only 3 percent of all voters in 2024, making the somewhat sizable swings toward Trump essentially meaningless in determining the outcome.
But what about what Roper calls Hispanic voters (and I will call Latinos)? 66-28 in 2016, 65-32 in 2020, and 51-46 in 2024. Even with only 11 percent of all voters, that is a massive shift that fully explains what was meaningfully different in 2024. Trump won because of Latino voters, and as I noted in my November columns, other data show that the movement toward trump by Latinas was non-negligible but not all that large, whereas the huge shift to Trump by Latino men was the whole ballgame. As an aside, it continues to be the case that the other big reason for Harris's loss was people who stayed home (by the millions), but that issue is not what I want to take on here.
As I wrote on November 7:
[Paul] Krugman ... is so sold on the idea that that election was all about the economy that he offers the completely unsupported (and almost certainly unsupportable) claim that Latino voters "swung to Trump believing that he would deliver prosperity."
If it were about feeling pinched in the pocketbook, why would it be only Latinos who shifted to Trump while no one else did? For that matter, why would Latinas not have "believ[ed] that he would deliver prosperity" as strongly as their male counterparts supposedly did? Is there some unknown social science research showing that Latino men are super-responsive to economic stress, that Latinas are kinda-sorta responsive to economic stress, and no one else cares about economic stress enough to change their votes?
Yet here is Krugman again two weeks ago:
And that’s why Donald Trump won the 2024 election. No, Democrats didn’t lose because they use big words, or advocate for open borders, or talk too much about trans rights. None of those things actually happened to any significant degree, regardless of what Trump or the self-defeating wing of the Democratic Party says. They lost because Americans were angry about higher prices and not mollified by the fact that most people’s wages had risen more than overall consumer prices.
To be clear, Krugman is doing some of his best writing these days on a whole range of topics, but he is absolutely not making an evidence- or logic-based argument about why Trump won. And unfortunately, he is not alone among people with relatively high profiles on the left. Here is E.J. Dionne, one of the most interesting (and usually persuasive) mainstream liberal columnists, in a column less than a week ago: "A significant share of the voters who backed Mr. Trump have decided that he has largely ignored the primary issue that pushed them his way, the cost of living."
Note that Dionne actually says something that, if backed up by evidence, would matter enormously. That is, he asserts that the cost of living pushed people Trump's way. Again, however, the problem is that no one has offered a theory as to why the cost of living pushed some people but not others Trump's way. Everyone presumably cares about the cost of living (except the super rich, who are overwhelmingly Republicans anyway), so why did every demographic group not jump toward Trump in roughly equal proportion?
And here is Seth Meyers in his "A Closer Look" monologue a week ago:
(6:34 mark): "Voters gave Donald Trump a second term because they were mad about the economy, and they were hoping he would fix it, despite the fact that last time he was in office, he broke it."
(7:01 mark): "The reason voters gave Trump another shot is because he made it clear he wouldn't just bring prices down, he would do it ASAP."
(15:33 mark): "So why is Trump calling the central issue of American political life -- the thing that got him elected, and the number one things voters say they care about -- a hoax?"
(16:41 mark): "Voters gave Trump a second term because they believed him when he said he'd bring down prices, and now every poll suggests they regret it."
That is a lot of confidence in a story that exists in people's imaginations but not in reality.
What is the sole piece of evidence that various purveyors of this conventional wisdom rely on when they make the claim that the economy decided the 2024 election? Apparently, a lot of Trump voters told pollsters that they were motivated by the economy. Well, sure, if we are going to be completely gullible about this, why not? Even in 2024, most people knew not to say, "I'd never vote for the non-White lady, no matter what." What is a nice cover story? The economy. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Again, however, even if one is not as cynical about that kind of polling as I am, there is no way to look at the evidence that is on offer and say, as Krugman did, that the economy is why Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
And as long as I am ending the year on a grumpy note, I will add that Krugman and others are busily saying that Trump is now committing the same error that Biden supposedly committed by telling people that they should not be upset about the economy. Krugman does make clear that Biden had actual good news to which he could point, whereas Trump is simply making things up, but the supposed sin is that politicians should never tell people how to feel.
Allow me to suggest that this is utter nonsense. Consider an alternative timeline in which Biden had said, "Gee, there are a lot of good things happening with the economy, and the US is doing much better than the rest of the world, but I dare not tell people any of that for fear that I'll be accused of telling them how to feel." Every political commentator and their cat would be saying, "Sheesh, what kind of politician has very good economic news to share but doesn't share it? This is malpractice, and he deserves to be unpopular."
I am no fan of Biden, and perhaps it is true that he delivered good economic news in the wrong tone, or something. If he said, "Hey stupidheads, yeah you, Jack! The economy is great, so you should love me, ya chumps," then that would be bad. If he had said, "I know that we still have a lot more work to do, but let's be happy about the genuine progress that we're making as a country as we try to put the bad days behind us," then that would be good. In any case, the idea that Biden was foolish even to say that there was good news is the worst kind of insider-ish non-analysis, blaming a losing party for doing whatever it did before losing.
If those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, what can we say about those who sort of remember the past but have no idea how to interpret what happened? Maybe emphasizing "the economy" truly is the way back to power for Democrats. There is no reason that this has to be symmetric, so they could have lost on bigotry but at some point win on kitchen-table issues.
Maybe. But it would be helpful if people would stop saying that Trump won because millions of kindhearted Americans could not help but vote for the guy whose answer to high prices was to put onerous taxes on imports. Ignoring bigotry when discussing these things in public might or might not be a necessary nicety, but as a matter of understanding politics in the US, it is not helpful.
I wish everyone peace and a much better world in 2026.
- Neil H. Buchanan