Just a quick note: In the end, Democrats will probably¹ pick up two seats in the House of Representatives and their nationwide vote share will be nearly identical to 2022. They received 48.54% of the vote compared to 48.60% two years ago.
This is something to account for in any narrative about the lessons Dems need to learn from their loss this year. If the public has really turned against them, whether because of immigration or wokeness or policy feebleness or working class angst, why didn't this show up in congressional races?
There are potential answers to this question. But it needs to at least be addressed.
¹Adam Gray is likely to win his razor-thin race in California's 13th district, which would give Democrats a two-seat pickup. But it's still too close to call for sure.
You mean like "How can Trump win in a landslide, yet Congressional Republicans actually lost ground?"
Yeah, there's a simple answer to that, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to say it.
Trump is sui generis. Lots of ink (and bits) have been expended trying to explain his appeal, but that's true with every dictator (and wannabe). Why did people vote for Hitler? Or Mussolini? They stoke fear and resentment, then promise to solve the fake problem that they created. Only the details differ.
Except Trump *didn't* win in a landslide. When all the votes are finished being counted, he'll have less than 50% of the popular vote, and an electoral college victory similar to Biden's in 2020 and his own in 2016.
What's more, the states where Harris and Trump campaigned the most generally had *less* of a popular vote shift to Trump from 2020 than the states where they didn't campaign much.
I'm not going to pretend to "know what it all means", but I've seen electoral landslides (e.g., Reagan '84, Nixon '72) and this wasn't one.
+1 Not even close to a landslide.
(Sigh) I guess I did need to say it.
Plus of course Trump didn't "win in a landslide"/ He won by something like 1.5% of the popular vote. So the lesson is: Dem congressional candidates as a group were marginally more popular than they were 2 years, while the Dem presidential candidate this year was marginally less popular than the one from 4 years ago. Not much to be gleaned from that.
Biden won by 4.5%. Harris lost by 1.5%, that is a 6% swing. Marginal?
A 3% swing actually -3 for one +3 for the the other is a net 6% difference in the vote margin.
Whether it was immigration or the price of eggs, all that was easy to hang around Biden and Harris's necks and that's what people seem to have cared about. All other politics was local. It's also not inconceivable that some less-MAGA-y Trump voters intentionally split their tickets, thinking maybe it would help contain Trump's worst impulses while he magically fixed the expensive egg problem.*
*Narrator: "He was not going to fix the egg problem. Also, nothing was going to constrain his worst impulses."
Maybe there was ticket-splitting, but there certainly was a lot of down-ballot fall-off: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/republicans-win-democrats-loss-2024-election-rcna182448
Republican Senatorial candidates got many fewer votes in several swing states than Trump. Who votes without even bothering to vote for their Senator? These aren't Republican voters, they're not policy voters, maybe not even cultural-values voters, they're Trump voters, and they're voting for the personal characteristics he projects -- the pretend tough guy who dodged the draft; the 'successful' teevee businessman who actually bankrupted casinos .... I could go on, but you know all the kayfabe.
Anecdote but poll worker friends of mine said there were plenty of people who simply walked in, voted for Trump and left the rest of their ballot blank. People are morons and the people who really love Trump don’t seem to like Democrats or Republicans so why would they bother voting for either?
That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Better comparison is 2020, due to dem advantage in off cycle elections like 2022
If the public has really turned against them, whether because of immigration or wokeness or policy feebleness or working class angst, why didn't this show up in congressional races?
I've already addressed this for you multiple times in the comments, Kevin! LOL.
The "public" in the grand sense of that word, did not "turn against them." Trump/GOP had a modestly more favorable structure picture than Harris/Dems, most likely related to economic angst among a small portion of low-propensity persuadable voters (inflation hangover, spike in mortgage rates, etc)—especially Latino voters, I think, who I suspect have now become the new key swing voter cohort—and that was enough for a (again) very modest shift. But where Dems/Harris threw resources into the fight, in the seven swing states and in, yes, highly competitive House races, they were able to mostly* stop the bleeding: Harris beat Biden's 2020 popular vote totals in most of the swing states, and yes, Democrats have done well in House races.
* "Mostly" is doing some heavy lifting, obviously, in that Harris lost all seven swing states, but they were all quite narrow, and her ultimate loss to Trump, around 1.5% of the popular vote, is very narrow indeed by historical standards, and Trump, of course, has failed to win a popular vote majority.
We still very much continue to be a 50-50 nation. Neither party has enjoyed a truly thumping presidential cycle win in quite some time: Democrats going back to at least 2008 and arguably 1996, and the GOP not since 1988! The extremely evenly divided nature of our partisan divide is the real "political theory of everything" that swamps all other big picture trends in US politics. No doubt this phase won't last forever, but until it ends, we'll continue to see very tightly fought presidential elections, and, I suspect, very tough going for incumbency parties: when almost half the country won't even consider voting for your party, being the incumbent is no longer the advantage it was in 1964 or 1972 or 1984 or 1996.
One has to wonder what it will take for people to see through Trump's façade. If he does everything he says he's going to do (never a sure bet), we'll be in a recession by the end of 2025. Will that do it?
Mass deportation will result in concentration camps and family separation. Will that do it?
High tariffs will result in significant price increases and high inflation. Will that do it?
Of course, there are 40-45% of the people who won't see it no matter what, but will the 10% in the middle wake up to the massive blunder they made in voting for a clown?
Pick up all the seats you like, but if you don’t get more than half you don’t control the House.
It remains to be seen if Johnson in any meaningful sense will "control" the House. He's dealing with absolutely razor thin margins. I hope for his sake his members all get their flu and covid shots! And there have to be a modest number of Republican House members who only won narrowly (and maybe in a few cases even went for Biden over Trump?).
What has bugged me is this: why a narrow majority for Democrats in the Senate gave outsized power to centrist/Republican-leaning members, while a narrow majority for Republicans in the House gave outsized power to the most right-wing MAGA/QAnon types. The result is that right-of-center forces had more influence in both Houses.
Why couldn't Bernie Sanders or Squad types have exploited their position in the Democratic Senate, and why couldn't moderate Repubs in the House do likewise (unless, of course, there were none left).
Because Democrats try to govern, while Republicans/right-wing try to disrupt.
A small majority is easy to disrupt, i.e. gives power to the right-wing side.
The biggest threat to Speaker Johnson’s control of the House is the
FreedomFreakshow Caucus, not Covid.At this point Johnson is very possibly underwater. 220 minus three is 217, which is not a "majority" for a few votes. It's not clear if Waltz and Stefanik will resign before the new Congress assembles on January 3rd. If they do -- Gaetz is already gone and has said he won't return on Jan 3rd -- Johnson will have 219 votes, enough for comfortable election as Speaker. If they do resign before the new Congress begins, his margin will fall to 217, just two more than the Democrats' caucus. Any illness in the Republican side will make the vote that much more difficult.
We can all hope that Kathy Hochul has the good sense to set the New York election on the later Tuesday in the eighty to ninety day period after Stefanik resigns from her House seat.
Oh, c'mon Kevin, isn't it obvious? Harris lost because there's some things a real man simply isn't going to take lying down. Like, you know, being bossed by a woman. That's it. No more than that and that was quite enough. These people are tube worms.
Glaringly obvious. Trump ran against a woman and won. Then he ran against a man and lost. Then he ran against a woman and won. There's a lesson here and why is it so damned hard to process?
I don't buy it. If the opinion polls are at all accurate, the black female candidate did quite a bit better than the white male candidate was doing before he stepped aside.
If the opinion polls are at all accurate, the black female candidate did quite a bit better than the white male candidate was doing before he stepped aside.
And Harris also did very well among whites! Indeed, her margins (compared to Biden 2020) held up best in the whitest swing states, and were weakest in heavily Latino areas.
We'll have a better idea in six months' time (people should be very careful about cross-tabs this early), but certainly the evidence suggests that the cohort that Democrats tanked with the most was the Latino electorate. I think this fits with the "economic angst" explanation (which I realize is not widely accepted in these parts, but is nonetheless to me the Occam's razor explanation for the modest shift that ultimately doomed the Vice President's bid).
But yeah, though we'll obviously never be able to visit the parallel universe where Joe Biden stayed on, I agree that the evidence points to a weaker performance by him than by Kamala Harris, who, after all, led Democrats to House gains, and limited Trump's popular vote margins to one of the weakest in history.
I agree. The Vice-President did very well against a man who has a unique talent for pulling entire Persian rugs' worth of wool over peoples' eyes.
Economic anxiety has to explain the loss of Latino votes for a black female because Latinos can’t be misogynists?
I'm not sure this is accurate as polling tends to improve for all candidates from June to Nov as the undecideds tend to shrink.
Even if we accept your premise that Kamala did better than Joe would have done, it doesn't at all refute the argument.
Exit polls 2020 Biden 57% of women, 2024 Harris 53% of women.
Oh, misogyny among women is a thing too, damn their eyes. There are a lot of people -- women as well as men -- who are brought up to believe that it's not proper for women to be the head of the house.
Sadly, yes.
In the case of Derek Tran, he ran HARD on Michelle Steel's abortion opposition. People may have chosen Trump, but they mostly otherwise chose the reproductive freedom option whenever it appeared on the ballot.
If California had not approved 2010's Proposition 20, which took redistricting away from the legislature and to an independent body, it would be able to gerrymander enough seats to make the Democrats have a majority in the next Congress. But good-government types, which included most Democrats, and all CA newspapers except the Sacramento Bee, supported Prop 20.
Don't surrender redistricting from the legislature unless all the states do so. Otherwise, like today, there will be an advantage for red states that understand political realities.
in 2010 Schwarzenegger was the governor of California. Since the change California has been bluer than blue.
California hardly has to gerrymander. It already has a percentage of seats in one party well in excess of the overall vote (one of the 'classic' bits of evidence used to assert a gerrymander exists). With > 50 seats in the House any one seat is less than 2%.
Year Vote% Seat%
2022 63.28 76.92
2020 66.27 79.25
2018 65.74 86.79
2016 62.31 73.58
2014 58.91 73.58
2012 60.57 71.69
2010 53.39 64.15
2008 59.9 64.15
2006 53.05 64.15
2004 53.54 62.26
2002 51.28 62.26
2000 51.79 61.53
Looking at those figures, 2012 was definitely a change. It would seem the jungle primaries were just/nearly as effective as gerrymandering. Along with 2010's Proposition 20, assuming that was first used for the 2012 elections...