This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.
But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”
What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.
Donald Trump performed a lot better in 2020 than the polls said he would. A major reason he performed so much better is that he did better among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. That was, to put it very mildly, not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobe in chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about Black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his margins among white voters.
And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among nonwhite voters.
There was a theory among Democrats that this was just a weird hangover from the pandemic, from the lockdowns and the school closures. But Ruffini thought that they were wrong. He thought this was a realignment, that the coalitions at the core of American politics were changing and that it was going to continue.
And that’s more or less what we saw in 2024. In talking to pollsters and analysts over the last few days, I think this has been underplayed. People are talking about 2024 as if it has this entirely new shape. But it doesn’t. It looks like 2020. So to understand this election, you don’t just need to understand 2024. You need to understand what happened in 2020 and the broader coalitional changes that began emerging there. Ruffini has been thinking about this and poring through this data for years. I recommend his book as an important place to start. And so I asked him on the show.
Ezra Klein: I want to start four years ago. What happened from your perspective in the 2020 election?
Patrick Ruffini: In the 2020 election, Biden was projected to win that election in the polls by eight points. And it turns out to be very, very close. But one thing that happened very early on election night was the results from Miami Dade County, Florida, showing an absolute sea change in that county that is a 68 percent Hispanic county: a lot of Cuban Americans, a lot of Venezuelans, a lot of Colombians showing a 22-point shift in his direction. In the Rio Grande Valley, you saw some counties flip to Donald Trump. And then you go out West, to places like Little Saigon in Orange County, California: You had Asian voters moving toward Donald Trump.
So you had the makings of what was in 2016 primarily a coalition built on the backs of the white working class become more of a multiracial coalition defined by a working-class identity. That was a big part of why that election was so close — and so unexpectedly close: because we saw the beginnings of a racial realignment.
So why did that happen? How did these voters who were once thought to be part of the emerging Democratic multiracial majority move from 2016 to 2020 in Donald Trump’s direction?
So the term “education polarization” gets thrown around a lot: the idea that non-college-educated voters have zoomed right, college-educated voters have zoomed left. That’s something that has been discussed ad nauseum. But that is a very clinical way of describing this, and at the operational level of the individual voter, no one at the individual-voter level is thinking, “Well, I am not a college graduate. And Trump seems to talk in ways that appeal more to non-college-graduates, and so I am going to vote for him.”
I think one of the more revealing statistics from the 2020 election came out of the Cooperative Election Study, which is when you broke down African American, Hispanic, Asian voters ideologically, you had the folks in those groups who described themselves as conservatives all move 35 to 40 points toward Donald Trump in that election.
So at a more operational level, it was an ideological re-sorting of the electorate, where groups of voters who, I think, on the basis of either racial-group identity or perceived self-interest on the basis of racial identity, gradually shed that sense of either racial-group solidarity or the perception that we are a Democratic group and moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions.
But why? I want to go a level deeper on this. Before the 2020 election, we hear quite a bit about educational polarization, but it is fundamentally thought of as a divide in the white electorate. So in your view, what happens between 2016 and 2020 that breaches whatever wall had been holding this trend back from the multiracial electorate?
I think that’s a good question. You have to go back a little bit to 2016, where obviously Trump aims squarely at the white working class in the Upper Midwest and wins them over. At the same time, he seemingly did a lot in that election to alienate Hispanic voters from the very beginning of his campaign, walking down the golden escalator and calling Mexicans crossing the borders, “Many of them are rapists,” a bunch of things.
And yet, there’s really no strong evidence coming out of the 2016 election results that Hispanics really moved strongly against him. In fact, it was either a draw or he made slight gains. There are different conflicting sources of information. That, to me, raised a little aha moment: Somebody who could have this very stark rhetoric about disparaging a community, they still vote for him at rates that are similar to the rates that they voted for other Republicans.
In 2020, he largely drops that rhetoric. The issue of immigration, at least in the context of how it was defined, becomes much less of an issue. You have the Covid pandemic where you have white college-educated voters largely safely working from home — but Hispanic voters, in particular, who don’t have the option of working from home, who were the most hurt by the lockdown policies and saw in Trump somebody who was going to push to get them back to work.
In my chapter on the Hispanic vote, I go through all the reasons you could say it was reactions to Black Lives Matter and crime. It was reactions to the pandemic. You have all these microreasons: Maybe Trump went to Miami and talked tough on socialism, talked tough on Cuba and Venezuela.
But in the end, that doesn’t explain the breadth of the change — and not just among Latino voters but among Asian voters. And the crosscutting explanation I do think is: Trump clarified the ideological stakes and — not ideological stakes in the sense that we’ve historically thought of them but the sort of left-right cultural divide — and created a time for choosing between those two sides. And I think you see that in that ideological alignment figure that I just cited.
Something you bring up there reflects what I heard from a number of Democratic analysts of the Hispanic vote after 2020, where they said, “Look, what we think explains this is that the pandemic created unusual ripples and divides in the electorate.”
Hispanic voters really did suffer particularly from lockdowns. But also because of the pandemic, Donald Trump shut up more or less about immigration. Not completely, but he didn’t run his 2020 campaign on immigration the way he ran his 2016 campaign on immigration. And so there was a view in Democratic circles that 2020 was aberrant.
But then in 2024, Donald Trump does run his campaign on immigration. That went right back to the center of the Trump appeal, of the Trump rally, of the Trump advertisements. And the predicted pushback that would create for Hispanic voters didn’t happen. So those analysts were wrong. Why do you think they were wrong?
The theory of the emerging Democratic majority, the theory of a lot of Democrats around the issue of immigration, was that it was going to be like civil rights was for Black voters. It was going to be something that would unify the Hispanic community, the Hispanic vote, for the Democrats because you had someone like Donald Trump who’s being mean to immigrants.
But I think that assumption was always flawed in a number of ways. It was flawed in the sense that there really is no Pan-Latino, Pan-Hispanic identity in the same way that there is a Pan-African American identity. You have Hispanic voters who have very disparate interests based on their national origin. So Cuban Americans vote very differently than Puerto Ricans vote differently than Colombians and various different groups. And in different parts of the country, these groups vote very differently from Texas to Florida to California.
But also the interests of Hispanics in the United States who are citizens who are voting in elections are very, very different than, say, the interests of somebody — a migrant who has crossed the border. Over the last four years, in many ways, there was a lot of resentment from recent immigrants, people who are legally immigrated to the United States against people who were by de facto immigrating illegally.
That’s something we heard consistently throughout. And Donald Trump, just to put it very plainly, Donald Trump will have run a record share of the Hispanic vote running on a platform of mass deportation.
It’s a remarkable sentence. So here’s a way of explaining it that I think is pretty parsimonious and maybe works and maybe suggests this election does not require much extraordinary explanation at all.
In 2020, you have more or less a shape of the coalitions that we see now, but Donald Trump is president. He’s president during the pandemic. He is bad at being president, chaotic. He doesn’t deliver on a lot of things he promises, and he’s running in a bad environment for an incumbent like that.
Then fast-forward to 2024. You have Joe Biden, you have Kamala Harris — that’s the incumbent administration. We know, looking at international data, that this is a very bad environment for incumbents. Basically, in every wealthy democracy that we have seen in an election in the past couple of years, in nearly every one, the incumbent party, be it a left-wing party or right-wing party, has lost and lost big. The Democratic loss is actually not unusual or even particularly large if you plot it internationally.
And that’s it. You have the same coalition, but Trump has an incumbent penalty in 2020, so the Democratic coalition is a little bit bigger, and that means they win the popular vote by four to five points, given the base line.
And then you have this switch, because Democrats are now the incumbents at a bad time for incumbents. Same coalition. And now Donald Trump wins the popular vote by one to two points. Like, nothing really changed, except how bad the environment was and who was the incumbent. What’s wrong with that explanation, if anything?
Well, I think there’s a difference between — there is that absolute uniform swing. Just look at The New York Times map, the swing by counties. You find it very, very hard to find any blue on that map. It is a uniform, red sea change, really, from 2020 to 2024, which does, I think, lend itself to that very simple and clear explanation, that, “Look, it was the economy stupid.” The underlying environment for the incumbent party was just a bad environment for them to be running in. I think that explanation is absolutely correct.
I wouldn’t say, though, that the coalitions are the same anymore. I do think the coalitions have come into clearer focus in this election, that you typically see a swing in a state, and maybe that state swings back in the next election. Or you see a demographic group swing, like Hispanics. Hispanics have been very swingy for a while.
But this seems to be different than that because we’ve had this very unique historical outlier case of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee and the person that the entirety of our politics has revolved around for three elections in a row. You don’t usually have that. If there’s a realignment that’s happening, it’s basically happening around him. The election is about him.
That is a unique historical case that I think has further sharpened and clarified the differences in these party coalitions, that has really exaggerated the sort of, let’s say, tectonic shifts that have happened under the table in 2020.
And then you have a uniform swing that moves either right or left based on the environment, combined with tectonic shifts that are happening in demographics that are moving Latinos right, that are moving college-educated voters left.
So let’s talk a bit about the broader educational divide that is driving so much of this.
You have a striking chart early in the book, and it shows that the college and non-college voters vote very similarly, really up until the mid- to late ’90s. And then non-college and college voters really shift. The lines race away from each other.
So this non-college/college divide was not always so stark, and we’re talking in the modern era — was not so stark with Bill Clinton in ’96. What do you understand it to be? What is it about going to college or having gone to college that is making people vote so differently from those who haven’t?
I think the story really begins very early on, and I begin the book with this idea that the core identity of the Democratic Party in the 20th century was: We are the party of the working man, we are the party of the union member — and the Republicans are the party of the rich people, of CEOs.
But I do think the story really starts in the 1960s and 1970s with the realignments that happen around the Vietnam War protests and civil rights and where you have a lot of white working-class people in cities break away from the Democratic Party. And then it stops for a while.
Jimmy Carter does better with white working-class voters. He’s obviously from the South. He does better in the South. And it stops. And then you end up in this era with Bill Clinton, who was just a master at connecting to the working- and middle-class voter — regardless of race — and that was really central to his appeal and his charisma and his rhetoric.
But I think that changes in the 2000 election, where the sort of charisma gap goes a little bit in favor of Republicans. Al Gore is seen as a little bit more of a stiff. And this sort of red-blue cultural alignment, long before Donald Trump, long before 2016, starts to come into view in that election.
So I view this as a long-term trend, but there are accelerants. Two thousand was an accelerating election in polarization, and 2016 was an accelerating election in polarization.
I want to get at the role economic policy does or doesn’t play in this. More liberal Democrats or more leftist political analysts will tell a somewhat similar story to what you’re telling — but in it, Bill Clinton is the villain.
He signs the North American Free Trade Agreement, he brings neoliberalism, and what is breaking the connection between the Democratic Party and non-college voters is that the Democratic Party has stopped representing their economic interests. On the other side of that, I’m actually an economic policy reporter by trade, and I can tell you that since Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party, in part because of this critique, has been moving relentlessly left on economics.
Barack Obama was way to Bill Clinton’s left on economics. Hillary Clinton was to Barack Obama’s left on, at least, economic promises and policy. Joe Biden was very far to Barack Obama’s left on economics and policy. Harris was no break from that — at least in terms of what she was promising.
There’s a big difference between what a politician says or even the policies they enact and what voters perceive and hear about the party, about the politicians.
I think policy actually played relatively little role in voters gravitating toward Trump. I think a lot of this is his unique brand, his unique style, his unique aesthetic. And if you look particularly where we’ve seen the biggest shifts among Latino voters, that is a very economically focused electorate.
I did a poll in Texas of Hispanics in Texas, where I asked them, “What is the No. 1 problem that you see today with the Democratic Party?”
The answer they gave wasn’t that it was too woke or the buzzword of “socialism.” The answer was very interesting, and it’s something you don’t see come up with virtually any other group you talk to. And that is they perceive the Democratic Party as being the party of welfare benefits for people who don’t work.
And if you look at how the Democratic Party has been perceived in the last four years, in particular in terms of, “We’re letting immigrants into the country, illegal migrants into the country,” there’s a perception that they’re getting government benefits and not working. All of this is coming at the expense of people who made their way in America, who started from the very bottom of the rung and worked their way up the economic ladder — through their own hard work and not necessarily through government policies.
Is this a place in your view where the Democratic Party has simply misunderstood what economic populism or maybe economic identity is for many of the people it wants to win over? One of the signal shifts in Democratic economic policymaking and thinking in the time I’ve been covering it has been a move toward much more universal benefit design.
The big and, certainly in my view, one of the best policies of the Biden-Harris administration was this quite universal or nearly universal Child Tax Credit expansion. But there’s much more talk about redistribution, about the safety net, about making sure people have enough — and less about the sort of identity of economic aspiration.
I think Democrats understand the opposite side of being for the billionaires is being for the poor. And I understand, or I’d like to hear, if what you’re describing is this other layer, which is it’s being for the working class and rewarding the working class, which was certainly incredibly central to Bill Clinton’s rhetoric in a way that I think it is less central now to Democratic economic policymaking.
Something else I heard constantly traveling throughout the Rio Grande Valley in research for my book was you have people saying — and this was a part of the country, a part of Texas, that had voted Democratic by margins of either 75 to 25 or 80 to 20. I mean, it was very strongly Democratic. The Democratic identity ran stronger here than virtually anywhere in the country.
And they’re saying, “When we grew up around the dinner table, your parents told you, ‘We support the Democratic Party because they’re the party of the poor — just like us.’” And the response of the people who became Republicans in that area was, “What if we don’t want to be poor? We want to be with those people who are going to create policies that are going to benefit us because they’re going to enable us to move up the economic ladder.” And doing that through private sector success, not necessarily through a government benefits program.
I always wonder a little bit, though, if this isn’t back rationalization for changes that have already happened.
You’re a pollster. You’re tracking changes in opinion. I could sort of understand an explanation like that if this had been a linear change over time. People are moving up the economic ladder. They’re sort of finding themselves not represented by Democratic rhetoric. And so you’re seeing a flowing out of the coalition. But instead it’s like somebody snaps the plank of wood that is a Democratic coalition over their knee in 2020, and parts of it just break off. Is that really because people all of a sudden stop seeing themselves as described in this sort of rhetoric?
There is not necessarily a sea change in economic condition. But there’s a social component to this, as well. It’s sort of a cascade effect. When you have groups that have this solid Democratic group identity that is reinforced by political machines, and then it just seems like there’s a tipping point, at some point, where gradually people are moving, and then enough people move to where people start looking around and saying, “Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe I can be more vocal about this.”
You really saw that in 2020. You saw demonstrations of pro-Trump activity in a lot of these places where people would have been ostracized for saying they supported a Republican. And so I think it’s more gradual shifts elsewhere.
But if you look specifically at why the Rio Grande Valley has shifted so far so fast, I think it’s part of the social pressure right around the Democratic Party breaking down. And I think I would analogize that to some extent to what has actually happened in the Black community.
There’s a great book — I was probably going to call it out at the end with your three-books segment — called “Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior” by Ismael White and Chryl Laird, which really talks about the ways in which we would have expected Black voters to move — more away from the Democratic Party — based on changes in their ideological beliefs, based on changes in their views of different policy issues over the years.
But the reason we haven’t is because there is a very solid Democratic voting norm that’s enforced by being in the Black community, by attending the Black church and whatnot, that is slowly attenuated over the years as you have fewer people going to Black churches, as you have more suburbanization, people moving out of predominantly Black communities — but it’s still very strong. So I think some form of that happened in a place like the Rio Grande Valley in 2020.
Obviously, one thing that can explain this changing so much between 2016 and 2020 is Donald Trump.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: Hello, New York City, and hello to all of the incredible, tough, strong, hardworking American patriots right here in the Bronx. [Applause] Who would think? Who would think?
And more than policy, how much does just Trump’s image and background and aesthetic and self-presentation as this supersuccessful businessman play a role in this?
Archived clip of Donald Trump: We’re in the Bronx. We have young people, people that aspire to success. And I just wanted to know: I’m so tired of politics! Can we devote six minutes to success?
How much does he just himself redefine what it is the Republican Party is offering here and about here? Because he has represented this idea of aspirational wealth for, functionally, as long as he’s been in American public life.
The phrase I hear often used to describe this is, “Trump is the poor man’s idea of what a rich man should be.” I think that’s probably redounded to his benefit in these elections that he’s run in.
Democrats have haltingly tried to make Trump’s wealth an issue, the fact that he can’t possibly care about you, because his life experiences are just so different than yours. And it’s never really landed such that — I don’t think anybody tries that anymore. You look at the difference between Trump and somebody like Mitt Romney, who presented a very different idea of wealth, who kind of represented this old-school Republican ideal that you saw with George H.W. Bush, of noblesse oblige — but he seemed like a little bit more of a blue blood, out-of-touch, country club Republican. Trump could not be stylistically more different than that.
Tell me about what you call the cosmopolitan trap.
In 2020, I wrote about the sign that was all pervasive: “In this house, we believe” — and really listing out a bunch of liberal cultural totems that was popular during the Covid pandemic.
This is the “Science is real, no human being is illegal, kindness is everything.”
Yes, and you saw this in terms of a rising Democrats obviously doing better and better in high-income suburbs and doing better and better in particularly very, very high-income suburbs. You go to a place like Winnetka, Ill., outside Chicago — those are places that have moved, shifted 40 points to the left under the elections in which Donald Trump has been a candidate.
Democratic politics — it’s not, again, exclusively oriented toward that high-income, high-status, high-education voter. But I think the version of that sign was the focus on both the issues of abortion and democracy — the sort of sidestepping of what seemed like the main issue of the election, which is the state of the economy and inflation.
Democrats, particularly in the closing stretches of the Harris campaign, really pivoted back to this democracy and abortion message and really putting a lot of stock in this idea that if we do rallies with Liz Cheney, we’re going to move even more Republicans from those high-income suburbs that we moved in 2020 — and in many ways were actually pivotal to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. That we’re going to implicitly value those voters, more highly than the 62 percent of Americans who don’t have a college degree, implicitly those voters who we are losing.
I think that was the version of the cosmopolitan trap, where you are valuing the votes implicitly of high-income, high-status voters who are more like yourselves, who live in the same communities as the operatives who run these campaigns.
There’s a problem described by David Shor in terms of talking about the capture of the Democratic Party by its elite professional class. Harris had massive rallies in the campaign, but it turns out those were the same people who were coming out for Hillary, and that was not a winning coalition. There’s obviously a lot of enthusiasm right behind campaigning on these very highly emotionally charged issues, but they’re primarily issues that are important to the minority of voters who have college diplomas and particularly to the 31 to 32 percent of the electorate who are white voters with college degrees.
And that’s why I say it’s a trap. Because you’re talking about the groups where this message over-indexes, that are in the 30s or low 40s in terms of their share of the electorate — when the majority is elsewhere.
So I’ve been thinking a bit about this, and one place it’s led me is to the view that it was a bit of a disaster for the Democrats that the red wave didn’t hit in 2022. Because that created this alternative theory of the electorate, which was that there was a MAGA coalition and an anti-MAGA coalition. And the anti-MAGA coalition was motivated by fear of Donald Trump, hatred of him, by desire to protect democracy, particularly after Jan. 6, by Dobbs. And a view emerged, associated with people like Simon Rosenberg, that this coalition would show up repeatedly — and was showing up repeatedly. Democrats were outperforming in election after election after election. They were winning special elections. They were winning house elections and Senate elections you might not have expected. Gubernatorial elections.
In 2022, in being such an overperformance for Democrats, is also part of why either Joe Biden runs again, or certainly why he runs unopposed. I think that if Democrats had been wiped out in 2022, the pressure on him to not run again would have been very, very, very high.
In 2022, keeping Democratic control, at least of the Senate, I think is also part of why the Biden administration doesn’t do a midterm pivot that you often see in other Democratic administrations after a midterm wipeout. But in all these ways, it feels to me like 2022 sets the tone for the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign, which you really saw from Joe Biden before he stepped aside, which is to try to reactivate the electorate primarily against Donald Trump, again.
I’m curious how that lands for you.
I’ve heard that quite a lot, too. And I think all the examples that are cited are examples from lower-turnout elections. When we’re talking about special elections, that electorate is a fraction of what a presidential election would be. It is much higher in socioeconomic status. It is much higher also in the depth of partisanship and sentiment.
And the voters who don’t turn out in special elections but will turn out in the presidentials are disproportionately voters who are not activated by issues that are exclusively the domain of the right or the left. On the left, it’s obviously these issues of democracy and abortion that really are highly motivating to partisan Democrats. On the right, I would say the issue of immigration is one that is highly motivating to partisan conservative Republicans that is not necessarily motivating to voters who are both in the middle ideologically and politically — but are also the voters who aren’t the ones who show up in midterms and specials.
The voters who don’t show up in midterms and specials are voters who are primarily concerned about the state of the economy or about things that have been affected by inflation. And the message oftentimes from Democrats to those voters is: “This isn’t happening.” “Inflation is over.” Or: “Your income has risen enough to compensate you for inflation. What’s the problem?”
So it’s not surprising to me that we see this disconnect. But I do want to go back to this late pivot that Kamala Harris had toward the abortion issue, which if you look at the exit polls, doesn’t seem to have worked.
Do you think we can trust exit polls at this point for that kind of analysis? I have a lot of people warning me off saying things like that, so I’m curious as a pollster how you think about it.
I think you have to triangulate this.
You have to look at the things we’ve been seeing and reading in polling and in focus groups throughout the election. It really is a shift among younger voters. Because the shift among young men to the right seems to have been much greater, at least in the exit polls.
So it’s not necessarily that there was a unique shift among young women to the right. But there was a shift among young voters generally to the right where you had millennials and Gen Z who are now within 10 points for Republicans, which is stunning. The same generational cohort in 2008 was voting for Democrats by 33 points. And in every election since, practically, they’ve been winning the youngest voters in the electorate by 20 points.
So what is happening there that this message of abortion isn’t landing, let’s say, with young women? They’re either high single digits or low double digits of voters who said abortion was their No. 1 issue. It was behind consistently with every group. It was behind the economy. So what’s going on? I think what you’re seeing is: Just in general, younger voters tend to be more diverse. Diverse voters have shifted toward the Republican Party. But particularly those voters who are lower in socioeconomic status, in general, which tends to include, frankly, a lot of people who are younger voters who were hit hardest by inflation.
So I think, to some extent, it’s just a complete undervaluing by the Democrats of the material explanations for why this electorate was going to act the way it did.
I do think it reflects also strategic choices and ways of viewing the electorate that could have played out differently.
It’s why I’m saying that as weird as it sounds, I think Democrats in retrospect would have been better off losing the 2022 midterms to the red wave many of them thought was coming. Because you go back to 1994, when Democrats get wiped out; you go back to 2010 when Democrats get wiped out. What tends to happen after that is the administration, the party, gets very focused on the voters who have turned on it, the people it has lost: What do they want to hear? What do they need? What is motivating them?
In 2022, you get this weird election where Democrats do much better than they expect. Joe Biden looks like a much stronger political force than people thought. And Democrats get very focused on the voters who supported them, the voters who turned out for them. What motivated those voters? And the narrative coming out of it — I had people on the show making this argument — is it was democracy and Dobbs. That is what unites this anti-MAGA coalition. And if you can get them thinking about that, they will come out, turn out and beat Donald Trump again.
So I think if Democrats had lost in 2022, they would have been thinking about, “Well, what is motivating these voters who don’t like us anymore?” And instead they came into 2024 thinking, “What motivates these voters who do like us?”
Yeah, I can’t disagree with any of that. And I think to some extent, the election that we saw, it was almost very much of the election that we would have had had Joe Biden run. In terms of some of the subgroup shifts that we see we’re seeing in the exit polls, we’re seeing in the county data are very much the same kinds of shifts that we were talking about in The New York Times/Siena College Poll that came out a year before the election, which really forecast on erosion of nonwhite support for Joe Biden.
Kamala Harris was either not able to correct for that or was only very slightly able to correct for that. And I think she comes, though, from that Dobbs democracy wing — I think even more so than he does. I think it’s clear that abortion was an issue that she was very passionate about. Framing the entire freedom message was really a message about reproductive rights. And so I think she reinforced this tendency that you saw in the Democratic Party after ’22. She was maybe not a change in direction — a needed kind of change in correction — that the Democrats actually needed coming out of that post-’22 period.
Let me strongly agree with half of that. You’re the pollster here. I’m not. I think there’s a very good chance that Biden, due to his age and the way he was campaigning, could have genuinely collapsed in the election.
If you saw more things like that first debate, I think that the Democratic wipeout could have been — I mean, look, we’re on track right now for Donald Trump to win the popular vote by one to two points, somewhere in that range. You can tell me if you think that’s wrong. And as you look around, particularly in the bluer states, at how bad the erosion was, Harris and her campaign were really capable. They really proved able to hold down the erosion, the battleground. I think you really could have seen that Michigan Senate seat go. Right now, it looks likely the Democrats will keep the Nevada Senate seat. I’m not sure that would have been true under Biden. Some of the downballot might have been somewhat saved by, in my view, Harris’s running a strong enough campaign that she kept the losses down, which is not nothing.
But the place where I’ll really agree with you is that she does come from the Dobbs and democracy wing of the party. Something that was just true about her in this campaign is, I think her and her staff, her campaign team — they knew perfectly well inflation and the economy were huge issues for voters.
They knew perfectly well it was a huge vulnerability for Joe Biden. She came out immediately with plans to give people $25,000 toward buying a new home, an expanded tax credit for families, for the parents of newborns. She had this whole thing about the opportunity economy.
But I think you can always tell, and voters can always tell — and it really comes through in how politicians speak — what concerns are deep and driving for candidates. You can tell when Donald Trump talks about immigration, he really cares. Like, he really cares about it. But when he talks about health care? He does not. Donald Trump talks about health care policy like a guy who has never thought about health care policy for two minutes in his entire life. And Harris has just never been a politician associated with economic policy fights.
So if it had been true that the election could be won on Dobbs and democracy, she’s a very good messenger for that. But if you really needed somebody who is a Democratic genius at building and talking about the economy in the way that Bill Clinton was, in some ways Barack Obama was — that wasn’t her.
That was never her political profile. It’s not someone who you would have picked in a primary for that particular job.
I think that’s all right. And look, when I say this is a very Trump-versus-Biden-like election, I’m not saying that Biden — Biden probably would have lost by more, most likely.
But just in terms of the shape of the coalition, there was a lot of optimism coming out of the candidate switch that the shape of the coalition had been different. And there was a period in time when she was really consciously foregrounding those positions around the home buyer credit.
That was something, by the way, that came up a lot in open ends when we asked people, “What one policy proposal do you most associate with the candidates?” The home buyer credit really shone through brightly for Harris. So there was a period in her campaign where I kind of joked, “Man, she would be the dream client for a pollster like me.” Because she is executing what seems like almost flawlessly on what the sort of Democratic pollster messaging memos would say. Because these are the exact same things that I’m finding in my focus groups.
As she lost a little bit of altitude — she was up at some point in the polling average by about three to four points — you could kind of see that initial Biden-Trump election pattern re-emerging again. Not saying anything about Biden’s ultimate support level — but in the sense of Hispanics coming in weaker.
I think a proxy for this was Nevada. It is a much more working-class state. It is a state where the Democratic vote is still very economically downscale, largely Latino, but a lot of other minority groups there, too. When the candidate switch happened, you saw her really outperforming in Nevada, to the extent where I thought, “Man, she has really solved a lot of the problems.” And I wasn’t sure this realignment that we’re talking about would happen.
But as we start to kind of see the election clarify, get closer, it’s really those working-class voters who peel off. They were the first into Harris when the candidate switch happened, then she had her search, and they were the first out.
And so, in the end, the election became a little bit more of a realignment election than we were maybe thinking about in August and September.
One thing that I think many Democrats believe is that Kamala Harris’s campaign has represented a break with how recent Democratic campaigns, at least, have operated.
It downplayed identity politics much more so than, say, Hillary Clinton did or Joe Biden did. She pivoted more to the center on immigration. She disowned a lot of positions she had taken in 2019. When you say she’s from this democracy and Dobbs wing of the party and that was continuity, do you think the campaign and the decisions they made were less of a break with how the Democratic Party has been running and coming off than Democrats told themselves?
I think if you’re a Democrat now, something you might want to be looking at is the example of Bill Clinton, who had that Sister Souljah moment.
Archived clip of Bill Clinton: You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Souljah. I defend her right to express herself through music, but her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight.
Last year she said, “You can’t call me or any Black person anywhere in the world a racist. We don’t have the power to do to white people what white people have done to us. And even if we did, we don’t have that lowdown dirty nature. If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them. Where are they?” Right here in this room. That’s where they are.
It’s become sort of a trope that Biden needed to do a Sister Souljah moment. Or Harris needed to do a Sister Souljah moment.
Basically, Democrats need to go and punch hippies and to signal to voters in the middle that they have changed. And I think the Democrats’ solution to this right was at the convention. You had so much talk about, “Oh, we’re waving flags and we’re putting out Tim Walz as this sort of exemplar of this wholesome Midwestern father figure” — and that that was going to solve the problem for them.
At the same time, Kamala Harris, herself, in her communication style was a very cautious — uniquely so — cautious figure in terms of her media strategy. When you mentioned this idea of her going on “The Joe Rogan Experience” — that idea is sort of unthinkable for Kamala Harris, who I think was very uncomfortable in sort of these off-the-cuff settings throughout the course of the campaign. In the context of a candidate who seems so cautious, who seems — somebody who doesn’t rock the boat — I don’t think voters — even if that perception of the Democratic Party as uniquely motivated by woke ideology is an unfair perception, you still have to do something to break it. If you accept that it’s a problem, you have to do something dramatic and bold and controversial that’s going to get attention to break it.
And I just don’t think Kamala Harris was that kind of candidate, perhaps less so than Democratic candidates have been in the past.
This makes me think of something that I found myself really caught on in the final weeks of the election: Harris and the Democrats’ real embrace of Dick and Liz Cheney’s endorsement.
As somebody who does not and will never participate in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney revisionism — like, I just think they were unfathomable disasters for the country — it just annoyed me. It just speaks to a lack of accountability in American politics.
At the same time, though, it also struck me as maybe getting what the divide in the country has wrong. The message of that was supposed to be, “Look how wide this coalition stretches. It’s all the way from Liz Cheney on one side to Liz Warren on the other.” But that’s not the divide. The red-blue divide of Obama’s 2004 speech isn’t the divide. It’s more this educational divide.
And so in a way, it would have been much more — and I’ve been a little bit of a broken record on this all season — relevant to the divide that Harris and the Democrats actually face for Harris to have gone on “Joe Rogan” and “Theo Von” and shows like that, that are much more cultural environments that Democrats have become increasingly distant from, than to be campaigning arm and arm with Liz Cheney in defense of democracy.
It’s a crazy way to think about how the system has changed that Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are more on the same side, closer together, more arm in arm, than Kamala Harris and sports talk radio and Joe Rogan. But that feels true.
I’m curious what you made of that moment and also what you make of this idea that the Democrats are sort of pretending to reach out here. They’re not reaching out in the places that they’re uncomfortable. It’s just that in a wild way, the places and people they’re comfortable with have really changed over the past 20 years.
A big trope toward the end of the campaign is when a candidate does something that seems strategically questionable for them, that their defenders will immediately step into the breach and say, “They know things you don’t. They have polling and focus groups that you don’t have.”
And as a pollster, I can tell you, they most likely do not or they’re at least are not acting on it. I think in the closing stages of any campaign, it’s a very emotional time for a candidate where they ultimately have to make a personal decision about how they want to close out the campaign. Win or lose, how do they want to be remembered?
I think you saw this in Joe Biden. His political reputation was somebody who’s this scrappy, working-class figure, and yet he always wanted to gravitate toward this lofty rhetoric about battle for the soul of the country and saving democracy in his re-election campaign.
In many ways, I just simply think these were her personal instincts to close out the campaign on this sort of loftier message of freedom, rather than addressing herself to the sort of economic concerns that are felt most acutely by the traditional members of the Democratic coalition.
Her instincts were once again to drive toward this part of the electorate, the Dobbs and democracy theory, and certainly, Liz Cheney was a big part of that.
In a way you see it with the closing visuals of the campaign. What visuals do I remember out of the final weeks? It was a gorgeous visual: Harris giving that speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.
You and I spoke for a column I was writing about this. It was striking to see Harris making her real closing argument there, in Washington, D.C., people flooding in from Northern Virginia, probably who work for the government. And Trump has what I think to many people looks like this disastrous rally at Madison Square Garden with this insult comic who calls Puerto Rico a garbage island.
He’s on “Joe Rogan”; he’s driving a garbage truck around. On Twitter, I saw a lot of this mocked or seen as a mistake. But I think they also reflected where that campaign was comfortable and what it understood the divide to be.
And so right there at the end, I think you really see it. You had Dobbs and democracy on the one side, and this much more blue collar aesthetic, culturally, ideologically, on the other. And at least in a postinflation environment, that did not rebound to Democrats’ advantage.
Trump is somebody who instinctively understands how to create visuals and how to create moments that will break through with the average American.
We asked a poll question: “What are the events of the campaign that you most remember, the things that happened in the last month of the campaign?” The No. 1 thing, by far, that people said they read or heard a lot about was the picture of Trump at McDonald’s. That was a visual that really just crystallized that kind of, as you call it, blue-collar aesthetic that he was trying to really drive home in the last closing weeks of the election.
And I thought that the Harris’s rally right in Washington, D.C., in the center of Washington, D.C., was important in that respect, as well. Because I think it’s been certainly something that is: What’s true about American politics is Americans don’t like Washington, D.C. And I think Americans and voters could have very easily looked at that and looked at her campaign in the final weeks, and people who are particularly low-propensity voters who don’t always vote in elections, who are cynical about democracy, who are cynical about the political systems, who really dislike intensely politicians and think they’re corrupt animals — and that is sort of an entrenched belief. I kind of asked myself watching that speech, “What is Kamala Harris offering those people?” Because those are the voters who are going to decide the election.
There is a question, when you’re talking about a realignment, about whether or not you’re just talking about shifts in the party coalitions in this 50-50 nation we seem to have — or very near to 50-50 nation we seem to have — and shifts in the party coalitions that could lead to one party having a longer period of dominance again, which is something we’ve seen many times in history. I’ve been trying to think about which I think we’re in.
On the one hand, Trump’s win — because it’s so different than what we’ve seen from his past elections in the popular vote — feels really big. And on the other hand, it seems very explainable to me. If he’s at a one-point or two-point popular vote margin in an environment that’s very bad for incumbents, this doesn’t mean the G.O.P. is all that strong at all. This was not like what happened to the Tories in the U.K., where they had the worst election outcome in their history.
And, now Donald Trump is going to be president. I would say he’s not that good or disciplined at being president. His ability to offer this blue-collar aesthetic and then actually govern on it are different. He’s got much more ideological people around him now than he has at other times, and sort of JD Vance and Elon Musk and others. And this is pretty thin — that if they wanted to build on this, they would have to be very disciplined in a way that I’ve not seen them be. And if they end up in an environment where it’s hard to be an incumbent, they have very little firewall here.
That I think from a more liberal perspective is maybe — I don’t exactly want to call it hopeful, because I would like to see the country succeed — but is maybe a less sunny take on how strong what the Republicans are building right now is.
I’m curious how you think about that, how you think about both the path toward this realignment being something that gives Republicans an enduring advantage — like, what would lead them there? And this path being something where Republicans, sort of like they did in 2004, when George W. Bush won re-election, thinking they have a real path toward dominance, even as they’re actually on the precipice of party disaster.
I think that’s an accurate assessment in the sense of any president who wins a second term, basically it never gets as good as the election in which they’ve won. I look at what happened in 1972. Richard Nixon wins a thumping majority, and two years later, he leaves the White House in disgrace. So certainly that is well established throughout American political history. That is a well-established pattern.
But there’s a reason my book has been compared to books like “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which in itself was a callback to “The Emerging Republican Majority.” But there’s a reason I didn’t call it something like that, because I don’t really contemplate in the pages of my book that there is necessarily a lasting advantage for one party.
What this is, I think, is the Republican Party adapting and responding to changes in the electorate that certainly during the Obama years were put into focus, where you had a rising share of the electorate that was nonwhite. On top of that, you had growing margins for Democrats in those groups. And a lot of Democratic optimism that demography was destiny, and Democrats are going to win elections from here on out. And I just don’t think that describes reality. It never describes reality, no matter what the coalitions look like and no matter what they are.
The shape of what the coalition will look like in the future will be very different. And I think we can say that with more certainty now — now that we’ve seen these election results. But that doesn’t mean any party has an advantage moving forward.
We have entrenched competitive two-party politics in America. You’ve written about this at length. And I don’t think that either party can ever escape accountability for bad things that happen on their watch. This was an example; 2024 was an example of it; 2020 was an example of it.
Then always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
So one is one I’ve already mentioned: “Steadfast Democrats” by Ismael White and Chryl Laird, looking at the history of Black politics in the modern era and specifically focusing on why Black voters have been so solidly in the Democratic coalition for so long. And the importance there of social pressure, the importance of a sense of shared community and being something that enforces a norm toward voting, toward the Democratic Party.
It’s a book that I really read and reread to really understand what I think is kind of the missing puzzle piece of this Republican racial realignment. The exit poll suggests Republicans have done somewhat better among Black voters but nowhere near their gains among Hispanic voters.
The second one is a book that was written in the early 1970s called “The Real Majority” by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg. This was a Nixon-era book that really had been looking at what seemed like the changes in the electorate then among white working-class voters moving into the Republican Party for Richard Nixon. This backlash politics that was happening around the Vietnam War, that was happening around civil rights, and talking about both the possibility that this could continue — and it did, in fact, continue — or the possibility that they contemplated that Democrats at the time might actually pivot and win back that Wallace voter in 1968.
But the really pivotal thing that I took from it is the example that they give of the median voter in the electorate, in 1970, being the machinist wife from Dayton, Ohio, who doesn’t work and didn’t graduate from college or didn’t actually even go to college. As compared to, I think, what the focus was — in the time, during the counterculture, in the antiwar protests — on valorizing the role of the student protester or this rising demographic group of people who were going to college and had more liberal politics.
The third book is one from 20 years ago called “The New Americans” by Michael Barone that looks at the history of immigrant groups in the United States, from the Italians to the Irish to the Jews and really finds analogues in sort of newer groups in the electorate, like Hispanics or Asian voters. And it really drove home for me that we have seen a lot of these trends before in terms of groups that started out politically very far on the Democratic side and have gradually migrated toward the center as they move up the economic ladder and become more enmeshed in the mainstream of American society.
Patrick Ruffini, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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