As we continue to argue about why Kamala Harris lost, I want to remind everyone that only about 3% of the electorate switched from D to R this year—less in swing states. So regardless of whether you think the culprit was cultural issues or the economy or misogyny or Latino defections or a bad campaign—no matter which it is, it only had to influence 2-3% of the voting public. You can make a plausible argument for practically anything doing that.
UPDATE: But wait! What about lower turnout? If you account for that you get to about 4%. Still a very small number.
This is a particularly bad time to engage in navel gazing.
Yes. I see no point in the circular firing squad, particularly since there's already a 360 degree bombardment from the right wing and mainstream media (but I repeat myself.)
Trump received 27.7% of eligible voters votes in 2016. He got 31.26% in 2020. If the electorate grew as much between 2020 and 2024 as it did between 2016 to 2020 he would need to get to 77,600,000 to get to 31.26% of eligible voters votes in 2024. That means he needs about 1.1 million more votes as of 11/16/2024.
Overall Trump didn't get more popular.
See below, deathawaits (sorry I didn't read your post before writing mine). I'm not sure why your numbers are a little different than mine (I get 29.2% of the voting-age population for Trump), but the point is the same. For all practical purposes, Trump got the same proportion of votes he got in 2020, but turnout for Harris bombed.
I guess maybe the people who were so excited at her huge rallies figured that their cheers and screams were enough to put her in the White House.
Congratulations, Democrats . . . again.
I am imputing the voting age population at 248,296,205.
Approximately 237,849,631 in 2020 and 227,403,057 in 2016.
This all just pisses me off. I convinced at least 20 people in a dead red district, including 2 who had never voted Democratic (first eligible election 1988 & 1992) to vote for Kamala. I only kinda want to know how first time voters turned out. All of the 18-22 crowd I know are student athletes.
Fuck you. Why is it the Democrats fault a third of the electorate tunes out?
The democrats successfully turned out a bunch of tuned out voters in 2020 but failed to turn out those same voters in 2024.
Exactly. Or those voters, 7.6 m of them, after four years of chaos and instability and unignorable characterological decrepitude, in 2020 were open to being turned out. 2024, not so much.
Trump has locked in his peeps, probably for a generation. If non-authoritarians want to achieve lasting power - at this point the only kind that counts - we must overcome this.
Oh, I get it, you're saying Covid was a devious, dastardly Democratic plot to turn out voters. Too bad they blew it all on sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads in the next presidential.
Actually, Kevin, that's incorrect. The vote totals show that Trump's total was only 3% more than in 2020, but Harris's was DOWN by 9% compared to Biden in 2020. If you adjust for population growth, Trump's total was less than 1% higher but the Democratic candidate's was down by a whopping 11%.
So it was not 3% of voters switching from the Democrat to Trump; it was Democratic voters sitting on their asses and NOT VOTING. If HALF of Joe Biden's voters in 2020 had turned out for Harris in 2024, we would not be talking about how quickly GOP Senators would be rolling over and confirming Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr for cabinet positions; we would be talking about when Donald Trump would, at long last, go to trial for his crimes.
There are no "vote totals" at this point. Votes are still being counted and recorded.
Here in California Kamala lost about 2 million votes compared to Joe’s total. Trump got about the same as 2020. There are currently 93% of the votes counted. Things aren’t going to change much.
Technically we have to finish counting before we can be certain about what percentage of votes have been counted.
According to this web site:
https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/unprocessed-ballots-status
(Link provided by (Crissa)
There are 789k votes remaining to be counted. Harris has just under 9 million votes. Biden had 11 million votes to Trump’s 6 million. Trump’s count will be nearly identical to his 2020 count. I don’t know why so many Biden voters didn’t turn out for Harris. I’m sure lots of people will offer opinions.
House races still TBD, inc 2 in Calif.
District: Current Margin (~90% or more votes counted)
AK-1: R +3%
CA-13: R +1.1%
IA-1: R +0.019%
CA-45: R +0.02%
OH-9: D +0.33%
There are currently 93% of the votes counted. Things aren’t going to change much.
Well, one thing that's going to change is (you heard it hear): Trump's PV total is going to drop below 50%. He's at 50.1% nationally with 98% of the vote counted, which means several million more votes to tally.
I'll take my rays of sunlight wherever I can find them.
Those weren't more 'Democratic' votes for Biden, those were the rarely motivated to vote who will always need some kind of extra inspiration and who will almost never find it. Last time was the anomaly.
Last time was the anomaly.
Special voting procedures due to the pandemic helped juice turnout in 2020. I recall one commenter mentioning that in New Jersey, everyone was sent a ballot in the mail in 2020, and this didn't happen in 2024. Stuff like that.
Another great reason why Election Day should be a holiday, if only to focus popular interest.
It was Democratic voters sitting on their asses and NOT VOTING.
This was nearly all in non-competitive states. Harris's totals exceeded Biden's in six of the seven swing states, I think. So yes, some Democratic voters in places like Oklahoma and Massachusetts sat this one out.
It's the media. You cannot win an election when the media refuses to accurately tell people the news out of fear of looking "biased". It is antithetical to democracy.
True, so true.
It is so, so, so much the media that I say bullshit to anyone's analysis that fails to consider media and disinformation as one big reason Kamala lost. The overwhelming bulk of coverage of the election saw the candidates and the issues through Republican framing. Even the post-election analysis is doing the same thing.
And no tv network complained about ads which said straight up false and hateful slander, either.
What's with that?
One need only look at recent coverage of Trump to see how much major media is biased in favor of casting Trump as not only a normal politician, but as a strong and successful one.
For example, the NYtimes's banner headline the other day on Trump's objectively idiotic SecDef and AG nominations characterized them instead as a "show of strength," and the NYtimes has subsequently covered the noms as "worrying Washington insiders" but "popular with Trump voters."
Similarly, count the number of times erstwhile respectable media has mindlessly repeated the phrase "Biden crime family," in reporting about how Trump has promised to go after President Biden and his son(s? and maybe grandkids?), I guess because those are the words Trump uses. Which makes it sound like a good thing--who doesn't want crime families prosecuted?
The responsible thing to do would be to report that Trump is promising to abuse the justice system to corruptly prosecute people he doesn't like, followed by a series of quotes from law professors and opposition politicians about how that would be illegal, immoral, etc.
And it's not even the political coverage. The reporting on inflation/the economy was also terrible.
We did in 2020
If one party has a media handicap, yet wins some elections, that doesn't mean the handicap isn't real and need to be addressed.
We did in 2020
Yep. And in 1990, 1992, 1996, 1998, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2018, 2020, 2022.
Media coverage of politics in the US is often lacking, but the reality is it doesn't stop Democrats from having good elections when conditions warrant. And if you look at the above years, you'll notice every single one of them featured a "fundamentals" picture that was quite positive for Democrats. If anything I believe 2024 was "the revenge of the fundamentals" election. It wasn't the media: it was that a critical mass of voters (a small portion, as Kevin rightly points out) was negatively impacted by higher prices. It's true the US economy was (is!) very far indeed from being a disaster. The inflation problem was fairly minor in historical terms (substantially offset by higher wages). But it didn't have to be "major" given that we're a 50-50 nation, and so only small moves of the needle can be decisive.
The media was worse, though.
Assuming that media coverage and the associated chosen framing and narrative are the same every year might be convenient for your narrative, but it doesnt seem to jive with actual events.
Obviously, small shifts in the media focus can explain a few percentage points.
It’s not remotely obvious that “small” shifts in media focus can move millions of votes. But even if this is valid, it’s certainly not obvious such a shift occurred this past cycle. Mind you I don’t think media reportage this cycle was great. But I don’t think it’s ever great.
Well, I guess you are just wrong.
We just havent seen the kind of 'up is down, black is white' reporting on the economy from the mainstream and obviously the mainstreaming and sanewashing of Trumps crimes and approach to democracy are also a new development that we didnt see inthe past.
+1
This.
Remember this media is a privately owned entity. How dare you tell then how to act, have you no decency? When did the country become totalitarian?
Must I really place a marker?
Funny, it is a widely held belief among Conservatives that the main-stream media is strongly biased against them. And I definitely see lots of media coverage that strongly favors my side (the Dems), so much to the point that I sometimes roll my eyes and skip stories.
I think its more likely that some voters did not buy what we were selling this time.
I also think that the scale of the Trump victory is exaggerated in popular imagination. Most notably, his advantage in the popular vote (1.7%?) will be smaller percentage-wise than what Hilary beat him by in 2016 (2.1%). It's not like America overwhelmingly became pro-Trump this time...
"Funny, it is a widely held belief among Conservatives that the main-stream media is strongly biased against them."
That is because the media stays much closer to reality than "conservatives" (presumably you actually mean Republicans/trumpists/right-wingers) would like.
"If HALF of Joe Biden's voters in 2020 had turned out for Harris in 2024, we would not be talking about ...."
That doesn't sound right.
Actually, you are right -- my statement was misleading.
What I meant was that if half of the Dem voters who stayed home in 2024 had shown up for Harris, she would have won. In 2020, Biden got 81.3 million votes, but this year Harris got only 73.7 million. That's a difference of 7.6 million. If half of those 7.6 million had voted, it would have put Harris at 77.5 million, topping Trump by 1.2 million.
Of course, that doesn't tell us how the Electoral College totals would have turned out, but at least she would have beat him in the popular vote, and she would have had a chance if that boost in turnout had been concentrated in the swing states.
Thanks for spotting my error.
...that doesn't tell us how the Electoral College totals would have turned out...
With some ballots still to count in the blue wall states (MI, WI, PA), the margins there are about 237,000 votes from flipping the election. That's pretty close.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how did she lose Georgia by such a large margin?
Thank god we were spared the following Q&A after a different outcome last Tuesday:
Q: Madam Vice President, even though you won the Electoral College, you lost the popular vote. What do you say to the people who want you to concede the election to Donald Trump anyway. After all, look what happened in Georgia!
A: This is what I say: I'm the president-elect, and all of you can go fuck yourself.
(Actually, that would have been fun.)
For what it's worth, she lost Georgia by just over two points.
President Biden would have kept those states on the Blue side.
What I meant was that if half of the Dem voters who stayed home in 2024 had shown up for Harris, she would have won
I dunno. It would've been closer, but the scenario you describe sounds like 2016, when padded Democratic margins in deep blue or deep red states enable the nominee to win the popular vote, but not the Electoral College. Again, Harris generally beat Joe's 2020 vote totals in the swing states.
But maybe in the scenario you describe, Dems take the House or save Bob Casey's seat.
I was wondering when someone would point this out.
IMHO, the Democrats would have won if they put someone out with half a brain (another point I haven't seen touched on by the left.) Sorry. But Kamala never was able to say ANYTHING about ANYTHING.
The left has to take the electorate more seriously.
Good God, Mr. or Ms. Troll. Did you even watch one of her speeches?
Am I dreaming or did Trump hold a rally and sway to the music for 40 minutes? Please someone tell me what incredible speech Trump gave at any point ever. Fuck that, tell me one time Trump was coherent for an entire speech, er paragraph, er sentence. {No, I have not figure out how to do strikethrough.)
🙂
No, no, Al Hack up there is right! Harris was notably (suspiciously?) silent on many critical key issues that Americans Care Deeply About!
For example, while Trump was out there every day telling voters that he thought that Hannibal Lecter was both late and great, I don't recall Harris ever taking a position one way or another.
How does Kamala Harris compare to Donald Trump?
Don’t feed AlTrollqa
Poll: What's the worst outcome of the 2024 election?
A. Donald Trump will become president.
B. The endless arguments over why Kamala lost and why Kamala and Democrats suck.
Based on what we've seen so far, the needle is pointing to B.
Can everyone please shut up and go away now?
I was bracing for A, but B comes as a surprise.
Can everyone please shut up and go away now?
Getting politics hobbyists to stop talking about politics is harder than getting junkies to stop shooting smack. And I notice you haven't followed your own command!
But yes, I reckon 99% of these hot takes from the third week week of November, 2024, won't stand the test of time. They seldom do.
Actually, I have not engaged in any arguments about why Kamala and Democrats suck. It's not that they're above criticism. I've shared a few thoughts about where they could have improved. But the premise that they suck, and therefore lost, is bogus. That's why I want everyone to shut up about it.
Elections are zero sum events. Lose by one vote and you still get tyranny.
It's the same story it's been for decades. The Democrats win or lose on turnout. The Democrats have more supporters but Republican supporters average more motivated, with the result that Republicans have much less worry about whether or not their supporters will actually vote. The Democrats' first campaign priority should always be to motivate their supporters to vote, and getting new supporters should always take second place. Given a choice between a policy that will motivate the base and a policy that may sway some independents or soft Republicans, go with the policy that will motivate the base.
That's why efforts to be "moderate" fail; they don't motivate the base. I suspect that's why Harris failed; she relied too much on trotting out people like Cheney and on back-pedalling on progressive policies she's supported in the past, and turned off the base without picking up enough independents to make up for the loss. I would suggest that an unabashedly progressive platform would be more likely to win than a centrist platform.
I don’t know… the base always turns out because they are most engaged. They are happy with any win. I know I am.
To be clear, I would love to see a candidate with an "unabashedly progressive platform" win. But as someone who went around knocking on doors for George McGovern, and who has followed politics closely ever since, I've never seen any evidence that it's a winning strategy.
I've never seen it tried.
Mike-
While I agree with you I will go one further
I would like to see a Non-affiliated candidate who publishes his/her positions on abortion, the environment, the military etc. In fact, I'd like to see both democrat and republican monikers stripped from all candidates.
I betcha that makes MORE people stay at home.
Why?
There are too many folks out there who vote party as opposed to voting candidate. I can't tell you how many people I talked to who didn't understand either candidates position on key issues but voted because they were either D or R.
We are voting for labels rather than substance
When the Republican brand is Nutball and the Democrat brand is Sanity, I think it's okay to vote for the brand. You don't put an R next to your name if you are a sane candidate. While a non-sane candidate might put a D next to their name, in one case you know the candidate is insane and in the other you know the candidate will have a lot of pressure to act sane.
It's the same story it's been for decades. The Democrats win or lose on turnout.
This is deeply wrong.
Also chew on this. According to exit polls (which may be almost useless, I admit), it looks like the cohorts that failed to turn out in 2024 were Black and Hispanic women. And as for age, the fall in turnout was mostly in the 50-64 group.
Agreed, we still need to see what happened at the swing state level. But it's still beyond denying that Biden got 81.3 million votes in 2020 and Harris got only 73.7 million this year. Given the stakes of this election, that's pretty depressing.
And please spare me the insults to Harris. She was a spectacularly likable, intelligent, and experienced candidate. Trump is one of the most vile human beings I've ever seen, and stunningly ignorant to boot.
Are you from an alternative dimension?
- Likeable - did you see the videos of her cackling about throwing the parents of truants in jail?
- Intelligent - are you thinking about "What can be, unburdened by what has been"?
- Experienced - has she ever run against a Republican in a competitive race?
Your comment is as stupid as taking a Muslim influencer that bacon is a spice.
> Did you see the videos...
No, I don't watch Fox News taking short clips out of context. I watched SNL.
> Intelligent
I watched her debate against Trump.
> Experienced
She ran against Republicans in 2010, 2014, and 2016. You don't become the California General Attorney nor a California senator without defeating a Republican in an election.
> stupid
Yes, you are.
- Intelligent - are you thinking about "What can be, unburdened by what has been"?
Not much of an ear for prose, I see. You are one dumb MF.
+1 I think you got it spot on.
But it was a mandate!
I know, because all of the Republicans are telling me so.
Is it the higher percentage of undecided and independents voting for a third party in the swing states?
Trump outperformed the Senate candidate in WI and MI more than Kamala did. While she lost both states, both Democratic Senate candidates won. (One was re-elected, the other was not an incumbent.)
People love to play the blame game. In general and in politics specifically. Whether or not the blame is justified doesn't really matter.
President Biden would have beaten Trump. Thank you for screwing America, Nancy Pelosi.
Don’t feed this troll either.
+1
Yep. No one has crystal ball that will let us peer into the alternate universe where the Dems stuck with Biden, but the evidence we have strongly suggests Kamala Harris made it into a closer election. She's going to hold Trump to the lowest PV margin of any wining presidential candidate since 1968. He's going to end up taking less than 50% of the popular vote. And his coattails are basically non-existent, characterized by one of the weaker House elections for a winning candidate in US political history. (GOP Senate gains are almost entirely attributable to cyclical effects, Senate math, etc.)
Agree in re your analysis of GOP Senate gains.
Had Biden stayed in, he would have underperformed Biden 2020 by a lot more.
People are locked into their biases with their petty complaints. Some people complain that she was too liberal while others claim she was no different than Trump. Some say she should have cleaved herself off Biden while others say Biden should have quit sooner. Some believe she didn't earn the nomination while others say she didn't do interviews with the right groups and people.
That Harris was swept in all of the battleground states suggests that 3-4% of Americans -- the folks we call low-propensity/low-information voters -- had bought what Trump was selling.
Why would they buy his lies? Because they're low-propensity/low-information Americans. The messaging war on immigration and the economy was lost a year ago, not last month or the summer. Trump's narratives were repeated by many outlets and people and not well-countered, if at all. Ask yourself, who did marketing better, Biden or Trump? Trump sold NAFTA 2.0 as a big deal but it made just tiny changes.
Lots of groups and people are responsible. The only solution is to let these folks see the consequences of their choices so that it won't be repeated in the midterms. Beyond that, well, Americans have short memories.
How do you counter when the media fails to discern between fact and fiction.
This. The fact that we are all talking about "immigration" and border security at all is an example of agenda-setting divorced from the actual real-world experience of actual voters. I get inflation being something voters were upset about*--we all buy stuff, and are aware of prices, so yeah, people experienced it--but I doubt that really anybody (certainly not _millions_ of people) has any direct experience such that they'd even notice if X versus Y migrants entered/left this country.
I'm very much convinced that the only reason voters cared about immigration is because of the thousand-and-one reports on Crisis! At the Border! reinforced Trump's yammering about poisoned blood and pet-comsumption.
_______
*I disagree about how upsetting it was, and definitely disagree about the logic of being upset about inflation leading one to vote for Trump and his slew of extremely inflationary economic promises, etc.
"...the folks we call low-propensity/low-information voters -- had bought what Trump was selling."
You're exactly right. Every "man on the street" interview I saw or read showed precisely this. There were many factors at play in 2024, and they all count, but taking an Occam's Razor approach to fundamentals leads persuasively to your take.
"The only solution is to let these folks see the consequences of their choices..."
Yup. And them's gonna be some interesting consequences....
I wonder how many eligible voters were removed from the rolls.
Also, how many were moving during the election! While doing district walking, we were getting a large number of 'moved'. The deceased count I don't know if it advantaged anyone.
The Democrats self ghetto making in display. 3% going from Democrats (taking the statistic as is), the challenge is the Republians for larger bodies of voters are achieving switches, cycle on cycle. now thinnot merely voters not switching from you to winning back lost blocs. Ones written off by the activist base as impure heathens
I think the main problem we have is that voters don't like what's portrayed as the liberal vision of America.
How many discussions of virtually every political achievement do we describe as "the first X to win Y", where X is Black, Hispanic, gay, trans, Jewish, Asian, etc, rather than talking about their accomplishments?
How many people have had to sit through DEI classes at work or school that portray people as privileged by race, sex or ethnicity? Or that use ridiculous terms like "people of color" for huge swaths of the population that have nothing in common culturally?
How many articles can you find in the mainstream media that use the phrase white male, but not as implicitly negative?
On climate change, we seem to have relatively little conception of how difficult a problem decarbonizing the world is, and instead berate people for not solving it quickly.
Even with abortion, where we should have a significant advantage, we hurt ourselves by refusing to discuss what most people would think of as reasonable constraints, such as no fully elective abortions after 4 months?
Or that use ridiculous terms like "people of color" for huge swaths of the population that have nothing in common culturally?
Because people of no color punish them all alike for not being plain white?
So, we should be Republicans only slightly less so? I'm sure that's a winning strategy.
Sort of off thread but have to ask-
“Assuming” a big part of the GOP sweep was “high prices”, iiuc (big "if" 🙂 the only way to bring back the prepandemic prices would be to significantly reduce Demand, and the only way to do that is a recession bringing considerable unemployment, which is why I suspect neither side ever said specifically “how” they would lower prices.
I just don't see the promised tax cuts and reduced “gov red tape” translating to anything close to the price reductions the Walmart shopper voted for.
Or can they?
I have to respectfully disagree about this in light of the scum Con Don is. We lost against what is basically a corrupt monster. He's a catastrophe, not just a moderate , misguided Repub. There is that hardline 30 to 35% of his base that won't budge no matter what. Why was the race even close?
At the same time, I agree that too much finger pointing right now isn't the answer because it can cause more harm than good.
Harris didn't have a chance since she is both black and a woman. My own mother-in-law complained, "What's wrong with them, they couldn't even find a man to run?" Race and sexism was the strategy and these points illustrate it:
* The immigration controversy is really thinly veiled racism.
* At the end of the 2016 election, Hillary's team scolded Grump's team, explaining that they didn't stoop to using racism (and sexism?) to win.
* The disgusting "Your body, my choice, bitch!"
* Of course, Harris didn't get many votes from white men.
* Some Hispanic men couldn't stomach the idea of a woman president. (I suspect their religion causes that sexist attitude).
At the same time, we have to fight news nihilism. A lot of people don't know what to believe anymore, so they just listen to their misguided friends and family. Repubs have been striving for this for decades – it's part of their MO since the real facts in the news all too often decimate their ignorant beliefs. People who fall down into that silo can't be persuaded, and that's dangerous, as we see now, contending with the consequences. I don't know the answer to this, although I've been wrestling with it my entire adult life, and I'm not young. There used to be consequences for lying, not as much now. Yeah, Fox had to pay hundreds of millions for lying, and yet they're still around, still popular and still spewing misinformation as if that never happened. We seem powerless to it, but this can't go on.