This was your money, your effort. It mattered. And yes, Chairs Ben Wikler (WI) and Anderson Clayton (NC) mattered. More of them, please.
What was the use of all that money, talent and energy? Plenty. Without it we’d have not won four of five swing state Senatorial contests (only losing PA if the numbers hold).
And some local initiatives (Arizona voting rights from Bolts, and see referendum section) would not have done well.
That’s worth a lot.
Some modelers got it right:
It's basically job approval/economy approval but at state level, allowing for state predictions. You can click “Save .pdf” to view or save it. The abstract says:
100 days prior to the election, our model forecasts a split popular vote (50.3% for Trump, 49.7% for Harris), but a notable Trump advantage in the Electoral College, with just under a 3 in 4 chance Trump wins the Election. This Republican advantage 100 days prior to Election Day sheds light on Biden’s abrupt decision to drop out of the race and suggests that if Harris wins, she will have overcome extremely challenging fundamentals and/or Donald Trump and the Republican Party will have squandered a sizeable Electoral College advantage.
Don’t gloss over the “extremely challenging fundamentals” part (unpopular president, state of economy). That is what made for the wave election.
My CT district was blue enough to withstand the wave, but it hit here nonetheless.
John Burn-Murdoch/Financial Times:
Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents
Governments across the world are struggling in this period of economic and geopolitical turmoil
The US, red dot to right, was outpaced only by Belgium. Harris did better than most of the rest of the world, but evry govern,=ment up for election lost vote share.
Such a crushing defeat in this week’s US election is bound to elicit months if not years of soul-searching from Democrats. Did Biden hold on for too long? Should party officials have opted for a contested convention instead of parachuting Harris into the race? Has the party’s socially progressive turn alienated some Hispanic and Black men?
The problem is, it’s entirely possible both that the answer to all three of those questions is “yes”, and that taking action to address them would not have produced a fundamentally different outcome. Just as the answer to “would Britain’s Conservatives have fared better in an autumn election in a lower inflation environment?” is “maybe”, but the response to “would it have resulted in a materially different outcome?” is “no”.
The reason I make these assertions is that the economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world.
Harris is currently winning 48% of the vote with more to come in from California.
This is a long tweet from Sharon Quinsaat, but well worth the read:
Now why would an underpaid Filipino immigrant and a Native Hawaiian who has been on the waitlist to finally get a home put their faith on the Republican Party and Trump to their economic concerns. These groups have faced extreme racism (the racial structure in Hawaii is different) and economic hardship. None of it made sense to me. None at all. Until I saw first hand the information that they consume to understand why they are having these problems.(2) Their sources of information are nothing we have never heard of. Yes, there is still that staple of Fox News and News Max. There's also a lot reading Epoch Times, One America News, and Rumble. But I had a deep conversation with a Native Hawaiian (let's call her Lily) who regards Trump as a demi-god. She showed me on her phone the stuff she reads and listens to everyday. I have never heard of them before, but we listened to them together. The conspiracy theories in these sites are WILD, to say the least. But she is convinced they are true. I have my research assistants look at these sites and influencer/analyst because they are so new to me.
Lily and I are living in two different worlds..
EJ Dionne/Washington Post:
Did you miss the Trump surge? So did I. What can we learn?
The reasons Vice President Kamala Harris lost were all in plain sight.
But the truth is I missed the signals and frustrations that were in plain sight. The worst part is that I would regularly cite them myself when describing the hurdles I thought Harris was overcoming. Five numbers — three about facts, two about feelings — go a long way toward explaining why Trump won.
The facts were part of a slide that Republican pollster Whit Ayres regularly included in his pre-election presentations. Ayres would contrast the average inflation rate during Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies (1 percent vs. 5 percent); interest rates (3 percent under Trump, 6 percent under Biden); and the price of a market basket of food ($100 in the Trump years, $125 in the Biden years).
NBC (my bolded):
How Trump won — and how Harris lost — the 2024 election
Democrats’ recriminations started immediately, but Trump’s victory was decisive enough that there may have been little Kamala Harris could have done.
Democrats’ recriminations started before the clock ran out on Election Day — Harris was too cautious, many said, or she should have broken cleanly from President Joe Biden and replaced the leaders he installed in the campaign — but Trump’s victory was conclusive enough across the board that there may have been little she could do.
“The electorate has moved decisively to the right on a number of key issues, which happen to be the key issues that defined this election, especially immigration and inflation,” said Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic group Blueprint. “It was probably impossible for any Democrat to win, and probably any Republican could have won, because Harris made probably the best possible attempt to win it and Trump made the best possible attempt to lose it.”
New York Times (my bolded):
How Trump Won, and How Harris Lost
He made one essential bet: that his grievances would become the grievances of the MAGA movement, and then the G.O.P., and then more than half the country. It paid off
But Mr. Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.
“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.
But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.
We all thought that women voters would out vote the angry men. And Harris more than held her own with white women. They didn’t outvote the men because some of them were angry, too, with the economy being the main issue.
Ronald Brownstein/The Atlantic:
What Swayed Trump Voters Was Bidenomics
For millions of Americans, an unacceptable present weighed more heavily than an uncertain future.
Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.
This was less a vote against Harris and more a vote against the economic status quo. It’s good that voters were uncomfortable with Trump. But that didn’t change enough votes, so not good enough.
Let’s end with a few choice HL Mencken quotes from a century ago. You may know some of the quotes, they are part of our fabric:
- For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
- On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
- If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
- Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
- Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
- The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression
