Swing States Broke en Masse. So Did Swing Voters.
The most naturally pessimistic Democratic operative could not imagine a scenario more nightmarish than what happened on Tuesday. Conversely, it is doubtful that any Republican pro could have dreamed up the result, at least in the presidential race.
As I’ve written, not only do swing states tend to break in one direction, so too do swing voters. That is how campaigns that can appear to be too close to call going into the election have the potential, and indeed likelihood, to pop in one direction or the other. The 1980 contest between President Carter and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan is a great example of this. Undecideds decide. So it was on Tuesday.
Winners are often remembered as having done everything right, the loser everything wrong. As the saying goes, the victor gets to write history, and besides, these days everyone likes to see things in a binary fashion. Yet it’s hardly that simple.
The Trump campaign was saddled with untold millions in personal legal bills for the candidate, as well as a downturn in small-dollar contributions. As a result, it had to enlist outside and often untested groups to do the blocking and tackling of identifying supporters and getting them out to vote. One got the sense heading into the weekend before the election, like in 2016, that they expected to come up short. Tim Alberta’s revealing Saturday article in The Atlantic signaled that the previously tight-lipped Trump campaign was starting to engage in the finger pointing that often precedes election losses.The candidate’s behavior in the final days also seemed to suggest something less than optimism. But like eight years ago, Trump and his team far exceeded their own expectations.
In terms of strategy and paid advertising, the Trump campaign proved to be exceedingly effective, exhibiting a focus and discipline that did not translate to its candidate, who was anything but that.
The metaphor of the Harris campaign building an airplane while mid-flight was quite apt, even allowing that they inherited a fuselage already built by the Biden campaign. There is already plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking on what the Harris campaign did and didn’t do, but blaming her campaign for what happened seems misplaced. Losing all five of the swing states that have already been called and trailing in the remaining Arizona and Nevada, while losing the popular vote by 3.3 percentage points (50.9 to 47.6 percent) as the count currently stands, suggests that there were more fundamental problems at work.
Some artifacts of her ill-fated 2019 campaign, most notably some overly progressive positions that played into the negative stereotype of a California liberal, didn’t serve her well. The Trump campaign ads effectively featured audio and video of Harris in 2019 expressing support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. It became the most effective single cudgel for Trump to beat on her with. But on a day-to-day basis, Harris was highly focused and disciplined, actually a pretty good campaigner, and far better than an 81-year-old Biden would have been.
Even those who blame President Biden for not stepping away sooner probably place too much importance on the identity of the candidate in a year that was always going to be challenging for the incumbent party.
Partisan Democrats were going to vote for a Democrat no matter what; defections were very few and far between. Any lack of enthusiasm is more likely to manifest itself with someone either not voting or skipping over that office on the ballot. The same goes for partisan Republicans. Each nominee starts off with between 44 and 46 percent of the potential electorate, with just 8 to 12 percent in between. But we know that those pure independents in the middle read, watch, listen, and think about news and politics less than partisans and vote in lower numbers, reducing their share of the actual electorate to between 2 and 4 percent. Harris’s current vote share of 47.6 percent means thatshe got few of those undecideds who did vote.
The albatross around Harris’s neck in this race were the twin issues of the border and cost of living.The biggest single question was whether these concerns among independent voters would be enough to offset what had appeared to be comparable concerns about whether they wanted four more years of Trump and whether he was up to another four years in office. In the end, the “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” question overshadowed the “Is he more erratic andill-suited for the Oval Office than he was four years ago?” question.
Abortion was on the ballot in one shape or form in 10 states this year. While the abortion-rights side prevailed in seven of them, it is clear that the issue was not the “get out of jail free” card that many Democrats hoped. I have long maintained that disappointing showing for Republicans in 2022 had far more to do with exotic GOP nominees in about two dozen critical races than it was about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision igniting a huge influx of pro-choice voters.
With 37 congressional seats yet to be called as of midday Thursday, House control is still up for grabs, but at this point the most likely outcome is a split very similar to what we had going into the election: 221 for Republicans to Democrats’ 214. The fact that there was no strong trend in either direction in the House, a far more sensitive and relevant barometer than Senate outcomes, is telling. What happened in the presidential contest appeared to be completely independent of what happened in the House.
The Senate’s flip from Democratic to Republican control is certain, but the size of the GOP majority is still up in the air. Unlike the House, what happens in the Senate on a national level is more of a function of the map and the calendar.
When a party has an unusually strong Senate election year, they may well be over-exposed to potential losses when that class of senators again face the voters. In this particular group of Senate seats, which were last up in 2018, Trump’s midterm election yielded a good year for Democrats. So, you might have had one or more Democrats win that year who might not have won under neutral or tougher partisan circumstances, as well as a hardy group of Republicans who survived in an adverse environment.
There will be plenty of time to sift through the mountains of election returns and exit-polling data, and when it is available, the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voter Survey, which cross-checks respondents with voting records to verify who actually did vote.
The more critical analysis, however, will be done by each of the parties. If Democrats come out of this simply blaming Harris or attributing their loss to Trump’s uniqueness, they will be doing themselves an enormous disservice. If Republicans do not realize that Democratic mistakes were partly responsible for their win, they are deluding themselves as well.
This article was originally published for the National Journal on Nov. 7, 2024.