Excellent, am going to read twice this one, "Why Harris Lost (The Crosstabs Edition)". (1) Have a map-lover in the house who thinks the eye-catching fuzziness is due to overlay of one map over another. The final Deep red is more pro-Trump and the final Deep blue is more pro-Harris. (2) Article gets at nuances. Does it boil down to envy and jealousy? In their hearts, too many men, and even a few women, might be envious of women who achieve things, despite adversity. They might be jealous of women who are loved, by others, for doing the right thing.
Might? I would venture ARE envious, and jealous that a black/brown woman could achieve so much despite the road blocks THEY put in place for her. THAT could NOT stand. This is why taking DEI down was a first priority of the new Administration with their see through excuse of "merit only.". Harris was everything Trump wasn't: honest, hardworking, smart, compassionate, and devoted to her country.
On the ground voters I talk to agree that Harris won because too many men and some of their wives couldn’t stomach having a woman as the most powerful person in the world. These men were never going to tell the truth on that decision so the media’s focus on inflation/economy became a convenient excuse for a vote for the incompetent, know-nothing, indecent Trump!
Agreed.....there are more female misogynists than people realize. What was very disturbing to realize from 2024 is just how many women are likely allowing their husbands/partners to decide their vote--or even cast it (via absentee ballot). Talk about election fraud. How many men are getting to cast two votes? I would wager that millions are.
This is totally in line with the view that one vote per household (read: male) is desirable.
Combine this with the fact that over 40% of registered voters did not bother to exercise their right (and responsibility) to vote in 2024, and we are in the frightening mess we are today.
I have issues with this analysis. Harris "lost" by fewer votes than the number of registered voters denied access to voting or who had their votes disallowed through the many voter suppression measures enacted since 2020 in many states. Please see https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DCIM-DEC2023-03.pdf. I have not been able to locate the one analysis I have seen that provides the precise number. Shame on the Democrats for their hand-wringing about "what Harris did wrong" and shame on the Right for the gloating and talk of a "mandate".
“Biden won in 2020 because COVID was destroying the economy (and the rest of our lives). Trump won in 2024 because voters were upset about the persistent inflation resulting from COVID and were nostalgic for Trump’s pre-COVID economy and suckered by his “businessman” mythology. Trump was further helped by Biden being too compromised by age to be an effective communicator for his own policies.”
They are breath-taking because CDC uses the now-common gag rules on employees speaking to reporters to fend off much reporting. If there had been reporters there, or talking to people freely, some of the weaknesses could well have been fixed prior to Covid. Then, a less severe pandemic could have meant we would be in a very different place politically right now. A former CDC media relations head told us about the system being political. https://www.quillmag.com/2022/09/22/former-media-relations-head-restrictions-tightened-on-cdc-reporting-long-before-the-pandemic/
The problem with the demographic analysis of who voted for Trump and Harris is that it doesn’t explain why people voted as they did. If a young white male and older Black woman both voted for Trump because of egg prices, their different demographic profiles are beside the point. My theory is that people didn’t vote for a narcissistic sociopath but rather a bunch of narrow cohorts voted for Trump because he was on their side on the single issue they cared most about: abortion, egg prices, trans issues, lower taxes, less regulation, immigration, owning the libs, anti-Democratic party, libertarianism, God anointed him (surviving the assassination attempt), not a Black candidate, not a woman, not a Black woman, not from California—the list goes on and on and cumulatively gets to 49% when you have a con man overseeing it and blending this toxic brew. Trump is proving to the 6+ million people who voted for Biden and not Harris that staying home or voting for Trump was not the answer. There are about 90 million eligible voters who didn’t vote. If they don’t like what they’re seeing, the GOP is toast. And remember, Dems actually picked up a seat in the House and won four Senate seats in swing states Trump won. Harris got more votes than Biden in four swing states but Trump got a lot more than he did in 2020. Bottom line for me is that Democrats actually did well and Trump is a unicorn.
Agree with all of this column except one claim: “Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics.”
I think demographics still matter, just not in the way they used to. The electorate is no longer polarized on race and instead is cleaving along educational lines, as well as how “politically engaged” one is. The new demographic indicators seem to favor the R’s assuming they can turn out their new coalition in the cycles ahead. Big TBD there.
Wow. We live in very, very different worlds. Where I live, the electorate is very polarized on race. 92% of black women voting for Harris was not a fluke.
Race still matters but the data suggest it matters less than it used to. The stronger predictors of vote choice now are class/education. Race is still predictive but not as strongly as a couple cycles ago.
But the microeconomics are not equally good across the economy. Fantastic for upper income and wealthy households, but middle class can't buy or rent a home? Can't afford college? Those are very significant problems.
Isn't it weird then that voters so motivated by housing would vote against the candidate proposing a $10,000 first-time home buyers tax credit in favor of the candidate proposing ... literally nothing?
I don't fault her, and you are right, running against Trump should've been a slam dunk win for her. I'm just saying her staff could have worked on that aspect so she could adequately project her true strength. I'm just afraid it turned voters, especially men, off - unjustifiably, I admit.
I wonder if the racists who were also misogynists could be polled and if that would have had generated meaningful data set. Even if we could identify that group, is there a message that could work?
from Sarah: Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics.
Fact check True. Dems getting the economics right is neccessary but insufficient.
The Dems continue to drift left and continue to become less and less popular. On economics, Dems do not have an economic policy that makes any sense to me. As far as I can tell they have no idea of any sort for the supply side of the economic equation. It is all demand side stimulus which was the problem in the Biden Admin. All demand side stimulus, zero supply side. This was not always the case. I was not fan of Bill Clintons and lord knows the man has many personal failings. But he left office with his polices quite popular. And what were those? He championed NAFTA which was a significant supply side stimulus. In addition, Clinton did other moderate things like signed welfare reform, signed a border-enforcement-focused immigration bill and of course negotiated a balanced budget agreement with Newt flipping Gingrich. He led American forces in Bosnia and took military action against Sadam Hussein. All of that and he Sister Souljaed the extreme Left of his Party. That is what a centrist President looks like.
Sure, he got lucky with cheap oil prices (supply side stimulus) and Y2K which resulted in a ton of B-to-B business spending which goosed the economy. Still, can you imagine a Democrat today doing any of what Clinton did?
Biden did the opposite of Clinton. He did not champion free trade, was not fiscally responsible, had a reckless border policy until the last 6 months of his administration, did not Sister Souljah the far Left on its most radial cultural positions including the false accusations and ahistorical comments about Israel which only activated anti Jewish sentiment among his base. It was not just Biden of course. Dems from Senator Van Holland to the pro-Hamas protestors all made the false claims about Israel killing Palestinians indiscriminately and committed war crimes which was never true (and which has again and again been disproven). If ever there needed to be a Sister Souljah moment for Biden, it was on Israel. Biden bugged out of Afghanistan against the advice of his military generals and irresponsibly in my view. Meanwhile Democratic governance in progressive states like CA and OR is so bad, Ezra Klein was prompted to write a book about it. In Oregon, it has been continues Democratic rule since the mid 1990’s and in that time the schools are an embarrassment, taxes keep going up for worse and worse outcomes, the business climate has collapsed and public safety was compromised until we elected a moderate DA. Progressive polices don’t work.
It seems to me a mistake to look past the far progressive drift of the Democratic Party and why that drift has made it so unpopular and to therefore, call out the Progressive wing of the Dem Party. If its unpopularity and loss to the Trumpy Repubs is not a wake up call, I don’t know what will be.
What the hell are you taking about? Literally, what the hell are you talking about? Biden was more pro- free trade than Trump. The problem with your "supply side" argument is that the pandemic nuked the supply chain. Even with that, though, Biden used defense spending to get supplies moving from shipyards and factories to retailers. Much of Biden's stimulus was B-to-B. And the family tax credits was money that went directly into family spending.
Look, the economy under Biden was objectively good The inflation wasn't the result of the stimulus. It was the result of a pandemic. Things like that happen, and when they do, it's expensive. The stock market was way up; people were taking vacations at record rates; he addressed inflation better than just about every other First World country.
And for all of your comparisons to Clinton, Bill wasn't able to "smooth the landing" during the 2000 dot com bust. Biden achieved the unicorn– the smooth landing that many economists thought wasn't possible.
On places like Oregon and California, they have their problems, but you and I both would prefer living in either state to living in Mississippi or Alabama.
In all seriousness, the problem wasn't the economy. It wasn't Biden's age. Or Kamala's comments on trans people. Americans voted for Trump b/c they find politics boring. They found Biden boring. They wanted reality TV instead of actual reality.
And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn’t reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system.
Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be
As the Grateful Dead sings: you ain't gonna learn what do you don't want to know
Sarah - nice summary of the data, and I like the conclusion that voters in 2020 chose Biden because they'd lost faith in DJT and the Rs; then chose DJT in 2024 because they'd lost faith in Ds.
For 2028 if DJT has torched the economy, and if Ds cannot offer a believable promise, voters will have no place to turn. One possibility is that they stay home.
A scarier possibility is they try something else. In other countries "something else" has meant pitchforks and a strongman.
Harris lost due to fifty years of GOP promulgation of hatred for liberals in pursuit of permanent fascist power. Bill Kristol helped make Trump possible. Shame to your grave, Bill
"Republicans were not able to boost their margins in the swing states in 2024 as much as they did nationally,..."
I think this is easily explained. Kamala Harris was unliked and unpopular, as she has been since her primary campaign in 2019. Prior to July 2024, she was even more unpopular than Joe Biden. In swing states, where every voter knows that their vote is crucial to the outcome of the election, a lot of Democrats and Indies who don't like her, held their noses and voted for her anyway. In red and blue states where the outcome was pre-ordained, these voters simply stayed home, thereby increasing Trump's margins. If you were a red state Democrat who's vote was irrelevant in say, South Carolina, and you didn't like Kamala Harris, why would you bother to turn out and vote for her? Likewise, if you were a blue state Democrat in New Jersey who thought Harris was incompetent. She was going to win your state, anyway, so why put your fingerprints on it? (BTW, this same thought process is what doomed Hillary Clinton in 2016 - she was so disliked, even among Democrats, that voters in the blue-wall states who thought she'd win without them, stayed home, rather than vote for her).
To me, this is the simple explanation for why Trump won the popular vote, gained ground nearly everywhere, but barely won the swing states, while the GOP lost every swing state Senate race except for Pennsylvania, and only won the House by 3 votes.
I think a better explanation is that Kamala had 100 days. (And if you think she was incompetent, she did a HELL of a job in 100 days, uniting the party, raising money, and turning out the vote.) But her opponent had an 8 year head start.
So, if you're Kamala, your best bet is to run triage. Don't put a lot of resources into CA– you're winning there anyway. Same with FL– you're losing there, anyway. Focus on the handful of swing states you need to win. Maybe add in a couple more like NC just to make Trump spend resources in a state he can't afford to lose.
This explains why did better in swing states than the rest of the country– running a 100-day campaign, she basically mailed the rest of the country in (she had to). It also explains why people like Gallego ran ahead of her– they had more time to build a brand and a coalition.
That is certainly a viable analysis. We'll probably never know which of us is right.
That said, I do think Kamala is basically incompetent, and that she sucks at politics. This was evidenced during her 2019 campaign and unpopular vice presidency. That said, given the circumstances, I admit she was a part of a pretty damn good campaign, run by the Biden experts/team that won in 2020. They might have beaten Trump again, had they had a decent candidate and more time. She played her part well. She did what she was told. Kept her head down at first, stayed out of the spotlight, and let the "vibe" do its thing. The party was just so relieved to have a candidate that could campaign, her numbers couldn't help but improve. She didn't do a press conference for weeks after she was nominated. They protected her. In commercials, she ran as a moderate, never mentioning any of the woke positions she had taken in 2019. She gave a decent convention speech, and she beat the hell out of Trump in the debate (a really low-bar accomplishment, but it's something).
But, she couldn't hide forever, and she couldn't run against herself (and her 2019 positions). In the end, the vibe receded, and she was left with the public perception of herself from her "failed" vice presidency. Fair of not, her vice presidency was massacred in the media for four years. By November, she was leaking oil badly from all cylinders. Her polls were deteriorating, and that is when the unthinkable of losing the popular vote began to become a reality. Her campaign has since admitted that they never saw internal polling suggesting she could win. Had she had more time, I think she would have lost worse.
Well, one woman was a black woman who was not very good at politics, and who was defined as an "incompetent, inarticulate DEI hire", and the other was Hillary Clinton. So, I'm not sure your knee-jerk general misogyny argument holds water on those two.
And, I didn't say it was all Democrats in red/blue states, just enough of them to increase Trump's margins overall. You did not fall into that category, even though your vote didn't matter in the end.
Elect more women. And if white boys are threatened by intelligent, accomplished and educated women, even better.
And, spent zero time trying to accommodate the views of Republicans who spent decades laying the groundwork that allowed trump to take over their party. Let them clean up their own mess but I suspect the agenda trump is implementing right now makes many Republicans very happy.
Excellent, am going to read twice this one, "Why Harris Lost (The Crosstabs Edition)". (1) Have a map-lover in the house who thinks the eye-catching fuzziness is due to overlay of one map over another. The final Deep red is more pro-Trump and the final Deep blue is more pro-Harris. (2) Article gets at nuances. Does it boil down to envy and jealousy? In their hearts, too many men, and even a few women, might be envious of women who achieve things, despite adversity. They might be jealous of women who are loved, by others, for doing the right thing.
Might? I would venture ARE envious, and jealous that a black/brown woman could achieve so much despite the road blocks THEY put in place for her. THAT could NOT stand. This is why taking DEI down was a first priority of the new Administration with their see through excuse of "merit only.". Harris was everything Trump wasn't: honest, hardworking, smart, compassionate, and devoted to her country.
On the ground voters I talk to agree that Harris won because too many men and some of their wives couldn’t stomach having a woman as the most powerful person in the world. These men were never going to tell the truth on that decision so the media’s focus on inflation/economy became a convenient excuse for a vote for the incompetent, know-nothing, indecent Trump!
Agreed.....there are more female misogynists than people realize. What was very disturbing to realize from 2024 is just how many women are likely allowing their husbands/partners to decide their vote--or even cast it (via absentee ballot). Talk about election fraud. How many men are getting to cast two votes? I would wager that millions are.
This is totally in line with the view that one vote per household (read: male) is desirable.
Combine this with the fact that over 40% of registered voters did not bother to exercise their right (and responsibility) to vote in 2024, and we are in the frightening mess we are today.
I have issues with this analysis. Harris "lost" by fewer votes than the number of registered voters denied access to voting or who had their votes disallowed through the many voter suppression measures enacted since 2020 in many states. Please see https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/DCIM-DEC2023-03.pdf. I have not been able to locate the one analysis I have seen that provides the precise number. Shame on the Democrats for their hand-wringing about "what Harris did wrong" and shame on the Right for the gloating and talk of a "mandate".
Hey, team? The Democrats destiny wasn't decided by the economy in 2024.
You're telling me Vance is an opportunistic hypocrite who doesn't actually believe in his performative working class schtick? Shocking revelation.
These comments are breath-taking:
“Biden won in 2020 because COVID was destroying the economy (and the rest of our lives). Trump won in 2024 because voters were upset about the persistent inflation resulting from COVID and were nostalgic for Trump’s pre-COVID economy and suckered by his “businessman” mythology. Trump was further helped by Biden being too compromised by age to be an effective communicator for his own policies.”
They are breath-taking because CDC uses the now-common gag rules on employees speaking to reporters to fend off much reporting. If there had been reporters there, or talking to people freely, some of the weaknesses could well have been fixed prior to Covid. Then, a less severe pandemic could have meant we would be in a very different place politically right now. A former CDC media relations head told us about the system being political. https://www.quillmag.com/2022/09/22/former-media-relations-head-restrictions-tightened-on-cdc-reporting-long-before-the-pandemic/
The problem with the demographic analysis of who voted for Trump and Harris is that it doesn’t explain why people voted as they did. If a young white male and older Black woman both voted for Trump because of egg prices, their different demographic profiles are beside the point. My theory is that people didn’t vote for a narcissistic sociopath but rather a bunch of narrow cohorts voted for Trump because he was on their side on the single issue they cared most about: abortion, egg prices, trans issues, lower taxes, less regulation, immigration, owning the libs, anti-Democratic party, libertarianism, God anointed him (surviving the assassination attempt), not a Black candidate, not a woman, not a Black woman, not from California—the list goes on and on and cumulatively gets to 49% when you have a con man overseeing it and blending this toxic brew. Trump is proving to the 6+ million people who voted for Biden and not Harris that staying home or voting for Trump was not the answer. There are about 90 million eligible voters who didn’t vote. If they don’t like what they’re seeing, the GOP is toast. And remember, Dems actually picked up a seat in the House and won four Senate seats in swing states Trump won. Harris got more votes than Biden in four swing states but Trump got a lot more than he did in 2020. Bottom line for me is that Democrats actually did well and Trump is a unicorn.
Agree with all of this column except one claim: “Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics.”
I think demographics still matter, just not in the way they used to. The electorate is no longer polarized on race and instead is cleaving along educational lines, as well as how “politically engaged” one is. The new demographic indicators seem to favor the R’s assuming they can turn out their new coalition in the cycles ahead. Big TBD there.
Wow. We live in very, very different worlds. Where I live, the electorate is very polarized on race. 92% of black women voting for Harris was not a fluke.
Race still matters but the data suggest it matters less than it used to. The stronger predictors of vote choice now are class/education. Race is still predictive but not as strongly as a couple cycles ago.
Great sentence by Sarah: Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics.
Bulls-eye.
A bull's eye on a garbage can maybe.
How many charts do you want me to post to show you that the economy was actually in historically good condition?
But the microeconomics are not equally good across the economy. Fantastic for upper income and wealthy households, but middle class can't buy or rent a home? Can't afford college? Those are very significant problems.
Isn't it weird then that voters so motivated by housing would vote against the candidate proposing a $10,000 first-time home buyers tax credit in favor of the candidate proposing ... literally nothing?
I don't fault her, and you are right, running against Trump should've been a slam dunk win for her. I'm just saying her staff could have worked on that aspect so she could adequately project her true strength. I'm just afraid it turned voters, especially men, off - unjustifiably, I admit.
I wonder if the racists who were also misogynists could be polled and if that would have had generated meaningful data set. Even if we could identify that group, is there a message that could work?
Like this idea, plus an interview with a family member who thinks the double hatred is wrong, to see why they are different
from Sarah: Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics.
Fact check True. Dems getting the economics right is neccessary but insufficient.
The Dems continue to drift left and continue to become less and less popular. On economics, Dems do not have an economic policy that makes any sense to me. As far as I can tell they have no idea of any sort for the supply side of the economic equation. It is all demand side stimulus which was the problem in the Biden Admin. All demand side stimulus, zero supply side. This was not always the case. I was not fan of Bill Clintons and lord knows the man has many personal failings. But he left office with his polices quite popular. And what were those? He championed NAFTA which was a significant supply side stimulus. In addition, Clinton did other moderate things like signed welfare reform, signed a border-enforcement-focused immigration bill and of course negotiated a balanced budget agreement with Newt flipping Gingrich. He led American forces in Bosnia and took military action against Sadam Hussein. All of that and he Sister Souljaed the extreme Left of his Party. That is what a centrist President looks like.
Sure, he got lucky with cheap oil prices (supply side stimulus) and Y2K which resulted in a ton of B-to-B business spending which goosed the economy. Still, can you imagine a Democrat today doing any of what Clinton did?
Biden did the opposite of Clinton. He did not champion free trade, was not fiscally responsible, had a reckless border policy until the last 6 months of his administration, did not Sister Souljah the far Left on its most radial cultural positions including the false accusations and ahistorical comments about Israel which only activated anti Jewish sentiment among his base. It was not just Biden of course. Dems from Senator Van Holland to the pro-Hamas protestors all made the false claims about Israel killing Palestinians indiscriminately and committed war crimes which was never true (and which has again and again been disproven). If ever there needed to be a Sister Souljah moment for Biden, it was on Israel. Biden bugged out of Afghanistan against the advice of his military generals and irresponsibly in my view. Meanwhile Democratic governance in progressive states like CA and OR is so bad, Ezra Klein was prompted to write a book about it. In Oregon, it has been continues Democratic rule since the mid 1990’s and in that time the schools are an embarrassment, taxes keep going up for worse and worse outcomes, the business climate has collapsed and public safety was compromised until we elected a moderate DA. Progressive polices don’t work.
It seems to me a mistake to look past the far progressive drift of the Democratic Party and why that drift has made it so unpopular and to therefore, call out the Progressive wing of the Dem Party. If its unpopularity and loss to the Trumpy Repubs is not a wake up call, I don’t know what will be.
What the hell are you taking about? Literally, what the hell are you talking about? Biden was more pro- free trade than Trump. The problem with your "supply side" argument is that the pandemic nuked the supply chain. Even with that, though, Biden used defense spending to get supplies moving from shipyards and factories to retailers. Much of Biden's stimulus was B-to-B. And the family tax credits was money that went directly into family spending.
Look, the economy under Biden was objectively good The inflation wasn't the result of the stimulus. It was the result of a pandemic. Things like that happen, and when they do, it's expensive. The stock market was way up; people were taking vacations at record rates; he addressed inflation better than just about every other First World country.
And for all of your comparisons to Clinton, Bill wasn't able to "smooth the landing" during the 2000 dot com bust. Biden achieved the unicorn– the smooth landing that many economists thought wasn't possible.
On places like Oregon and California, they have their problems, but you and I both would prefer living in either state to living in Mississippi or Alabama.
In all seriousness, the problem wasn't the economy. It wasn't Biden's age. Or Kamala's comments on trans people. Americans voted for Trump b/c they find politics boring. They found Biden boring. They wanted reality TV instead of actual reality.
I am not comparing Biden to Trump. I am comparing Biden to Bill Clinton on trade (and other issues). Biden was terrbile on trade and spending.
The American Rescuse Plan was a mistake. Just ask Larry Summers who predicted it.
Noah Smith:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-americans-can-cease-being-rich
From David Frum just today in The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/05/david-frum-show-trumps-national-security-disaster/682868/
And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn’t reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system.
Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be
As the Grateful Dead sings: you ain't gonna learn what do you don't want to know
"Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics."
I am confident that Todd Gitlin was trying to tell them just that 30 years ago in _Twilight of Common Dreams_.
Sarah - nice summary of the data, and I like the conclusion that voters in 2020 chose Biden because they'd lost faith in DJT and the Rs; then chose DJT in 2024 because they'd lost faith in Ds.
For 2028 if DJT has torched the economy, and if Ds cannot offer a believable promise, voters will have no place to turn. One possibility is that they stay home.
A scarier possibility is they try something else. In other countries "something else" has meant pitchforks and a strongman.
Harris lost due to fifty years of GOP promulgation of hatred for liberals in pursuit of permanent fascist power. Bill Kristol helped make Trump possible. Shame to your grave, Bill
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
"Republicans were not able to boost their margins in the swing states in 2024 as much as they did nationally,..."
I think this is easily explained. Kamala Harris was unliked and unpopular, as she has been since her primary campaign in 2019. Prior to July 2024, she was even more unpopular than Joe Biden. In swing states, where every voter knows that their vote is crucial to the outcome of the election, a lot of Democrats and Indies who don't like her, held their noses and voted for her anyway. In red and blue states where the outcome was pre-ordained, these voters simply stayed home, thereby increasing Trump's margins. If you were a red state Democrat who's vote was irrelevant in say, South Carolina, and you didn't like Kamala Harris, why would you bother to turn out and vote for her? Likewise, if you were a blue state Democrat in New Jersey who thought Harris was incompetent. She was going to win your state, anyway, so why put your fingerprints on it? (BTW, this same thought process is what doomed Hillary Clinton in 2016 - she was so disliked, even among Democrats, that voters in the blue-wall states who thought she'd win without them, stayed home, rather than vote for her).
To me, this is the simple explanation for why Trump won the popular vote, gained ground nearly everywhere, but barely won the swing states, while the GOP lost every swing state Senate race except for Pennsylvania, and only won the House by 3 votes.
I think a better explanation is that Kamala had 100 days. (And if you think she was incompetent, she did a HELL of a job in 100 days, uniting the party, raising money, and turning out the vote.) But her opponent had an 8 year head start.
So, if you're Kamala, your best bet is to run triage. Don't put a lot of resources into CA– you're winning there anyway. Same with FL– you're losing there, anyway. Focus on the handful of swing states you need to win. Maybe add in a couple more like NC just to make Trump spend resources in a state he can't afford to lose.
This explains why did better in swing states than the rest of the country– running a 100-day campaign, she basically mailed the rest of the country in (she had to). It also explains why people like Gallego ran ahead of her– they had more time to build a brand and a coalition.
That is certainly a viable analysis. We'll probably never know which of us is right.
That said, I do think Kamala is basically incompetent, and that she sucks at politics. This was evidenced during her 2019 campaign and unpopular vice presidency. That said, given the circumstances, I admit she was a part of a pretty damn good campaign, run by the Biden experts/team that won in 2020. They might have beaten Trump again, had they had a decent candidate and more time. She played her part well. She did what she was told. Kept her head down at first, stayed out of the spotlight, and let the "vibe" do its thing. The party was just so relieved to have a candidate that could campaign, her numbers couldn't help but improve. She didn't do a press conference for weeks after she was nominated. They protected her. In commercials, she ran as a moderate, never mentioning any of the woke positions she had taken in 2019. She gave a decent convention speech, and she beat the hell out of Trump in the debate (a really low-bar accomplishment, but it's something).
But, she couldn't hide forever, and she couldn't run against herself (and her 2019 positions). In the end, the vibe receded, and she was left with the public perception of herself from her "failed" vice presidency. Fair of not, her vice presidency was massacred in the media for four years. By November, she was leaking oil badly from all cylinders. Her polls were deteriorating, and that is when the unthinkable of losing the popular vote began to become a reality. Her campaign has since admitted that they never saw internal polling suggesting she could win. Had she had more time, I think she would have lost worse.
Think of it this way, if she’d been incompetent 2024 would’ve been a wipeout. 1984 plus Congress and a bunch of governorships.
Always interesting how the women are the ones who are disliked.
I live in Missouri -- no way in hell I was going to stay home in 2024. Your theory is very flawed.
Well, one woman was a black woman who was not very good at politics, and who was defined as an "incompetent, inarticulate DEI hire", and the other was Hillary Clinton. So, I'm not sure your knee-jerk general misogyny argument holds water on those two.
And, I didn't say it was all Democrats in red/blue states, just enough of them to increase Trump's margins overall. You did not fall into that category, even though your vote didn't matter in the end.
Only people who defined Harris that way was trump and the GOP.
Neither was incompetent, inarticulate or DEI. But they were women.
That was a problem. So, maybe the solution is to stop doing what you think was the root cause of your defeat?
Elect more women. And if white boys are threatened by intelligent, accomplished and educated women, even better.
And, spent zero time trying to accommodate the views of Republicans who spent decades laying the groundwork that allowed trump to take over their party. Let them clean up their own mess but I suspect the agenda trump is implementing right now makes many Republicans very happy.