Everyone—including me!—has a theory about why Democrats lost this year. The leading contenders are:
- Inflation.
- Illegal immigration.
- Too woke.
- Lost touch with working class.
But there are some simple facts to contend with for all of these things. Here are inflation and wages since Joe Biden took office:
In the 2022 election, inflation was above 7% and had been for more than a year. Wage growth for the working class had been falling behind just as long. Here's immigration:
In the 2022 election, illegal border crossings were astronomically high and had been for over a year. Finally, here's the popular vote for the House of Representatives:
The 2022 election was fought on inflation, immigration, and wokeness. It was the height of the DEI/cancel culture/book banning/CRT panic, and it was practically the only thing Fox News could talk about. And the election came after Biden's "disastrous" withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Now, Democrats did lose some ground in 2022. But not as much as this year even though inflation was down, immigration was down, wages were up, and the woke frenzy was subsiding. Every single measure of both culture war and economic issues was considerably worse in 2022 and had been for more than a year.
So for all of us, the question is: What changed between 2022 and 2024? Looking at the popular vote for the House helps to keep some distance from personalities, but it's still worth noting that Donald Trump was either president or the leading Republican candidate the entire time. Nothing much changed on that side.
It so happens that I'm on the wokeness/immigration side of the debate. I have been for a long time. And I think there's a good case to be made that Kamala Harris was viewed as worse along both dimensions compared to Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, those things were at more of a fever pitch in 2022 than today. So why were Democrats in general so roundly rejected?
A big factor no one is talking about: in 2024, the GOP encouraged their voters to vote by mail. Here in PA, there were frequent ads funded by the GOP encouraging their voters to vote by mail. I think they finally figured out that gooses turnout.
While the Democratic party has "lost touch with the working class" they've done far more for them, especially Biden. He's been incapable of explaining his successes. Where I live Biden could single handedly cure cancer, and they'll still hate him. It's widespread brainwashing. Democrats are seen as the enemy. They hate immigrants. They hate black people. What exactly is the Democratic Party to do to get these people back?
and so frustrated they chose not to look behind the curtain.
No one ever asked him "how" he was going to get prices back down, and I'm betting they won't just because he tax cuts the Dow to the moon.
I'm sorry but this notion "Biden was incapable of explaining his administration's successes" was just absolute bullshit. How many times did he attend and spoke at events detailing such successes and what the Administration was trying to do, hmm? You answered your own question. There's very little they can except wait for the Republicans to fuck up so said voters have no choice but to vote Dem like they did in 2020.
As far as the top of the ticket, the most important question to ask is, how was Trump even nominated, much less elected? I don't need to rehash all the strikes against him; all of us here know what they are. So do most of his voters (Yes, there are probably some so ignorant or stupid or senile that they have forgotten Jan. 6 and every other damned thing he has done; I hope there aren't many of these). To overlook or rationalize his many misdeeds and actual and likely criminal acts, you have to have completely lost trust in the institutions that have up until now civilized America -- the law, the Constitution, the political system, not to mention science, the academy, the other professions. (To be a Republican politician and support Trump, you just need to be deeply cynical.)
You have to think that, as bad as Trump is, he will be better than a Democratic former prosecutor who has been serving as Vice President since January 2021 and has yet to be caught mishandling government secrets, or fawning over ruthless dictators, or turning migrant children into de facto orphans. You have to think, without a shred of evidence, that prosecutors and judges are corrupt, even to somehow corrupting a jury selected by the same open process by which jurors have always been selected. You have to believe that highly secret government documents were planted by corrupt FBI agents, or that we were lied to about their content. You have to believe that January 6 rioters, who clearly were Trump supporters, were actually engaged in a leftist/Antifa false-flag operation. You have to discount the hundreds of convictions, guilty pleas and prison sentences being served by the insurrectionists. You have to discount the scores of injuries to Capitol and DC police officers. You have to believe that the members of your community who make the elections work are part of a vast network of evildoers thwarting the will of voters. You have to buy into baseless conspiracy theories that involve hundreds of thousands of conspirators. You have to credit those theories over the belief that we have robust systems that have stood up against flawed human beings, and yet have moved us, haltingly, toward a more perfect union.
This is what those of us who believe in the rule of law, of government of, by and for the people, in justice applied fairly to all, are up against. We are opposed by a decades-long project by Republicans to foment distrust in any and all institutions which might act as a check on those who seek power and wealth above all, especially irresponsible corporations and their management. Remember "Government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem"? It's a problem for those who want to be free to exploit workers, to pollute the environment to save the cost of clean operation, to extract as much wealth from their customers as they possibly can, to eschew sustainability for lower present costs.
Breaking down trust in institutions and norms has led large numbers of Americans to trust instead in a con man, a demagogue.
We need to find ways to counter this disinformation campaign and restore trust. There is no other way to run a democracy.
Yes. Democrats' birth right appears to be a Velcro suit for Republian slander and abuse.
Here here. I hope you don't mind I have quoted you to my friends and family.
Not at all, thanks for the feedback!
Damn straight, Mr.Schulz! The lies are the edge Trump has over Democrats. But his lies play to grievances his audience already harbor. The trick will be to give them something positive to think about (but when we did that, they ignored the facts). Doesn't seem fair, that Democrats must actually deliver, while Republicans get to just make stuff up, but hey -- life is hard. Let's get to work.
Because the media, knowingly or unknowingly, wanted Trump to win.
Democrats were outraged by January 6th, Trump's twin impeachments, the many federal indictments brought against Trump. And yet, Trump elided accountability. For many voters that must have looked as vindication for Trump, and as a friend puts it, "They just hate Trump's guts!" Failure to convict Trump became a liability for Democrats between 2022 and 2024.
Economy, immigration, abortion, etc are just politics so when things don't turn out well, we vote them out
Election Denial is the true disaster here.
This sweep will be seen as a vindication of election denial, so Trump 2.0 will approve (maybe "require") state's "enhanced voter count security". Jan 6 riots probably won't happen again because any GOP VP will never certify a blue victory.
Democrats now turn out in the off year elections. That’s how you account for 2022 v 2024. That plus the Trump effect.
The most obvious answer is none of the above. It's Elon Musk Peter Thiel, crypto bros. It's billionaires flooding the zone with money and disinformation. It's the reality distrotion machine that is now all-encompassing as a result of social media.
I'd be interested to see how many objectively false things (about jobs, GDP, inflation, immigration, wokeness) the average Trump voter believes. I'm guessing it's a lot.
And under Trump 2.0 disinformation will be baked into government stats , verified by FoxNews so regardless of what happens, it wont be his fault
Easy question easy answer: Mid terms are elitist affairs with low turnout. Presidential elections have higher turnout, so all the idiots who stayed home in 2022 came out voting in 2024. This likely explains 90% of the difference.
The rest of the distance is probably due to massively intensified Republican mendacity during the 2024 campaign.
Here is where I insert the perception issue - neatly summed up by Ben Davis of The Guardian - Basically we were collectively wealthy at the end of Trump's tenure with the Covid largess and then all of that was taken away over the next 4 years leaving us collectively poorer in perception if not in fact. The tidy aspect of this is that it actually applies to the world, not just the US. 4 year trial of UBI that works and then terminate it without adequate preparation. Lots of unhappy feelings. 🙁
Yeah like UBI was going keep ongoing. Sure. Hey I'm not opposed to UBI if replaced other benefits like SNAP, and I don't doubt many Dems would have supported more UBI and CTC but members of the other party not to mention egomaniacs like Synema and Manchin opposed such things and thus they could not be extended. So Harris gets the blame for this? Fuck the Guardian and fuck Bernie Sanders. The only working class people you know empty the trash from your posh offices. Please if you so-called working class types have specific examples of specific policies over the last four years that "abandoned" the working class I would like to know what they are, not just anti-establishment posturing.
“It so happens that I'm on the wokeness/immigration side of the debate… Still, those things were at more of a fever pitch in 2022 than today. So why were Democrats in general so roundly rejected?”
Biden was at the top of the ticket in 2020 (Dems won) and 2022 (Dems had a historically good midterm election with an incumbent President).
The whole situation seems clear to me: the Dems should’ve stuck with Biden.
Anyone who reads these comments frequently may recall that I lashed out at Kevin when he called for Biden to drop out of the race (and resign the Presidency!) after the first debate back in June. Kevin, of course, was not alone. All of the ostensibly all-knowing pundits said Biden had to go. And I repeated in these comments, over and over again, that kicking Biden out three months before an election was stark raving madness. Obviously. But it happened anyway. And that’s more or less why we lost. The fact that anyone is even debating this clear point is just stunning to me.
I even went so far as to insist that Harris was an awful candidate who would never be president. I remembered her 2020 Wokeness perfectly well, and, as far as I was concerned, she had already made herself ineligible.
But it gets worse. After Harris secured the nomination and quickly raised a billion dollars, comment threads (like this one) and social media sites (like Twitter) were full of dems asking when all of the Biden dead-enders (like me) were going to apologize for having been so wrong in urging him to stay in the race. And I would reply that Harris hadn’t won yet, did not have much of any lead in the polls, and was in fact an incredibly risky bet. And here we are.
There’s only one reason, in my opinion, why we ever wound up with a Trump era in the first place: Biden wasn’t the nominee in 2016 (he should’ve been). Instead we were obsessed with the identity politics of a first female president and adopted idiotic slogans like “I’m with her.”
And the single most likely reason we now have Trump 2.0? Biden wasn’t the nominee in 2024. Instead, we were obsessed with the idiotic identity politics of a first black female president and nominated someone with a recorded history of idiotic wokeness. And the lesson should have already been clear: you run someone else other than Biden against Trump, you lose.
And the case for Biden in 2024 was always clear as day. He was the incumbent president. Not only is that important, it was more important this year than ever before because the Dems were running against ANOTHER incumbent president (that’s how Repubs view Trump). But the Dems threw away their biggest advantage and ran a non-incumbent against an incumbent. And it just doesn’t get much dumber than that.
Also, Biden is the one and only Dem with a proven track record of beating Trump. Again, we just threw that away in exchange for some “joy.” And Biden was one of the few modern high-profile Dems barely tainted with “wokeness.” There would not have been any attack ads about his support for transgender surgeries in jail (or whatever the hell Harris’s idiotic and disqualifying statement was).
But wait, everyone is going to reply that the public simply rejected Biden for being too old, so he had to leave the race. Please. The oldest president in history, displaying obvious signs of dementia, just won an overwhelming victory. No one cares about age. And I doubt anyone other than the NYT editors ever did.
Now, I’m not saying that Biden would’ve definitely won. He might’ve been done in by inflation. It’s possible that no incumbent administration (Republican or Democrat) would’ve won reelection this year. But I do feel entirely confident in asserting that Dems would’ve had their best results with Biden on the ticket, and, as a result, they would’ve likely already won control of the House.
But no: they went with Harris and lost it all. And if I was able to see that coming clearly enough to shout it from the rooftops, then I just don’t know what sort of enclosed information bubble people live in if they somehow couldn’t see it coming as well.
I appreciate the Biden sentiment but not the revisionist history. As I said, if Biden was 10 years younger, a fighting Biden defending his administration and out there campaigning hard, good in the debate, you'd be right. But an unpopular administration with an old man trying to campaign whose age blocked any way he could get his message out, I'm sorry, the party had no choice but to demand a change.
As for 2016, explain to me how Biden rips the nomination away from Hilary Clinton when Clinton was promised that nomination by Obama and Biden as Vice President was to cap his career, not extend it? Upon what message would he have campaign on compelling enough to win, hmm? I sorry, as much as I like Biden, I don't know of any.
Nice stats ,but it’s looking more and more like Annie Lowrey has the answer to your question
Im guessing by the time Trump 2.0 is done “reorganizing” all the .gov sources of those graphs, he’s going to look great, no matter what’s really happening.
Short version- Stop looking behind the curtain and kiss the ring
I wonder if the difference in vote between 2022 and 2024 say, or even 2018 and 2020 is just that more low information voters vote in presidential elections, and Trump does better among low information voters.
It used to be that because suburban voters were the most reliable voters and they were Republican leaning, Republicans did better in off year elections. Now the reverse is true. Voters without a college degree are the most reliable Republican voters, and they are the most likely to skip midterms and vote in the presidential years. If so Democrats should expect to do better in off year elections as long as the Republican party remains in the Trump model.