Why Harris Lost (The Crosstabs Edition)

A lot of 2024 retrospectives have been based on vibes. Now we have some really good data. Here’s what it says.

Some tough news this morning: Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) has died at the age of 75. Shortly after his re-election last November, Connolly revealed he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer; last month, he announced he would not seek re-election next term. Our thoughts are with his family this morning. Happy Wednesday.

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(Composite / Photos: Shutterstock)

What the Catalist Data Tells Us

by Sarah Longwell

For those of us who love sifting through actual data when trying to make sense of seismic events—like, say, Donald Trump’s re-election—this week was invaluable. Democratic data firm Catalist came out with its report on the 2024 election, giving us the best set of numbers yet to understand what the hell really happened. Many of the big takeaways are in line with what we already knew: Kamala Harris lost because she struggled with younger and more diverse voters, while Trump overperformed with these groups. But in the troves of files, there was still a lot of interesting demographic data to parse.

Yes, Harris backslid the worst with male voters. Compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, she lost six points with men overall. She lost 12 points with Latino men, seven points with black men, and six points with Asian men.

But she also lost ground with some women voters—down seven points with Latina women, four points with Asian women, and one point with women overall compared to Biden in 2020.

Where Harris did well was among so-called “super voters”: people who have voted in all of the last four major national elections. She won 50 percent of them, a better showing than either Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.

By contrast, she underperformed with infrequent voters compared to Trump. This group skewed much more young and diverse.

Here’s how Amy Walter and Carrie Dann wrote it up in the Cook Political Report, which got the exclusive on the data: “Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections.” Trump got the electorate he wanted.

What should one make of all this? For Democrats looking for silver linings, there is this: Republicans were not able to boost their margins in the swing states in 2024 as much as they did nationally—meaning that in the states that actually matter, where all the ad spending and stumping happens, Democrats are in a stronger position than they are in the rest of the country. That’s something.

But of course, Trump still won those swing states. And he did so by scrambling the electoral landscape for both parties.

It used to be an article of faith that Dems reliably won young people and minority groups by extreme margins, while Republicans cleaned up with more established and white voters. The 2024 election was the starkest demonstration we’ve had yet that that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

As we’ve already begun to see in recent election cycles, including the special elections so far in 2025, Dems are more likely to thrive in off-year, low-turnout contests—previously favorable turf for Republicans. And it means the GOP could have a much stronger popular vote showing during presidential election years (though without Trump directly on the ballot this is TBD).

Ten years of Trump have, to some extent, reset our electoral coalitions—not to mention those coalitions’ policy preferences (Republicans favoring tariffs, price controls, and Russia—Reagan weeps!).

Having conducted hundreds of focus groups since 2018, I’ve become well-acquainted with the complex varietals of the American voter. Our rapidly shifting information landscape and cultural incohesion makes them harder to categorize for tidy political-science purposes.

I personally find terms like “far-left” and “far-right” or even the word “conservative” to be increasingly meaningless. And there are a fair number of things that used to be axiomatic about politics that no longer are. But one axiom of politics remains true: In the end, it comes down to how people feel about their futures and well-being.

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.

Which leaves both Democrats and Republicans in a tenuous position when it comes to winning future majorities in general elections. Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics. Having a clear economic message that voters believe will improve their lives is at the core of the work they need to do to return from the political wilderness.

Republicans have a bigger problem. Since Trump hijacked their political party, they’ve been shedding reliable college-educated suburban voters—along with most traditional Republican values and policies. And while Trump is able to offset this loss with Saddam Hussein–level margins among working-class voters, especially in rural areas, there’s no evidence a Republican who isn’t Trump can conjure similar appeal with voters otherwise uninterested in politics.

There’s a reason Republicans shrug helplessly at the notion that Trump could run for a third term. It’s because they no longer have any better ideas.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The GOP’s Big Medicaid Idea Was Tried Before—And Failed Badly… Arkansas and Georgia tried work requirements, and the results were not pretty, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

• Democrats Need to Stand for Things… On Just Between Us, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to talk about Biden’s health, Trump’s trip, and how to argue about immigration, democracy, and the rule of law.

• Schizo-in-Chief… On the flagship pod, DAVID FRENCH joins TIM MILLER to talk about Trump’s vacillations between sounding like Bernie Sanders one day and Paul Ryan the next.

• Death of a Cybertruck Salesman… How Trump Killed Tesla, or: Schadenfreude is a bargain at $5.60 per mile, writes JVL in The Triad.

• Kristi Noem Embarrasses Herself Again… ANDREW EGGER joins SAM STEIN on Bulwark+ Takes to chat about Kristi Noem’s disastrous Senate testimony, where she completely botched the definition of habeas corpus.

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THE RICH GET RICHER: Republicans are inching toward “yes” on the “big, beautiful bill”, per Politico:

Republican leaders are increasingly confident they will be able to notch a final deal with key GOP megabill holdouts and move toward a final vote in the coming days after several whirlwind hours of closely held negotiations.

The upbeat turn in the frequently tumultuous talks was described by six senior Republicans who are participating in them. It came after President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to personally urge the warring factions to drop their demands and come to an agreement on the sprawling domestic-policy bill centered on a multi-trillion-dollar suite of tax cuts.

The 30,000-foot overview here remains remarkable. Some Republican congressmen have been dragging their heels over the fact that the bill that tightens healthcare eligibility for poor Americans doesn’t tighten healthcare eligibility for poor Americans enough. Other Republican congressmen have objected that the bill’s regressive tax cuts aren’t regressive enough. Trump’s ultimate priority is just to get them on the same page. And while Politico suggests that’s still likely, there remain a few bumps in the road ahead. Maybe more than a few.

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ET TU, JD?: If the GOP budget bill passes, it’ll be a win for Republicans and for a particular theory of Republican politics: that for all the talk of a political realignment and the GOP adopting pro-working-class rhetoric, the party’s chief policy aim remains cutting taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the poor. Over at the New Republic, Greg Sargent pins one of the party’s most celebrated supposed working-class whisperers, JD Vance, to the wall:

Back in 2017, when House Republicans were feverishly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term, Vance repeatedly criticized the effort’s Medicaid cuts, castigating them as a serious betrayal of Trump voters—and, importantly, of the supposed working-class populism underlying Trump’s support. Trump voters, Vance said then, backed him because unlike other Republicans, he “wasn’t saying I’m going to take away . . . your Medicaid.” . . .

The House GOP is currently hashing out the “big, beautiful bill” embodying Trump’s agenda, and it would impose work requirements and other bureaucratic hurdles on Medicaid recipients. That would result in at least seven million fewer people on the program, many from the ranks of the working poor, and many in red states

These are precisely the types of voters who would have been hurt by the 2017 House GOP effort to repeal the ACA. That bill would have phased out the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and transitioned to block grants to states, booting millions off the program, many of them in Trump country, if the bill hadn’t failed in the Senate.

Read the whole thing.

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KISS YOUR BOOSTERS GOODBYE: Under 65 and healthy? Looks like no more COVID boosters for you, says the FDA. Here’s the AP:

Annual COVID-19 shots for healthy younger adults and children will no longer be routinely approved under a major new policy shift unveiled Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Top officials for the Food and Drug Administration laid out new requirements for yearly updates to COVID shots, saying they’d continue to use a streamlined approach that would make vaccines available to adults 65 and older as well as children and younger adults with at least one health problem that puts them at higher risk. But the FDA framework urges companies conduct large, lengthy studies before tweaked vaccines can be approved for healthier people.

Heterodox orneriness or sheer antivax crankery? As with much of the stuff coming out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services today, it’s difficult to say for sure. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad, who coauthored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine announcing the new policy, argued the change simply brings the U.S. COVID-vaccine regulatory regime in line with “all other high-income nations.” And in an odd rhetorical bankshot, they argued that widespread authorization of COVID boosters may have had a “ripple effect” that hurt public confidence in vaccines overall, even “vital immunization programs” like the MMR vaccine, “which has been clearly established as safe and highly effective.”

But the fingerprints of RFK Jr. and his more weapons-grade vaccine lunacy are discernible here too. The call for large new, placebo-controlled trials of COVID vaccines is in keeping with Kennedy’s long-stated and entirely erroneous belief that vaccines currently in circulation have not been sufficiently tested. And it calls into question whether other previously approved vaccines may find their authorizations on the chopping block too.

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