The presidential election was two weeks ago, and the country’s liberals are already deep into the blame phase. Though we don’t yet have accurate data about how various demographic groups voted, and won’t for months, we’ve entered a preliminary round of explanations and recriminations — a menu of lessons to learn about and adjustments to make to the ideology, worldview and strategy of liberals, which, if history is any guide, will both prove hugely influential and probably, in big ways, wrong. Before those premature post-mortems get fully baked into conventional wisdom, though, I wanted to flag a handful of observations about the race and how it’s already being interpreted — some caveats, some counterpoints, some context that may help us understand the meaning of a big messy election in a big messy country, at least until we get the actually-reliable voter data.
OK, maybe more than a handful.
1. This was not a landslide.
In the end, it seems, Donald Trump’s margin in the national popular vote will be about 1.6 percentage points — the narrowest victory since razor-thin 2000. His margin in the three crucial swing states of the upper Midwest will be about 232,000 votes — a bigger win there than in 2016, but slightly smaller than Joe Biden secured in his famously narrow 2020 win in those same states. It looks unlikely that Trump even won a majority of votes.
The election did mark a decisive shift: a broad, uniform move to the right, down to the county level, that carried a Republican to a popular vote win for the first time in 20 years. But this was not a wipeout even like the one in 2008 (let alone 1932, 1972 or 1984). And if recent history is any guide — control of the presidency has now flipped in three consecutive cycles — it may not be an enduring majority, either.
It was an undeniably consequential victory, given the Trumpist transformation of state power it promises. But is it of a scale that demands a national epistemological break, yielding a new set of stories about the country and its direction, the nature of expertise and the course of social history? We’re about to see.
2. Perhaps we should talk less about “polarization” than “parity.”
The 2024 election was the fourth consecutive contest in which the popular-vote margin was less than five percentage points; the last stretch like this ended in 1896. As recently as the 1990s, Democrats had maintained continuous control of the House of Representatives for four decades; since 2008, control has flipped back and forth three times.
As Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin wrote in a report for the American Enterprise Institute titled “Politics Without Winners” in October, “the American party system is in an unusual extended deadlock,” in which “close elections and narrow majorities dominate electoral politics more than at any other point in American history.” You might choose to see this as maddening, or healthy, or perhaps both.
But even in a global political context historically brutal for incumbents and incumbent parties, Kamala Harris still won 48.3 percent of the vote. This is a country in remarkable electoral balance, in which neither party is ever really more than a few inches from power.
3. In very blue places, the much-hyped red shift reflected Harris losses rather than Trump gains.
At the national level, Trump added more than two million votes to his 2020 totals and Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 benchmarks by more than seven million. In swing states, where she concentrated her resources and messaging, Harris did her best (though Trump did well, too). But in the most Democratic places, where shrinking margins have produced a kind of liberal vertigo, Trump didn’t actually gain much support; the much-hyped surge right among urban voters was primarily powered by a Harris collapse.
In New Jersey, for instance, Trump won almost 80,000 more votes than in 2020; Harris almost 400,000 fewer votes than Biden did. In Massachusetts, Trump picked up almost 68,000 votes and Harris dropped more than 300,000. In New York, Trump picked up about 223,000 more votes than he did the last go-round; Harris earned almost 850,000 fewer. And in New York City, where the red shift has produced a lot of talk about the reactionary turn of blue cities, Trump won over 90,000 more votes than he had in 2020, while Harris won 909,000 fewer than Biden had. Elections are won by margins, of course, but if you are trying to take the political temperature of a place, the raw vote totals matter, too. In the streets of New York, there probably aren’t many more Trumpers than you thought — just fewer loyal and committed Democrats.
4. Demographically, the parties are starting to look more and more similar.
Much has been made of the recent “class inversion” of the two parties, with Democrats increasingly a party of affluent and especially well-educated voters and Republicans gaining support among the poor and working class. In this election, at least to trust the exit polls, Harris won voters making over $100,000 and lost those making less than $50,000 and between $50,000 and $100,000 — making Trump’s coalition by some measures a closer match for Barack Obama’s 2008 coalition. (Of recent coalitions, Harris’s may most closely resemble Bob Dole’s.)
But while the shifts are real, the end result gives a bit of a different picture, as Tim Barker emphasized in a powerful and persuasive post-mortem for the New Left Review, in which he argues that the election did not signal a “realignment” so much as a “dealignment.” In none of the three broad income categories captured by exit polls did either side win voters by more than five percentage points. When pollsters slice the electorate more thinly, into five income categories, neither candidate appears to have won more than 53 percent of any of the five groups. In 2008, the Financial Times recently calculated, the richest third of Americans were more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Republican than Democrat, and the poorest third more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Democrat; in 2024, it estimated, each was within a few points of an even split.
There are a few demographics that aren’t moving toward 50/50 — rural voters got more Republican, and Black voters didn’t shift much at all. Hispanic voters got much less Democratic, as did youth and women. But the white vote got a little less red, and education polarization a little less sizable, too. This is not any real comfort to liberals, whose coalition looks much less distinct as a result. But all told, it is less a true inversion than a flattening: It’s not just the country as a whole that is balanced so close to 50/50; most demographic subgroups are trending that way, too.
5. Harris did not run a “woke” campaign.
This case has been made quite often on cable television and social media, and in strategy sessions in recent weeks — by Philippe Reines, Seth Moulton and Elissa Slotkin, among others. But the counterargument has been made memorably by, among others, Jon Stewart and John Oliver: On the campaign trail, Harris emphasized her past as a prosecutor, her gun ownership, her solidarity with Israel, her administration’s role in record-setting oil and gas production and her party’s pursuit of a harsh border-crackdown bill that was spiked by Republicans for political advantage. Her campaign seemed to highlight Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney more than Shawn Fain or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her swing-state advertising skewed heavily toward bread-and-butter issues rather than social justice or identity politics.
In down-ballot races, Democrats did not toss around the term “Latinx” or make arguments about affirmative action or gender medicine, either. For the most part, they were too busy talking tough about crime and the border, too, and even those who didn’t need to be so careful chose to keep their distance from all the social-justice flash points. Whenever I read election post-mortems advising Democrats to ditch social-justice language, disavow activists and distance themselves from advocacy organizations often derisively referred to as “the groups,” I think: Isn’t that, broadly speaking, the campaign we all just watched?
Did Harris suffer from stances she and other Democrats had taken in earlier cycles? Probably at least to some degree. Trump certainly emphasized her 2019 support for transgender medical care for prisoners in the campaign’s closing weeks, and there are obviously ways she might have chosen to more explicitly disavow positions she’d previously taken (perhaps to electoral benefit, but also perhaps not). But looking not just at this campaign but also the four years of Democratic positioning and policymaking it follows, it is really hard to see which if any supposedly toxic left-wing positions made their way into public policy or even campaign ads or speeches on the trail. (Check out this 2020 Axios interview with Jon Ossoff, for instance, in which he pointedly disavows the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police, abolishing ICE and expanding the Supreme Court.) You may think left-wingers are pushing electoral albatrosses on the party, but Democrats as a party have already been running away from them for quite a while. In this cycle, for instance, their message on the border was that Republicans had gotten in the way of a crackdown; at his 2022 State of the Union speech, Joe Biden chanted “Fund the police! Fund them! Fund them!” And Democrats in the chamber gave him a standing ovation for it.
6. The left’s culture-war problem may be less about Democratic politicians than about Democratic voters.
So why have Americans continued to associate a social-justice agenda with Democrats, if so few of them have been publicly pushing those positions over the past five years? One answer is that the memory of some of those positions still lingers, no matter the positioning of elected officials. But another possibility is that to the extent Americans are feeling alienated by progressives, they aren’t really voting to reject Democratic politicians so much as Democratic voters, many of whom much more closely resemble the stereotype of professional-class bureaucrats and corporate middle managers wielding D.E.I. agendas than anyone actually running for office.
Large shares of Democratic voters remain quite left-wing, and to many Americans they are more visible figures than any politician — their co-workers, their neighbors, those they see on social media. It may well be the case that to the extent that the progressivism of “the groups” is a problem for Democrats, this is a more straightforward and direct social effect — not mediated by elected officials or their policy positions. And if the conflict is a matter of the broader culture war rather than a partisan dispute, that isn’t exactly something that’s easy for the party to solve. It’s one thing for Democrats to prune their public messaging of anything that might strike the median voter as woke excess — for the most part, they’ve already done that. But appointing Rahm Emanuel to head the Democratic National Committee won’t change the makeup of your H.R. department or the kinds of T-shirts or yard signs you see. At least not overnight.
7. Trump’s closing argument was a culture-war complaint about something incredibly rare.
The anti-trans ads that dominated Trump campaign spending in the fall, and that highlighted Harris’s 2019 support for gender surgeries for prison inmates, may loom as large in political memories as the Willie Horton ads of 1988. In the closing weeks of the campaign, this messaging blitz eclipsed ads concerning the economy, inflation and immigration, and both Republican consultants and Democratic candidates credited it in retrospect with moving an awful lot of undecided voters to Trump.
In the weeks since, it has been tempting for many self-critical liberals to attribute this effect to the political vulnerabilities of a social-justice coalition that includes advocates of gender medicine. Perhaps Harris might’ve benefited electorally from a more emphatic “Sister Souljah moment” on trans issues, explicitly disavowing her earlier position, however morally grotesque and personally uncomfortable that might have been. But what is perhaps most remarkable to me is that throughout the Biden administration, the total number of such surgeries performed in federal prisons was two.
8. Biden’s invisibility as president may have been more costly than his delay in dropping out.
At the start of Biden’s term, administration officials often talked about the need to make their legislative gains concrete to voters — an approach to governance that came to be called “deliverism” — often presented as a lesson learned from the Obama years, when voters were often unaware of what the government was doing on their behalf.
But to the extent that the Biden administration did deliver concrete wins for voters, chiefly through the expanded social-welfare spending allocated as pandemic stimulus, it also allowed much of those gains, including those first rolled out under Trump, to disappear and expire, resulting in a sudden collapse in many measures of voters’ well-being. The more enduring investments the administration made — in infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy — are longer-timeline policies, designed to play out over many years. In the meantime, there is a pretty acute need for salesmanship — of which, over the past four years, there was a pretty acute void in the White House. Perhaps constant speechifying on the state of the economy by the president would have felt as hectoring to voters as the chart-posting of neoliberal economists did on social media. But when you don’t really have a lead messenger, it gets a lot easier for the other side to shape the story.
9. The most pro-labor administration in memory didn’t move unions or their voters.
Biden bailed out the Teamsters pension fund and became the first American president in history to walk the picket line when he joined Shawn Fain’s United Auto Workers strike in 2023. But the Teamsters didn’t endorse Harris, afterward citing her friendliness to big tech and her seeming support for a gig-economy future; their president spoke instead at the Republican National Convention. Overall, according to exit polls, union families voted Democratic by a smaller margin than they had in 2020. Elsewhere in the electorate, it’s plausible to say the party misunderstood the material challenges of voters or failed to respond adequately to them. But when it comes to union voters, especially, the lesson seems more to be that material considerations have been crowded out by “post-material” factors. Should that be a surprise? It’s been two decades since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” and many well-off Democrats have been voting somewhat against their own material interests that whole time, too.
10. Have Democrats really forgotten how to say no?
This has been the contention of several post-election post-mortems, including one much passed-around and thoughtful guest essay in The Times by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to John Fetterman. He argued that Democrats should be much more strategic in stiff-arming progressive interest groups in order to pursue a centrist supermajority.
But here is a short list of things the Democrats have effectively said no to, in this campaign and over the past couple of years: Medicare for All; free community college; free child care and universal pre-K; a true Green New Deal, of the kind Bernie Sanders campaigned on; major investments in the “care economy,” as was once promised as the core of Build Back Better; an empathic approach to migration; and a hard line on Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
And what is the list of things the campaign and the party has emphatically said yes to since the 2022 midterms? In the closing days of the presidential race, as the establishment-and-outsiders theme came ever more into focus, I found myself wondering what the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party really stood for, beyond the status quo. Harris proposed a surprisingly ambitious national elder-care plan, but it did not appear to have a major effect on the race. She floated tax credits for first-time home buyers and talked up the need to build more housing. She floated the idea of some price controls to limit inflation, then walked back the proposal. In a time of vague if widespread discontent, it’s hard to win when you look like the embodiment of the system and sell yourself as its defender.
11. We still don’t have a very clear picture of the state of the economy, which is a bit strange given its centrality in our politics.
Voters told exit pollsters that the economy was one of the top determinants of their vote, and in the two weeks since the election, scores of soul-searching Democrats have acknowledged that in the end, the public had been at least as right as the experts over the past couple of years — that the country’s much-touted economic miracle wasn’t actually all that it was cracked up to be, that far too many Americans felt they’d fallen farther behind and that those insisting otherwise were missing the big picture.
Does this mean that the conventional top-line metrics we’ve used now for generations to measure the health of the economy are no good? Or perhaps, even, that they never were? In the immediate aftermath of the election, Annie Lowrey published an incisive account of all the things the top-line measures missed. Kyla Scanlon, who coined the term “vibe-cession,” has touched on the subject, too, and J. Zachary Mazlish has also offered a thorough rundown whose upshot is that yes, the economy was in worse shape than the conventional measures suggested. But while some metrics do suggest conditions closer to the perceptions of voters, it’s also the case that those living in swing states believed local economic conditions were improving rather than worsening, almost three-quarters of Americans steadily reported their own finances were at least OK, and partisan views of the state of the economy flipped almost immediately after Election Day. What, exactly, are we meant to learn from all this? In another vibe-cession, are we going to trust the vibe and hunt for the metrics to match?
12. But given what we do know, it is perhaps notable how little Democratic soul-searching has focused on the problem of inflation and how to manage it better next time.
The first inflation post-mortem was really a pre-mortem, the one-man campaign by Larry Summers against the wisdom of Biden’s major pandemic stimulus. In the years that have followed, a remarkable string of credentialed, orthodox economists — including Ben Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard and Peter Orszag — have demonstrated that the inflation that voters found so punishing in 2021 and 2022 was not a creation of American fiscal policy but of the underlying conditions of the pandemic recovery.
But if that is the case — if the biggest political challenge of this election cycle was a problem of how we responded to a crisis rather than how we created one — where does that leave us? Some analysts have floated the possibility that higher interest rates, designed to curb inflation, actually worsened the problem; Summers himself has suggested that properly accounting for the higher cost of borrowing could explain three-quarters of the mysterious “gap” between official inflation figures and public perceptions of the economy. One serious forward-looking proposal was put forward in The Times by the heterodox economist Isabella Weber: much more aggressive interventions on price surges when they start. And it is perhaps notable that the political economies of several countries that have defied the global anti-incumbency trend — Switzerland and Mexico, to name two prominent ones — are defined in part by much more pervasive price controls and much more aggressive price interventions. Spain has also done well to forestall inflation recently, though it hasn’t exactly made its prime minister a national hero — it only helped him win a tight re-election in late 2023.
13. Astroturfing a “liberal” Joe Rogan probably isn’t the answer.
Probably, Harris should have gone on the Rogan podcast. But she did go on “Call Her Daddy,” “Club Shay Shay” and “The Breakfast Club.” And those responding to Trump’s victory with calls to build a liberal equivalent of Joe Rogan misunderstand not only his appeal but also the podcast landscape as it already is.
Apple’s top 10 podcasts of the year included two or three liberal-coded news shows and two lifestyle shows with a liberal valence, and only Joe Rogan with any conservative reputation. The charts shift somewhat day to day, but thumb through the top 50 and the balance of left-wing and left-coded shows and right-wing and right-coded shows tends to be pretty even.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to the idea that the post-legacy media environment skews more conservative at the moment. These charts bounce around a lot; Spotify has a more right-wing skew at the top, subscriber-only podcasts probably tell a different story, and the same is probably true for YouTube (on Substack, often cited as a hotbed of anti-liberal contrarianism, a pretty significant share of top political newsletters actually skew left). It’s to say that the issue is less an imbalance in the new-media ecosystem than the fact that in a culture dominated in many ways by liberals, the progressive voices are going to sound a bit more establishmentarian, and the countercultural voices are often going to come from — or drift to — the right. In the George W. Bush era, remember, conservatives had the same complaint about liberals, who they believed ran the culture, but the answer wasn’t to give Dennis Miller his own “Daily Show.”
Which returns me to the political meta-narrative I emphasized the morning after the election: that the election represents a broad but relatively vague cultural backlash to the liberal establishment; that the establishment is larger than the Democratic Party, though for reasons both longstanding and underscored in the pandemic the party is very much identified with it; and that to return again to political power probably doesn’t require a huge shift in the basic mood of the country, but probably does mean liberals need to find some ways to look like outsiders and upstarts again (rather than simply suggesting again that a vote for Democrats is a vote for post-tribal national unity and an effective end to the battles of the culture war). As Ted Gioia has memorably put it, cultural conflict is now often less a matter of left and right than of top-down and bottom-up. Probably, we would all do well to consider many fewer subjects in such narrowly partisan terms.
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