June 11, 2025
Postelection autopsies are lacking the forest for the timber.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris.
(Mario Tama / Getty)
As Democrats sift by the wreckage of 2024, they’re beginning to conduct a well-recognized process: the post-election post-mortem. Armed with exit polls, turnout information, and demographic breakdowns, analysts are dissecting Kamala Harris’s defeat with surgical precision. However like many autopsies, this one dangers lacking the reason for demise by focusing too narrowly on signs. All of those postelection reviews are lacking the forest of the tribal actuality of American politics for the timber of disconnected information factors.
The latest analysis from Democratic data firm Catalist presents helpful insights about voter dropoff and demographic shifts. But it additionally perpetuates a few of the most problematic tendencies in Democratic political evaluation—tendencies that helped create the situations for defeat within the first place.
The best weak spot within the Catalist report—and in a lot different evaluation from media and commentators and political operatives—is the reluctance to grapple critically with the centrality of racial and gender animus and resentment as central organizing forces in American politics. On the one hand, the Catalist report does say that “males moved in the direction of Trump in 2024…. These modifications have been seen throughout racial and different demographic teams,” serving to to clarify his modest enhancements amongst Latinos and African Individuals. Then again, nonetheless, that discovering is listed seventh of their 11 “key findings,” making it only one tree in a forest of misogyny.
Equally with race. Of their sixth discovering they point out nearly in passing that “Harris additionally noticed help drops amongst white males with a university diploma.” In an election the place the standard knowledge is that inflation and the worth of eggs defeated the Democrats, what’s the reason for college-educated white males transferring to Trump?
The 14th-century thinker William Ockham popularized a framework now often called Occam’s Razor that holds that the only rationalization is normally the most effective. In a rustic that has by no means elected a lady president and engaged in a violent and bloody Civil Struggle explicitly animated by racial politics, the reason of race and gender having swung the 2024 election is the only. One other approach Catalist may have framed their findings would have been to say that Kamala Harris gained amongst each single racial group—besides white folks.
The fact is that Harris misplaced not as a result of she was too progressive on cultural points however as a result of Democrats proceed to shrink back from the battle over the existential questions of whether or not America needs to be a white nation or a multiracial democracy and of whether or not a lady may or needs to be president. Trump’s enchantment has at all times been explicitly racial—from “Mexicans are rapists” to “they’re consuming the canine”—but Democrats stay scared of calling this what it’s and mounting a forceful counternarrative. And so they stay perplexed about learn how to run in opposition to a person who has been caught on tape proudly bragging about sexually assaulting ladies.
Present Challenge
Whereas it’s true that turnout declined amongst key Democratic constituencies, the story is extra nuanced than a easy narrative of across-the-board Democratic failure. Harris really elevated Democratic vote totals over 2020 in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. In California, Democratic turnout dropped almost 20 %, however this seemingly mirrored the truth that the state wasn’t aggressive, so campaigns missed it and spent their voter mobilization funds elsewhere. The drop-off wasn’t some basic rejection of the Democratic message.
Extra importantly, Trump’s success got here largely from his potential to prove beforehand nonvoting conservative supporters—a phenomenon that has been constructing for years however will get inadequate consideration. As I wrote in November, the primary thrust of the story behind the various counties that ostensibly “flipped” from blue to pink is that the Democratic vote dropped dramatically. And that adopted the prior sample of Trump’s beforehand nonvoting MAGA voters. In 2020, for instance, Trump galvanized 75,000 beforehand nonvoting Republicans in Hidalgo County, Texas, whereas Biden attracted 22,000 extra Democratic voters than Obama had. The story wasn’t Latino voters abandoning Democrats; it was Republicans lastly mobilizing their dormant supporters.
Maybe probably the most under-analyzed facet of 2024 is the position of sexism and misogyny. The USA has by no means elected a feminine president. Ever. This isn’t an accident or a statistical quirk—it displays deep-seated attitudes about management and energy that don’t disappear simply because we’re uncomfortable discussing them.
The emergence of the “manosphere” and its affect on younger males throughout racial strains is actual, however it’s constructing on centuries-old foundations. In a rustic the place ladies couldn’t vote till the Nineteen Twenties and couldn’t open financial institution accounts on their very own till the Nineteen Seventies, the concept that gender performed no position in Harris’s defeat is naïve at finest.
What’s the distinction between Stacey Abrams’s and Raphael Warnock’s efficiency in Georgia in 2022 and Harris’s and Ruben Gallego’s in 2024? Gender. The Catalist report is on level in its conclusion that “help drops [for Harris] have been concentrated among the many youthful cohorts of voters, notably younger males.” Does this discrepancy mirror a failure of Democratic Social gathering messaging, or is it an unsurprising consequence in a rustic the place ladies are the vast majority of folks and but make up just 8.2 percent of the CEOs of S&P 500 companies? To many individuals, the cultural conception of the image of management doesn’t appear like a lady of shade, and failure to confront that actuality is naïve and foolhardy.
The Democratic Social gathering faces actual challenges, however they’re not those most analysts are figuring out. The occasion doesn’t must average its positions or chase after Trump voters. It must construct the infrastructure and craft the message to mobilize its pure coalition—the multiracial new American majority that elected Obama and Biden, and that then stayed house in 2024.
Widespread
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To win going ahead would require huge investments in voter registration and turnout operations in communities of shade. It’ll require daring messaging that doesn’t apologize for standing in opposition to racism and for equality. And it might want to perceive that in a quickly diversifying nation, the trail to victory runs by empowering and galvanizing the coalition of transformation, not chasing the coalition of restoration, as Ron Brownstein dubbed the Obama after which Trump coalitions.
Democrats didn’t lose the 2024 election as a result of they have been too progressive. They misplaced as a result of they weren’t progressive sufficient—a minimum of not in ways in which impressed their base to prove in overwhelming numbers. Till we’re keen to face that actuality, we’ll preserve conducting autopsies on preventable deaths.
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