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?
Too much joy, not enough hate.
For people who voted for him every anti-Trump satire on tv might as well have been an ad for him, because it's fuck you all the way down to hell.
I think the key difference between 2022 and 2024 is turnout. Republicans' traditional advantage with reliable voters has flipped: educated voters who pay attention and turn out reliably are mostly Democrats now, while low-information voters who are barely paying attention and don't show up for midterms like Trump.
I further suspect that the pollsters underestimate Trump's support because late deciders, who don't bother deciding their vote until election day, break for him. It's not the pollsters' fault, the opinions of this group are non-pollable.
Also, in 2022 Dobbs had just been handed down and was fresh in everyone's minds, whereas in 2024 it was old news and less salient. It also probably calmed people that so many states that tried to ban abortion had those laws overturned by ballot initiatives, and Trump didn't run on the issue.
Did 10m educated people die/vanish/lose their education then between 2020 and 2024? Because you say that educated people turn out every election AND they’re heavily voting Democratic. Yet Kamala has about 10m or so fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Where did the educated voters go in your theory?
My memory is Biden ran up the popular vote score quite a lot in deep blue states like Washington and Oregon.
"Protest" votes, against incumbent Trump
Aaaagh! Jasper has noted several times that there are millions of votes yet to be counted, disproportionately in blue jurisdictions, and including provisional ballots which skew D. All the votes from 2020 have long since been counted. Apples =/= oranges.
This turnout thing is taking hold, and it's simply not true. It's a mirage created by the slow pace at which California and some of the other states do their counting. You're comparing the early vote tally in 2024 to the final vote tally of 2020.
Bottom line, if you extrapolate the current vote to the final vote assuming the same proportions of the current vote (OK, that might be a questionable assumption -- I don't know the details of the outstanding vote on a granular level), then 2024 is going to end up only about 1 M fewer votes than 2020, and population growth maybe should have added *maybe* about 1 M more votes. So, we're only 2 M votes down from 2020 turnout, at most.
Harris is going to end up with about 6 M votes less than Biden in 2020, and Trump is going to end up with about 5 M more votes than he had in 2020. In other words, Harris is going to end up with the 3rd, or narrowly the 4th most, votes for President in history, with Biden still #1, and Trump sitting at #2/#3 or #2/#4.
It seems much more likely that there was an honest to goodness switch from Biden to Trump, rather than a whole mess of Biden voters staying home, and brand new Trump voters showing up.
And one other piece of data. The shift to Trump was more pronounced in the non-swing states. Where Harris actively campaigned, the switch was less. In the end, it looks like Harris will be only about 160K votes away (the three blue wall states) from having lost the popular vote and winning the electoral college. That would have been maximal cosmic justice, but also maximal political strife filled with lawsuits and potential for violence. But it was something talked about a little -- Trump's gains in the popular vote were more "inefficient" than they seem at first glance.
When they are all counted Kamala will probably have gotten about 7 million fewer votes than Biden did, not 10. Moreover Trump will also have gotten about 3 million fewr voters than Biden, albeit several million more than he did in 2020.. And overall it looks like turnout was down, about 2 million fewer voters thatn in 2020.
I don't know what to make of all this but I appreciate Kevin trying to get us to avoid oversimplifying the "meaning" of this loss.
It's easy to draw the wrong conclusion from election losses. Remember all those Republicans who were going back to the drawing board after Romney lost in 2012. They certainly weren't imagining that Donald Trump was what was needed, that they needed a cruder stupider rich guy to be their candidate. And it's also good to remember that minus Comey's announcement 11 days before the election and a couple miscalculations in the Clinton campaign, Trump would NOT have been the GOP answer.
I think the key difference between 2022 and 2024 is turnout.
Right. Working class concerns were obviously going to be more dominant in an election when they make up a higher share of voters.
Unless you were in a battleground state, you can not conceive of the firehose of political ads, all entirely negative, run by the Republicans.
By Nov. 4 anyone with no other source would have thought that an army of transgender Mexican drug gangs were invading across the southern border, and that the price of food was resulting in famine conditions across the US.
I thought that anti-transgender ad (the one where Harris looks like she’s smugly saying prisoners will get free transgender care under her presidency) were very effective. They ran them incessantly during football games and the World Series and targeted just the people they were trying to appeal to.
Yup. They were cringe-worthy bad but I can't help but think they were effective.
I don’t deny what you’re saying. I just think it’s great that our country’s voters are so comfortable that their top concern is the - 2? 4? - prisoners nationwide who have gotten transgender care plus the - dozen? hundred? Utah claimed to only have 4 statewide, so I’m extrapolating - boys playing girls’ sports in high schools.
Can’t wait to see what Nextdoorian scourges we tackle after Trump gets rid of all the immigrants, LGBTs and Arabs, as well as putting women and blacks back in their place.
I think the target audience was low information trans-phobic young men. And I think what they fear is lusting after a woman and finding out they are trans, thereby proving they themselves are gay. Also, I think “trans” is a cipher for gay hatred which is otherwise frowned upon.
The free operations for trans prisoners isn't just about the handful of people directly involved. It's about taxpayer-financed priorities. And "boys" playing on "girls'" teams isn't just about the "boys" but about the "girls" who would as a result have their accomplishments superseded by biologically stronger contestants. What I'm saying is that it isn't just the trans individuals who are affected, in the view of those would are troubled by such things.
Yes. I don't watch TV except sports (typical male, extremely frustrating to TV execs), and the transgender ads are the only ones I remember seeing.
Good point. I live in NY and don't watch much network TV at all, and internet ads are tailored to each one of us. I only saw political ads when some site like Crooks and Liars ran one. And that firehose of ads was to people who were already firehosed by Fox News and Sinclair etc.
We’ve all heard republicans say racial divisiveness was aggravated when Obama was elected. Really.
And so it was in this election. The common issue with three of the four issues Kevin noted is America’s original sin…..racism. It’s the republican southern strategy on steroids. Plus an African American candidate who also was a woman.
I don’t think it will ever go away. Sad to say we aren’t the country and never will be the country many of us hoped for.
I agree. The Dems didn't nominate a white guy and it surely cost them millions of votes.
The Dems didn't nominate a white guy and it surely cost them millions of votes.
It's possible. I do think that one under the radar issue (one that understandably is seldom discussed, because it's an extremely uncomfortable topic) is Hispanic-African American racial tension. This is hardly a secret to anyone who has studied urban issues—it's a pretty old dynamic. Also, my theory is that Black candidates code "further left" in the eyes of a lot of voters than white candidates with identical policy positions. Like, I have to believe Democrats might have won that Wisconsin Senate seat in 2022 had Mandela Barnes been a white dude.
The Orange Guy won against a White woman whom the media had been tearing down for years and who was sandbagged at the last minute by the FBI. Then he lost against a fairly ordinary-pol White man who was VP to a Black man. Then he won against a Black woman who was VP to that White man. He did not change his persona or a lot of his campaign issues between campaigns.
Do any particular ... themes suggest themselves? Oh and btw he is a flagrant misogynist and adjudicated rapist.
I don't like it either, but a substantial segment of the American electorate -- of ALL races -- simply will not vote for a woman for President.
I'm afraid you're right about sexism and misogyny.
This. Until I see indications to the contrary, the simplest explanation for Americans failing this simple, simple test is that too many (both male and female voters) cannot accept a woman as POTUS.
Needless to say, we always want the simplest "explanation."
(In this case, the simplest explanation for why "Americans" aren't as good or as moral as we are.)
And it was common knowledge that Americans would never vote for a black man as President, not so long ago.
You forgot that TFG is also an adjudicated racist, per the FHA consent agreement over discriminatory renting.
SO many crimes to keep track of ...
Well, no matter. He'll pardon himself. And the SC will declare it unreviewable because the pardons were scribbled on an OFFICIAL White House paper napkin.
The sad thing is that with a quick read of your comment, I thought you had a typo with racist substituting for rapist. But finishing your comment, you did indeed mean racist and further you were correct. But depressingly enough, rapist would have been completely accurate and correct as well.
Lying about wokenness has been the vogue among Republicans, certainly.
No, children have not been subject to surgeries to make them trans.
No, medical intervention is only for those who've suffered for years.
No, CRT/DEI is not taught in public school - and no, it doesn't teach white kids to be guilty.
No, the Haitians were legal immigrants, no they didn't eat someone's pets.
It's just all lies, all the way down to,
Yes, Bud Light gave beer to a trans woman. Just like they'd been doing for thirty years. Are you a bigot or something?
There's a bunch of lies on the left, too, such as 'Harris took a turn to the right'. What turn? They lie about that, too.
It's all aggravating.
+1
Though inflation is down, prices keep going up. Other than gasoline, which varies greatly, most prices are likely never coming down much at all, and people feel that on a daily basis, no matter what happens to their paycheck. Immigration may be down, but the number of immigrants continue to grow. Your charts don't reflect cumulative effects. And I don't underestimate the fear-mongering Trump has perpetrated in the battleground states.
In the aggregate prices *always* go up. This is not a phenomenon unique to the period 2020-2024. Saying something like "this doesn't reflect cumulative effects" fails to account for why voters do not care about the cumulative effects of consumer prices increasing their entire lives until inflation ticks up, suddenly care about them once inflation goes up to 7-8%, and then don't stop caring even after it falls back down to 2% as usual.
Hysteresis/hysteria
+1
It's selective hearing: you say Inflation, you (and Dems and intellectuals) hear Inflation RATE. GOP & low info voters hear Prices. Inflation Down to these people means Prices Down. Which obviously they are NOT so they just tune you out about it and/or say Fake News.
To get them to be ok with Inflation (Rate) Down, it'd have to be WAAAY down or going negative (!) for many months (if not years) and get prices back to some acceptable level. I'm not talking $0.25/gal gas (ya, that was a thing not all THAT long ago in the Time Before aka the 60's) that some of us DO remember but food that kinda matches wages is what people want. Unless Trump dictates price controls (or strong arms Big Ag to drastically reduce prices) nothing is going to change BUT Joe SixPack showed da libz (and, uh, that loud black woman (!)) and will be happy with whatever comes. Trump and the GOP will ride the business cycle, like the GOP always does, and JD will likely have an easy ride to HIS 8 years in office.
People don't want to be judged on being a bigot. Trump gave them the freedom to not care. Higher prices aren't going anywhere but hey, they can hate without remorse.
This also. As Lyndon Johnson observed, they REALLY want someone to look down on, but they HATE being called out for it.
These are not the hallmarks of emotional maturity or a developed intellect btw, and they CERTAINLY don't want to hear THAT.
This is exactly right. Most people don’t know anything about inflation rates, they just know prices went up a lot really quickly. Even though we know prices won’t go down, that’s the only thing that would convince them inflation is down, in the short term. After a few years of normal, barely noticeable price increases the sting of watching prices rise sharply will wear off and inflation will be ok.
I even heard some woman being interviewed who said something like "sure, we're making more now, but these food prices are way too high." IOW, our pay has been adjusted based on the current value of a dollar, but food prices should still be based on the value of a dollar four years ago.
Same thing in the early 1980s. Reporters went around asking people in the grocery store how they felt about lower inflation and they didn't believe it was lower. 'Prices haven't gone down so inflation is as bad as ever' was the general theme.
It's simpler than any of that.
It's just vibes.
Democrats were not “rejected” they were “dejected”
When the numbers become clearer my bet is Trump did about as well as 20 and got a few hundred thousand more votes from hispanics. Maybe some incremental gains among independents.
Everywhere you look dem turnout was flat.
He didnt beat us, we took a dive.
Rather than strike up the standard circular firing squad soundtrack a better question is why was the vote share lower among the bloc with the higher percentage of total voters?
Why did our side sit it out?
Do we not believe our own narrative of Magas threat to civilization?
It was rigged. Dems voted but there votes were "lost". Isn't that what happened to the Repubs in 2020?
I've read quite a bit about how podcasts were successfully weaponized by the Trump campaign. Young men have been disaffected for a while, they are being outclassed by women in nearly all areas. They have limited economic prospects unless they are outstanding in tech/finance and that limits their access to potential mates.
I think you have to consider the very high turn out of young males who've listened to way too much Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and have developed a misogynistic world view that keeps them from getting laid.
I think the not getting laid part comes first. FWIW some attributed Jesse Ventura winning the governorship of Minnesota to appealing to this same type of young man. Too bad it wasn't Jesse instead of Trump running for President. The country would be much better off.
"Young men have been disaffected for a while, they are being outclassed by women in nearly all areas."
What is the evidence for this statement, beyond the incels and femcels desperately wanting it to be true, for their own opposing reasons? More women than men go to college, but the women at the margin are getting shit degrees that don't even cover their student loans.
In some metro areas young women earn more than young men, but I have yet to see a national comparison. And such a comparison would be hard to do, at least because low-earning women may choose to leave the workforce and take care of children, while low-earning men are unlikely to do that. So that will artificially inflate the average earnings of the remaining women.
I go with racism and misogyny instead of immigration and wokeness. Woke has a tinge of racism as I remember woke comes from the Black community. We can say woke but we can't say N*****ger.
NPR mentioned it but a lot of Michigan Trump voters also pulled the level for Elissa Slotkin for Senate.
Misogyny? Meh.
I think a woman president is far different than a woman Senator. The number of women in the senate didn't break into double digits till 2001. I guess the tolerance for women in government has increased, but it has its limits. A woman as POTUS apparently is it.
A Senator is a representative. The President is the Daddy of the country. A woman in office would upset the patriarchal order instituted by God. Maybe Hillary Clinton got more votes because she was seen as a more strict cool calculator like Angela Merkel and Thatcher, and not a warmer looser unconditional love mother type like Harris.
Surprised Kevin didn’t cite the fact that Kamala didn’t have enough detailed policy papers or do enough mainstream media interviews. Those obviously lost her 10m votes right there.
I’ve been having success with conservatives with the following with respect to transgender issues:
A: Why is it any of your damned business? It’s a free country.
B: Who gives a shit where someone pisses as long as they don’t splatter?
The swear words are necessary to put you on their plane.
When they inevitably babble “The children!” stop them and say “Ok, let’s establish the baseline for the government butting into family matters. Note we must use the same standards for guns in the home, vaccinations, home schooling, and cult rituals”.
Racism and mysogyny, but mostly mysogyny. A number of Republicans couldn't stand the thought of voting for Trump, so they didn't. A similar number of Democrats that previously voted for Biden couldn't stand the thought of voting for a Black woman, so they voted for Trump. The net result was that Trump got about the same number of votes as in 2020, just from a different subset of the population.
Yes, being a woman and also a child of black and brown immigrants was a double or maybe triple whammy for Harris.
The four reasons given aren't wrong, but they're not quite at the root level.
My theory: Dems spend too much time communicating to select, narrow constitueincies and not enough time talking about big-picture principles. And, sometimes, they fail to talk enough at all.
From the list, inflation and immigration were major issues over the past four years. The Biden administration may have taken absolutely perfectly targeted actions to respond to both and both are now under control. But the administration spent way too little time talking to the public about these probems and explaining what they were doing about them and why.
The too woke/lost touch points are also communication errors. Dems advocate for justice (at times anyway, though not always or consistently) for trans people, LGBTQ+, ethinic minoirites, migrants, people accused of crimes, and on and on.
Your ordinary working class voter (mostly white, but also black or Latino) hears this list of Dem priorities and realizes that he or she is none of the above. The list of urgencies doesn't include folks who aren't any of these disadvantaged groups. Then the implication is that the Dems care about all sorts of people--but only the others.
My opinion? Dems should take pains to paint every advocacy for the marginalized in terms of broad, all-emcompassing principles. Tax-paying, working, middle-of-the-road folks also feel like the system is unfair, but they also hear Dems talk about how its unfair to some. The proposed solutions start to feel like a zero-sum proposition in which the unfairness can only be resolved by demanding more concessions from many and benefits given to a few.
Our greatest liberal leaders of the past taught us that things like fairness and equality can't be reserved for some people but not others. We have equality only when it covers everybody. We gotta explain it that way.
+1
If you're explaining, you're losing. It really is as simple as that. Republicans are good at campaigning and terrible at governing. Democrats are good at governing and terrible at campaigning.
I'd add one more I think major motivator: Trump's base and many base-adjacent Republicans (wrongly) believe Trump is being judicially persecuted. They are pissed, as Fox tells them to be. Remember when Clinton was impeached and his approval ratings went up? Same thing at work now. And they felt it was their duty to save him from prison by turning out to return him to office.
Except that the same critique you made of inflation applies to wokeness as well - Democrats were way more conspicuously "woke" in 2022 than they were in 2024, when they were all aggressively trying to dial it back and run away from stuff like "defund the police" etc.
If you just dislike trends in identity politics or think we have too much immigration, you can just say that and believe it without having to claim it matters on electoral grounds.
Logic & issues have very little to do with it. Republicans & their owners are way better at engaging peoples lizard brain. Take the despair & emptiness of peoples lives and channel it into hate & fear of the "other". Target all "othered" groups (religion, political party, gender, race, nation origin, etc) and only a couple of those need to resonate with a given voter. Add to that mis & dis information on issues and you have successfully weaponized peoples ignorance & emotions in order to demonize a political party & win elections.
"So for all of us, the question is: What changed between 2022 and 2024? "
2022 voter turnout: 46.8%
2024 voter turnout: 65%
About a third of voters in 2024 didn't vote in 2022. Maybe they voted in 2020, or maybe there's little overlap between people who voted in 2020 but not in 2022, and people who did not vote in 2020 but did in 2024.
It's possible not a single voter changed their minds across all three elections and all that changed is WHO voted. That seems unlikely, but without data, any other claims are suspicious.
Did the undecided go for the candidate they knew over the one they didn't? Or were they unpersuaded by Harris presenting herself as a "change candidate" because she was too tied to Biden, or unpersuaded because they didn't hear or read any of that?
Everything I've seen suggests independents were the swing vote and the ones who picked Trump over Harris say they chose mainly on the basis of the economy. Where is someone undecided about a vote weeks before the election likely to get facts about the economy?
The basic point here is important. In 2022, 108 million people voted in House races. In 2024, the total vote at present stands at 145 million and counting.
These are substantially different electorates. A whole different type of "demographic" shows up to vote in presidential years, in addition to the regulars who show up for off-year elections.
Comparing 2022 to 2024 is a case of comparing apples to apples plus a truckload of kumquats. It's a very shaky type of comparison.
Also (perhaps mainly), the Republicans running for Congress in 2022 were largely right-wing wackos and were therefore rejected (though not by high enough margins to satisfy me). Unlike Trump, they didn't have the force of personality or whatever you ascribe to Trump that would have made them undefeatable..
If Harris had pulled a victory by getting 1-2% more in WI, MiCH and PA we would not be having this conversation. Such are the vagaries of politics but it helps maintaining some perspective. As to the House, the numbers reflect tightening in many non-swing districts but the reality is that the Ds have flipped 7 seats and Rs have flipped 6 including 3 in gerrymandered North Carolina. In looking at the results so far I can easily see a 218-217 R House though the number may end up 220-215. IOW, D stand to gain seats but really it is a wash. As to the missing voter, it is real, my country (pop. 1.2 mill) voting participation went from 80% to 70%. One more thing, there is no one cause for the results, all played a part, immigration, inflation, Hamas, even TG, all amplified by Fox news with an assist from the rest of the media. Recall that Biden approval ratings turned south after the Afghanistan withdrawal which was wrongly portrayed by all the media. That said, Biden incapacity, was a real anchor. So to conclude, pick your poison, but I will say that Harris campaign never stood a chance in this environment but her canditature probably save many House seats and probably 3 Senate seats.
Thank you. Kamala Harris is a hero and a saint for sticking to her commitment to honesty and "the possible" in her campaign.
She was called a prostitute -- and not "metaphorically" -- by a rapist, cretinous, though she has a JD from Hastings, and a lazy vacuous climber when she is feared by her opponents for her preparation wherever she goes.
Could she have lied more and done better? It's not knowable, but with the exception of the silliness about not taxing "tips", she outlined a policy plan DIRECTLY aimed at improving the lives of lower-income/wealth families.
The nation chose a resentment-addled, imminently senile thug to lead itself and is stuck with consequences.
P.S. the word is "candidaCY".
Thanks for that - I was getting it from Spanish “candidatura” (just explaining).
The Trump engineered withdrawal from Afghanistan failed by one single suicide bomber who got through, then Republican lies about what we left there and all the rest.
With the huge amount of right-wing media (Fox, X, Sinclair Broadcast Group, etc) that are controlled by right-wing billionairs, it is no surprise that the majority of the people live in a bubble of disinformation. The choice the people made reflects that.
Apples to Oranges comparison
Presidential elections are not the same electorate turnout as off-season elections, you really need to compare like-to-like (as now particularly Democrats over-perform in off-season contra history due to the flip to having a higly edcuated base, the white collar profesional classes that are higher-turn-out in off-season)
The top four contenders Drum lists are in fact all of a piece and treating them as discrte factors is erroneous as clealry this was a mult-factor (sadly typically Drum error where he is always de-facto treating issues as mono-causal rather than multi-causal, a profound analytical bias he has) - any outside observered can see this as quite inter-related and in fact one can see it in the Democrats (formal and informal Democrats) reactions and comments - inflation minimised and denied, 'wokey woke' language and agenda unpopularity poopooed and academically nit-picked in denial, same relative to immigration and crime - all heavily informed by the views and experiences of the Uni-educated white collar "base" (which the Democrats won rather handily) while losing the under 50k working class demographics including expanded bleed out beyond white working class.
A general package of impressions (fair or not, clealry evident to any open eyed observer) hat turned off / did not attract non-core voters.
His ongoing inflation minimisation simply ignores the data that shows (a) differential socio-economic class impacts, (b) sub-national variation, (c) the long-standing observation that inflation perceptions in populations are heavily lagged and not tied to technical inflaiton but their memory benchmark of what prices "should be" (i.e. in fact expect disinflation until the price level normalises in memory).
I really believe too many people are over-thinking the outcome of this election. Just consider these figures:
The election with the extrordinary result requiring explanation was 2020, not 2024. Compared to Obama and Clinton, Harris did very well in getting out Democratic voters. All the talk about Democrats "losing the working class" and so on are bullshit. There hasn't been a loss of Democratic votes to the Republican candidate; MAGA Republicanism inspired millions of Americans to get out and vote for the first time in 2020. And unlike the even greater number of new voters Biden got that year, they turned out again last week.
Instead of interminable navel-gazing about "what Democrats are doing wrong", people should spend more time trying to explain what Trump has done to get such an unprecedented following, topping McCain and Romney's numbers by about 20%. That's a huge political phenomenon, and at the end of the day I'm not sure there's anything Democrats could have done to stop it.
Currently the NY Times has the vote count at 144.8 M, and calling that 93% complete, so 155.7 M in the end. They just published an article where they say the AP is estimating that the final count will only be 700K fewer than 2020. The vote currently sits at 70.4 M for her, and 74.3 M for him, with that 3.9 M difference expected to narrow.
So, no really significant drop off from 2020, with her having a decent chance of beating Trump's 2020 numbers. It's just that enough of the swing voters switched from D to R to make a difference.
Looking at the latest numbers, it's probably down to <300 K votes difference in the "blue wall" states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that kept her from winning the electoral college. Oh, how I would have loved to have seen her eke out an EC vote win/popular vote loss. (Although that would have definitely led to lawsuits, SCOTUS ratfuckery, and who knows what violence from the MAGA faithful.)
By historic standards, this doesn't really seem like a rout. Relative to any sane person's belief of "how the hell does he get anything more than 30%???", yeah, it is.
We are a deeply screwed up country.
Trump wasn't on the ballot in 2022 and he was in 2024. End of story. Those trends don't matter.
You can't compare mid-terms with presidential elections in the best of times, but you especially can't when people are so focused on the top of the ticket.
To answer your questions:
1). Trump wasn't on the ballot. It's clear MAGA is basically a fan club, especially in red states and brings out voters who normally don't vote. Before anyone declares any kind of "realignment" let's see what JD Vance can do on his own.
2). A mid-term, special election or referendum is a different kind of election than a Presidential election. That's what the whole liberal data crowd never quite got. It's a bigger pool of voters and especially big when you have a candidate whose is a draw to the polls.
The thing of it is had the Dems did poorly in 2022 Biden probably would have stepped down earlier than he did. And why would he have since the Dems kept the Senate and did well in Governor and state legislative races in 2022? He was entitled to run and defend his record, especially if things were improving. I just wish he was 10-20 years younger.
If turnout was 65 percent this year then far below 2020, so many did not vote and that hurt Harris more than Trump.
I agree, the GOP ran a sexist, racist campaign and got away with it because people will not accept a female President and Harris was vulnerable to such a campaign because of who she is and there was enough economic anxiety/uncertainty to reinforce such a campaign. It's hard for that shit to work when times are good. Hell, that rally at MSG may well have helped Trump,who knows?
People who want to blame Biden can go fuck themselves. Remember he beat Trump and did so with the most votes anyone has ever gotten for President. If things were really bad Dems would have suffered in the mid-terms as well. They didn't. As I said, if he was just 10-20 years younger he would have won again. It's a shame.
"... Still, those things were at more of a fever pitch in 2022 than today. So why were Democrats in general so roundly rejected?"
It takes time for a group of people (like for example white Southern Democrats) to shift from one party to another. Some go on voting for their previous party out of habit and inertia. But as their friends and neighbors switch eventually they do too. So 2024 could just be a continuation of the trend from 2018 to 2022. Although apparently tapering off some.
Orange Guy, and compatriots yelled about immigration, transgenders and inflation every second of every day. D's looked at them like what, are there ever 5 transgender athletes where this is a problem? From the advertising I'd have sworn that every day 10m transgender athletes from Mexico were breaking down the impenetrable wall due to their mighty transgender muscles so they can take those strawberry picking jobs from hardworking Americans.
Sometimes, if people won't do their homework, or show evidence of an IQ above room temperature in Celsius, there's nothing you can do.
Since this place is lacking in any thumbs up/down function I just want to again thank the thoughtful readers/commenters for an excellent discussion. Not that there might have been as usual a thumbs down or two along the way.
Meanwhile, no extreme politically motivated fake news Fox and Sinclair, plus various right wing internet guys, and this disaster would have had no chance in happening. But as Bette Davis once said in a film I can't post a clip from either, "But ya ARE Blanche, ya ARE in that chair."
Democrats have to dive into that sewer and swim somehow.