Americana

1. Parsing the Trump win
2. Democrats return to disarray
3. The House’s tipping point
4. The end of the ‘demographics’ era
5. Fetterman’s 2024 postmortem

Also: A new polling post-mortem on how Kamala Harris lost.

The stakes of the 2024 election were obvious four years ago, if not longer. Joe Biden entered the 2020 Democratic primary with a warning: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.” He kept running for president, well into 2024, on the premise that he could prevent that fundamental change.

He couldn’t. Neither could Kamala Harris. Around the country, the bets Republicans made, that voters frustrated by higher prices and illegal immigration would want to bring Trump back, paid off. Democratic bets, that voters might feel better about the economy by Tuesday and that Trump’s behavior had disqualified him, did not pay off. That was the election, and that’s why, unlike eight years ago, Democrats are not immediately organizing a mass resistance. They used to see Trump as a fluke that could be pulled out of office — by the Fourth Estate’s investigations, by Robert Mueller’s probes, by a new electorate. That last idea was right, but only temporarily.

Republicans are now set to take office with their broadest demographic coalition in generations, but not their biggest majorities in Washington. Twenty years ago, the last time Democrats were this despondent and lost, George W. Bush’s Republicans won a 10-seat Senate majority and a 30-seat House majority. They’ll have smaller ones now, but with stronger personal and ideological commitments to the president. (A defining story of the Trump years, and this election especially, was Republicans happily erasing the Bushes and Cheney from their family album.) Eight years ago, Democrats were so shell-shocked by Trump’s victory that they discussed ways to work with him, like collaborating on a major infrastructure package. They’re not doing that now, instead saying some nice things about the peaceful transfer of power and nothing about what they’ll do after the transfer.

The national red shift

The 2024 vote count won’t be finished for weeks, but the patterns are obvious – a shift of millions of votes toward Republicans that helped Donald Trump sweep the swing states, and helped his party beat popular Democratic senators.

In the places where the Harris campaign spent the most time and money, Democrats saw no significant fall-off in their total vote from 2020. The best example was Wisconsin, which for the third consecutive cycle saw the closest race in the country. As of Friday morning, Harris had won 1,667,852 votes there — nearly 37,000 more than the Biden-Harris ticket. The party’s suburban push paid some dividends, and Harris added 5000 votes alone in Waukesha County, the conservative heartland west of Milwaukee.

She lost because Trump added more votes, some by persuading non-college voters to switch to him and some by expanding the electorate. He added 87,000 votes to his 2020 total, shrinking the Democrats’ advantage in Milwaukee County from 40 points to 38 points; he ran ahead of his 2020 vote in southwest Wisconsin, which Democrats still are able to win in some statewide races.

It was a similar story in Michigan, despite a development that Democrats feared for a year — a collapse in majority-Arab-American cities around Detroit. Harris ran nearly 80,000 votes behind Biden, but had Trump won exactly as many votes as he did in 2020, that would have given her a statewide victory. Instead, he did better: He added 24,000 votes just in Detroit’s Wayne County.

The shift of non-white voters toward Trump was more pronounced in Arizona and Nevada, where counting isn’t finished yet — and in Texas, where it mostly is, and where the Harris campaign only held one rally and spent few resources. Democratic support collapsed in the Rio Grande Valley; Sen. Ted Cruz, who narrowly lost the Latino vote in 2018, won it by a landslide over Rep. Colin Allred. He ran well ahead of Harris, like every other Democratic Senate candidate. But it was not enough to stop their losses.

Democrats ask if a short progressive era is over

On Wednesday afternoon, as Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election, Democrats confronted the idea that a short progressive era had come and gone. In Ohio and Montana, two populist Democratic senators who’d always defied gravity succumbed to it. In California, voters ousted two reform prosecutors in deep blue counties – Los Angeles and Alameda – while recalling Oakland’s progressive and scandal-plagued mayor. Arizonans voted to allow local police to enforce immigration law; New Yorkers were on track to reject a new city diversity officer.

All of that unfolded on a map that got redder outside of a few cities and suburbs, and far redder in majority-Latino areas that had rarely voted Republican. Before Tuesday, no Democrat born after 1986 had ever voted in an election where Republicans won the popular vote. Now, all of them had. They were not entirely sure why.

“I would love to see some kind of autopsy,” said Faiz Shakir, the founder of the progressive journalism channel More Perfect Union, and the manager of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “I would worry about a party that said: Let’s move on, let’s fight, let’s get into resistance mode.”

Another narrow House majority looks likely

Control of the House of Representatives was still undecided on Friday morning, as nearly two dozen races remained too close to call. Unlike 2020, when Republicans surprised themselves and lost no seats, the party gave up some of the ground to Democrats who ran ahead of Kamala Harris. That was mitigated by GOP wins in seats that Harris’s party had held only narrowly for years — and where polling overestimated their support.

Democrats flipped three seats on a more favorable New York map, taking back ground in upstate New York and on Long Island. They won new majority-Black districts in Louisiana and Alabama, making up for three losses in North Carolina — also on new maps created after post-midterm lawsuits.

But they lost crucial seats in areas where Trump ran ahead of his 2020 vote – two in northeast Pennsylvania, one in mid-Michigan. In some target seats, where the top of the ticket out-performed compared to 2022 and 2020, Republicans like Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon held on. Some Democrats were blaming progressives, for making it hard to sell candidates who’d been able to win before.

“We swung the pendulum too far to the left,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., told Semafor. “We are increasingly becoming the party of the college educated rather than the working class. And as a result, we are paying an electoral price for it. I hope we have a serious reckoning with the results of the election.”

Progressives pushed back hard. “You know how weak that is, the weakest shit you could do, as opposed to figuring out a merger, a partnership, a collaboration?” New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary earlier this year to a centrist challenger, told Semafor. “You got the Squad, which has been the most exciting thing in politics since fucking FDR or the New Deal. Instead of embracing the Squad you blame Progressives for everything that goes wrong. No, they don’t know how to work in partnership and in collaboration with progressives.”

The 2024 election should end the ‘demographics are destiny’ era

If there’s one takeaway from the latest election results for both parties, it’s that it should explode the “demographics” conversation that’s been dominating American politics this century. By “demographics” I mean an ongoing — often intensely racialized and divisive — debate about which party is positioning itself toward a durable long-term majority.

Looking back on the debates about political strategy from President Obama’s 2008 landslide until today, perhaps the biggest theme was parties preparing themselves for a future in which the country is majority-nonwhite and recalibrating their thinking towards that horizon in response to every loss and victory. The assumption that various categories of voters, especially Latinos, were inevitably tilted toward one party fed into some very poor thinking. For Democrats: Overconfidence and condescension as they prepared for a younger, more diverse generation to power a long progressive era. For Republicans: Despair, paranoia, and xenophobia, all fed by the same assumption.

Instead, the political imagination is a little bigger today than it was on Monday. Trump’s victory featured shifts to the right in counties, precincts, and groups across the country, almost all largely attributed to the same grievances with the status quo. In a world where New York and New Jersey can swing by double digits in a single election, neither party can take any voter for granted, nor treat them as impossibly out of reach.

It’s ice cold comfort for Democrats today, but a world in which Republicans grow confident they can win a majority of voters in a majority-minority country — even in ways that horrify progressives and shift the demagoguery to new groups instead — may be a healthier place than the alternative in the long run.

John Fetterman on what went wrong for Democrats

In the run-up to Tuesday, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman left no warning bell unrung.

He clashed with progressives, and lost some key staff, over resolutely supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. He advocated for Joe Biden to stay in the presidential race and asked why so many Democrats were abandoning him. He warned Democrats that Donald Trump had a real pull with Pennsylvania voters, and that young men who didn’t trust politicians liked Elon Musk; this while Democrats in Harrisburg sued over Musk’s million dollar daily voter giveaway. He went on conservative media outlets, fretting that Democrats simply weren’t talking to skeptics who might be convinced to vote for them.

“That assassination attempt — that was an incredibly powerful visual,” Fetterman said in an interview this week, his first since the election. “Can you imagine if somebody had a bullet hit Obama and he had that moment: You know, fight, fight, fight? Can you imagine how that would have resonated for Democrats?”

Democrats weren’t sure if his theories of what worked for Trump, and didn’t for Democrats, were right. But after Tuesday, they weren’t really sure about anything.

Polls

The good news, if you hate horse race politics, is that there won’t be many election polls for a while. Outside of some runoffs in local and state legislative races, there are no major votes coming up until Spring. There’ll be special elections to replace members of Congress pulled into the Trump administration, but we just don’t know who or how many yet. (If you hate elections but read this newsletter, I’m grateful but confused.)

What we are getting are polls of the 2024 electorate and data on what did and didn’t work for the major parties. In polling for Blueprint, provided first to Semafor, the Democratic messaging shop asked 3,262 national and swing state voters to state their top concerns with Kamala Harris. The poll was in the field from November 6 to November 7, with a 2.1 percent margin of error.

These were the top issues cited:

Inflation was too high under Biden-Harris: +24 points

Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border: +23 points

Too focused on cultural/transgender issues: +17 points

Debt rose too much: +13 points

Too similar to Joe Biden: +12 points

She would let in too many immigrants: +10 points

The immigration worries, combined, were dominant: Thirty-six percent of Latino voters cited them as their chief concern. But by just 9 points more Latinos said that Harris “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,” as the survey put it. Among swing voters of all races who ultimately voted for Trump, that was their biggest issue, by 28 points. “Despite the Harris campaign running ads on economic issues,” the firm wrote in its poll analysis, “she may not have been able to escape her 2019 views and emphasis.”

What mattered less? Voters did not think that Harris would “raise taxes on the middle class; by a 9-point margin more said they weren’t concerned with that. By 13 points, they didn’t think she was too “pro-Palestine” and by 22 points they didn’t worry that she was too “pro-Israel.” Harris’s major problems were inflation and immigration, which flamed up three years before the election and, even after policy changes that lessened them, did not extinguish.

Ads

In future editions, we’ll have more comprehensive looks at the paid messaging that worked and failed in 2024. Here are two spots that, by general agreement, clearly worked and moved numbers in key races.

• Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “Unbelievable.” Democrats now concede that the Trump campaign’s heavy spending on ads about pro-trans policies were effective — they moved numbers in their focus groups and counteracted some of Harris’s effort to reintroduce herself as a pragmatist who would govern from the center. And this was the most effective version. It focused on a murderer who received a sex change in prison. It used video of Harris herself telling the National Center for Transgender Equality that she favored the policy “to push forward the movement, and the agenda.” And it epitomized the bet Trump made in each race: He could say things that would anger interest groups and media outlets, with no actual cost. Democrats tried to come up with a response ad, couldn’t settle on one that worked, and chose not to hit back.
• Gallego for Arizona, “Safe and Secure.” Arizona’s Democratic Senate candidate is on track to win his race against Kari Lake, completing a years-long strategy: Moderate his views and rhetoric about immigration, and run like a 1990s Democrat on crime. “He delivered critical funding for our law enforcement,” says one of his police surrogates in this spot, which like many of Gallego’s ads mentioned his military service — and his endorsement from the state police association. If one Democratic lesson from 2024 is that they need to move back to pro-policing, pro-border enforcement politics, and do it yesterday, this is the sort of message they’ll take into 2026.

Scooped!

The Harris campaign stayed tight-lipped until the candidate actually conceded the race. There was no leaking or backbiting – the mother’s milk of reporting on why a candidate lost. But Axios’s Alex Thompson, whose dogged and usually unanswered questions on whether Harris still believed in things she told 2020 Democratic primary voters, got a quote from her wrap-up call with staffers. “Yeah, this sucks,” she said. “We all just speak truth, why don’t we, right? There’s also so much good that has come of this.” End scene. Fade to black.

Next

• 73 days until Inauguration Day
• 361 days until off-year elections
• 725 days until the 2022 midterm elections

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