What I, and we, failed to understand.
I was sure Kamala Harris was going to win. I was convinced she would have a mandate. But now, more than a week after Election Day, I can admit I was wrong. Much of my misjudgment came from underestimating Donald Trump and his ability to connect with the electorate and make significant inroads beyond his base. Some of it also came from my own personal wishcasting — my inability to hear things I didn’t want to hear and my staunch refusal to reexamine my own theory of the case. I want to learn from all these mistakes. So, here’s some of what I got wrong in the 2024 election cycle.
Split-ticket voting is real
I absolutely did not think split-ticket voting was a real phenomenon in the year of our Lord, 2024. After all, in the post-Trump era of deep partisanship and polarization, how could the strategy possibly make sense? Well, just take a look at three battleground states won by Trump and the Democratic senate candidate. Ruben Gallego took Arizona with 50% of the vote, sandwiched between Harris (46.7%) and Trump (52.3%); Elissa Slotkin scored a Michigan Senate seat with 48.6%, just aboveHarris (48.3%) and below Trump’s (49.7%); and Jacky Rosen defended her seat with 47.9% in Nevada, which Trump won 50.6% to 47.5%. In other words, it seems that someTrump voters in Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada voted for Democrats down the ballot; others may have left the bottom of the ticket blank, potentially depressing the GOP down-ballot vote. (Not to mention, some voters backed Trump and abortion rights.) Taken together, all of this shows that the Trump brand, in these states, at least, appears stronger than the GOP brand.
MAGA is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is MAGA
I kept thinking that the Republican Party would come back to normal — that people like Liz Cheney and the rest of the Never Trump cadre would lull Republicans back to the land of Mitt Romney and John McCain. While I wanted that to happen, that ship has now sailed. The MAGA movement has eaten the GOP, and the GOP has gleefully accepted the power that MAGA has delivered them. That said, Trumpism doesn’t necessarily scale. Trump won in 2024, but people who were pretending to be Trump in swing states did not: Kari Lake, for one, has now lost both a gubernatorial and Senate race in Arizona, while Mark Robinson got trounced by nearly 15 points in North Carolina’s governor’s race, while Trump carried the state. And don’t forget, Ron DeSantis bombed in the GOP primary doing his best Trump impression.
Trump was able to grow his electorate
I thought the Trump campaign’s decision to double down on non-college-educated men would be a mistake. But those voters actually did show up in large numbers. In this regard, the former president’s media strategy also really paid off: He went on tons of podcasts (everything from Joe Rogan’s to Theo Vonn’s to the Nelk Brothers’), while doing little traditional media down the stretch — a big departure from his constant Fox News drop-ins in 2016. Traditional media, his campaign reasoned, didn’t move the needle; podcasts did. And they trusted that instinct on the basis of a simple slogan: “Max out the men and hold the women.”
MAGA built its own media…and it worked
I didn’t quite realize just how siloed Trump’s media-industrial complex really is. MAGA media people speak to Trump’s people; they don’t speak to the readers of The New York Times or The Washington Post. And they don’t need to, because Trump has enough of a base; he just needs to get them out there to vote. This quote from Politico, based on an NBC survey, summed it up nicely: “Among people who got their news from ‘newspapers,’ Biden was winning 70-21. Among people who got their news from ‘YouTube/Google,’ Trump led 55-39.” The left is worried or uncomfortable with the idea of partisan media. It also doesn’t have the same kind of footprint as the right on social media, which amplifies partisan content. So, when voters log on to social media, a lot of them are systematically directed to right-wing content.
The normal political rules do not apply to Trump
Trump’s hardcore supporters surely believe he will do a lot of the things he says he will, while others, perhaps because they treat him as a celebrity, apply a different standard in which he’s not necessarily held accountable for the things he says. As Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told the Times, “People think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.” Others seemed to be inexplicably charmed by his moral failings. As one voter told The Philadelphia Inquirer: “He’s good and bad. People say he’s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler…But I voted for the man.”
Polling isn’t so broken after all
I thought polls were overestimating Trump. But if anything, they were underestimating Trump (just like they did in 2016 and 2020). Polls predicted a margin-of-error race in which the odds were tantamount to a coin flip. And in many swing states, it was a margin-of-error race. As MSNBC reported, “In Michigan, the 538 average had Harris up by 1 and the RCP average had her up by 0.5. The results show Trump, the projected winner, up 1.4.” The numbers also (correctly) suggested that down-ballot Democrats would do better than the top of the ticket. But in the end, the polls still vastly underestimated the overall power Trump has in driving his people to the ballot box—especially when he himself is on the ballot. When Trump is not on the ballot, elections tend to play out very differently.
Inflation could not be explained away
By a number of metrics, Joe Biden’s economy has been a success — especially compared to other of the world’s richest countries. Unemployment in the US has remained low, while the stock market has roared and inflation cooled. Yet Democrats had trouble messaging the administration’s successes, and fundamentally, people saw prices of goods rise and blamed the current administration. It’s also worth noting that worldwide, voters were furious at the status quo. Anti-incumbency headwinds were a real phenomenon everywhere from the UK to Germany. Voters were furious about inflation, COVID, wealth inequities, and immigration. Much of this election was simply an expression of fury at the party in power.
In the end, I just had trouble believing voters wouldn’t find things like January 6 and Trump’s authoritarian language disqualifying. I believed voters would care more about abortion and democracy than they did. I underestimated the power of celebrity that Trump still has to overwhelm the rest of the political ecosystem. Look, there are plenty of takes out there already about what the Democrats should’ve done — from relying on different tactics or language — and there will be lots more as the party reckons with its future. But for me, I wanted to take a step back, to find ways to learn from my misplaced assumptions, before moving forward.
Reprinted with permission from Conde Nast — this piece originally appeared in Vanity Fair. Subscribe to Jong-Fast’s podcast Fast Politics here.
