My Initial Synthesis of Trump 2024

The Day After the Weekend After

Outperformance

We don’t yet have the definitive data we need for a deep analysis, but I have come to a few preliminary conclusions about the election.

First, I’ve said this before and I will keep saying it: Democrats did better in this election this year than almost every rich-world elected government on the planet. This isn’t supposed to make you feel better. We still lost. But if we are going to go forward, and win–we have to be clear eyed about what actually happened.

It is worth noting that I’m not saying inflation is the whole story, I am saying anti-incumbency fervor is probably most of what caused the loss. I do think inflation is probably the best explanation for that anti-incumbency bias, but I don’t think this is as simple as everyone last person was voting on the price of eggs.

(Thank you to Guy Oron from RealChange News who fact-checked me when I previously wrote that this anti incumbency pattern was universal. It was only universal among rich-world governments. Mexico’s left leaning Morena party gained seats).

Still, this is the most universally anti-incumbent global electorate on record, and the record goes back a long way. While it is certainly true that we have to consider what went wrong in this election, any analysis that doesn’t consider what went right is simply substituting good strategy with our justifiable grief. 

There is a deep human bias that will make this hard to do. The fact that we lost hits so hard and the feelings of shock and fear and moral revulsion are so real. This makes it very difficult to do anything other than think “why did we lose!?”

But if the global headwinds are considered, the most surprising thing about the election is that we even came close. Distasteful as it feels, we have to consider why we did so well, because if any of that is repeatable, we need to be sure to keep that around for next time. 

It is possible that this wild overperformance is because the US economy has recovered much faster than other countries. Granted, the intensity of inflation by county in the US isn’t predictive, so I am unsure that this variance is enough to explain it. 

It could be because Trump was such a weak, whiny, bad rerun of a candidate, or because Harris was smart and sparkled from the podium. It could be specific moments–like Harris’ amazing debate performance, or political conditions, like the assault on women’s basic bodily freedom. It could be Democrats’ moves toward more worker friendly policy during the Biden administration. Perhaps building a popular front from left to center-right helped. I don’t know. But these are all reasonable candidates for explaining the overperformance and we certainly should be careful about ignoring them.

It is also worth noting that in swing states, where Democrats campaigned aggressively, we did much better than in the rest of the country. Given that there is some real variability among demographics across those states, it is also unlikely that the variation has much to do with the states themselves. The campaigns are the best explanation. Perhaps Harris’ aggressive ground game, or the ads, or the surrogates, or just more information helped bring the realities from the previous paragraph into starker relief. 

I don’t know the answers to these–but I am clear that we overperformed globally and that the campaign overperformed the national background conditions. Any analysis that suggests the problem is that we Democrats are unusually bad at politics or that the campaign was really bad at campaigning do not seem to be rooted in reality. Throwing out all of it would be a foolish mistake.

It is worth noting that the shift in vote share among demographic groups strongly mirrors those who were the most exposed to the inflationary and social shocks of the last few years. Even people whose top concerns aren’t articulated as “economic” find themselves still in an angry, “this-place-sucks” mood. When I was canvassing a working class neighborhood, I met some Trump voters on the trail and I asked why. Several gave me the same answer, “because fuck that.” 

There was a lot of “fuck that” in this election, especially among people who are living with little margin. I’m not suggesting this excuses their choice—I see it as a repugnant decision. But it I do think it may explain it in the causal sense.

Race and Class Realignment

But the realignment among race, class and gender are still signs of a four alarm fire, because if the trend of young, less college educated, and the non-white rightward drift continues, the Democratic party won’t have any way to win future high-turnout elections.

Take the youth vote. (Caveat, exit polls aren’t terribly reliable). Young voters are reliably very Democratic, and they voted for Biden by a 24 point margin, but that fell a catastrophic 13 points to an 11 point margin. 30-44 year olds were only one point more likely to support Harris than Trump, a 9 point fall from Clinton. 

It also shows up in the educational divide, where people with a college degree are much more likely to vote blue, and people without are just as likely to vote red. And a lot more people don’t have degrees.

The biggest shifts were among non-white Americans. Those with degrees fell from 50 points more favorable to Clinton to just 33 points likelier to support Harris. Those without a degree fell from 56 points in favor of Clinton to just 30 for Harris. Among Latinos, Harris had only a 6 point margin, a catastrophic loss compared to Clinton’s 38 points. Clinton also won Latino men by 31 points, but Harris lost them by 12! She also lost a lot of Latinas, falling from a 44 point edge under Clinton to just 22 points this year. 

A couple of shifts surprised me as I was digging through exit poll numbers. White men have become less Trumpy since 2016, and even white men without a degree have too. Granted, they are still very Trumpy, but this still surprised me. Seniors too, shifted 7 points less favorable to Trump than they were in 2016–Harris actually tied Trump with this group.  

Urban Failure

Notably, the biggest geographic shifts toward Trump showed up in expensive urban areas. In fact, the more expensive, and the more diverse, the more the population tilted toward Trump. And this isn’t just because there are more non-white people around in cities. “The correlation between a county’s non-White voting population and its shift toward Trump isn’t nearly as strong in suburban or rural areas.”

There is clearly something about what is happening in cities that is moving working class people of color to the right. 

Given that cities are so expensive, and have been so bad at housing people, and we’ve seen a surge in both these last few years, this is not surprising. Given that cities are ground zero for much of our most antisocial behavior, and we have seen a surge in those behaviors these last few years, it is yet again not surprising. 

And given that working class black and brown and Asian residents of our cities are the most exposed to those maladies, it’s not surprising that they were particularly likely to vote “fuck that.”

I have a (predictable, I know) hunch that the cause is housing more than the now ebbing crime wave, although both probably impacted the vote and both certainly matter a great deal.

For instance, Seattle is better at providing housing than a lot of really expensive cities (yes, the bar is ridiculously low). Seattle’s crime wave mirrored the national picture, but it lasted a bit longer, and yet we saw less of a rightward shift than other big expensive cities. That augurs in favor of a housing story. 

New York had less of a crime wave than most blue cities, but is terrible on providing housing, and saw a big jump to the right. Boston has basically the best crime in the country, but is bad at building housing. It shifted 5 points to the right while King County (I can’t seem to get Seattle specific data), held steady and got a tad bluer if you count the Cornel West and Jill Stein vote. 

None of this should be terribly surprising. After all, if a global inflationary shock was the cause or a major cause of anti-incumbency fervor–it’s not surprising that the places that are the most expensive showed the most anger toward their incumbent President and his successor.*

(Disinformation and a Weak Spot in the Campaign

I think it is well-established now that we have a massive, global disinformation problem. Yochai Benkler did a fantastic job in Network Propaganda of showing why misinformation thrived in rising right-wing information networks. And we can also see that the more news a person consumes, especially news that has institutionalized fact-checking mechanisms in place, the less likely a person is to vote for Trump. 

It is also possible this is just another way of showing educational polarization rather than media-as-the-cause of political views.

While I’m not sure that has much to do with the specific shift from Biden to Harris, I do think this a major enabler of the rise of corrupt, right-wing authoritarianism globally, and part of why a character so corrupt, incompetent and repugnant as Trump has even been remotely viable in the last decade. 

It is part of how we arrived at an electorate with razor thin margins that with a few points of frustration votes can flip an election to someone who hates America and American freedoms and there is clearly deep work to be done on this front.

Misinformation or not–one place the Harris campaign fell most obviously short was new media. Both she and Tim Walz should have gone on Joe Rogan, and done at least a dozen other similar pods and again as many streamers. They stayed too close to safer more carefully scripted, or at least factual-oriented, spaces. They clearly throttled back their meme-able brat summer and that was a foolish move on the part of people who seemed to be trying to run a campaign from a decade ago.

While they were good at reaching influencers in the arts and some comedy, Democrats have always been pretty good at that. They didn’t do enough to engage people who aren’t interested in politics, but whose primary interests are sports, wellness, gaming and the like. 

Next?

Now we have to take the information we do have and figure out where to go from here, and update our plan as we learn more and hit roadblocks along the way.

Elizabeth Warren has laid out the beginnings of a plan.

Washington Governor Bob Ferguson and Attorney General Nick Brown stand ready.

Our Mayor has made a passing comment or two, but so far has shown little leadership or done much to inspire confidence on the topic. Our largely conservative city council has been, for all I can tell—silent on the matter. Granted, many of them just supported a MAGA fraud for the legislature, so I wouldn’t expect much from them.

It is up to us, friends, to work shoulder to shoulder on whatever comes next. I know I will share my thoughts on a plan to fight back in the coming days.

(*For information on 2020 v 2024 vote shares. Time will tell how much the non-white population specifically in Seattle changed v other cities and that very much impacts my reasoning above).