How Kamala Harris lost

[stevenkesslar]

How Kamala Harris lost voters in the battlegrounds’ biggest cities

In the swing states, turnout in the major cities trailed the rest of the state. The drops weren’t the same across neighborhoods, though.

 

So this is a cornucopia of excellent data geek articles on how Harris lost.  If you're not into that, check out.

That fantastic article above gives us a graphic first draft of what the best written books about this election will likely say.   It was younger voters, Latino voters, and Black voters that did Harris in.  These demos from Philadelphia confirm what the exit polls say.

The 30,000 foot bumper sticker should be "Democrats are losing the working class."  But at least one exit poll says Democrats did not lose much or any of the White vote, compared to 2020.  So slightly more White college voters offset slightly fewer White non-college voters who shifted further to Trump.  The final and biggest nails in the coffin really were about groups with lower incomes, hurt most by higher rents, higher prices, higher interest rates.

A few key paragraphs:

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For instance, Trump received nearly 3,400 more votes than he had in 2020 across the 476 “predominantly Black” precincts in the six cities, defined for POLITICO’s analysis as places where at least 85 percent of residents are Black. But Harris received about 17,500 fewer than Biden had, a far greater impact on the overall margins.

This is just a first draft.  But given my brilliant political instincts, second only to Alan Lichtman 😨, this rings true. 

Blacks were one of the nails in Kamala Harris's coffin.  But it is much less that they shifted to Trump.  It was turnout.  They didn't vote in the numbers Harris needed.   Either way, Blacks alone did not make the difference in Pennsylvania.  And a lot of Blacks have been vocal about how they resent having this blamed on them. Given that far larger voting blocs - Latino men, White women - could have put Harris on top, but chose not to.  However that works out, Harris squeezed as much juice out of college-educated Whites like me as she could.  It just was not enough.

This is a repeat of 2012, with a different outcome.  I think both Team Obama and Team Romney agreed that, in order to win a second term, Obama had to get higher Black turnout than he did in 2008, which was record Black turnout already.  Team Romney thought Obama could not do it.  Obama did.  Harris did not.  But she came close, which I think is way better than Biden would have done.

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Hispanic voters aren’t as represented in the urban hubs of battleground states as Black voters. Still, there are more than three dozen precincts across the six cities where the population is at least 85 percent Hispanic. Combined, those areas swung 8.2 points toward Trump and turnout dropped by more than 11 percent.

For every Black nail in the coffin, there were two Hispanic nails.  Turnout was down among Latinos, too.  But Latinos who switched to Trump was seemingly about equally as big a nail, at least in this analysis.

I've been wondering how much of this shift of Latinos to Trump was based on more Latinos switching from Democrat to Republican, and how much was based on lots of Latino Democrats just not voting.  So far it seems clear it was a lot of both.

There is a silver lining in the cloud, I think.

To me that chart is now one of the most important facts of American political life.  Harris basically just matched the all time low Latino vote total a Democrat received:  Jimmy Carter in 1980.  Both elections were mostly about three things:  inflation, inflation, and inflation.  Latinos reward incumbents who manage the economy well, especially if they are Democrats.  So Trump and Republicans certainly have a chance to do just as well, even better, with Latinos in 2028.  But I would not count on it.  There's no evidence the long term trend has changed in a meaningful way.   While there has been and still is a preference for Democrats, 1980, 1992, 2008, and 2024 are all years where the incumbent party got clobbered by Latinos because of the economy, stupid.

The way I think about this is mathematical, and regression to the mean.  1984 in the chart above is a great example of that.  Despite Reagan's landslide in 1984, which was even more crushing than his 1980 landslide, Latinos in fact reverted to the mean and voted for Mondale by 61 %, compared to 56 % for Carter.   The long term good news for Democrats is that in 1980 and 1984 either of those numbers meant a landslide loss.  But thanks to Democrats' success with more affluent voters of every race in the suburbs, they are now the difference between a narrow loss and narrow win.  As a Democrat, I'd rather be in 2024 than 1984.

As a Democrat, I'd also rather be in 2024 than 2002.  That is when I read Ruy Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority, which I bought at a symposium at Carleton College to honor Paul Wellstone, progressive icon.  So what's in store is Republicans win in 2002 by kicking the shit out of Democrats as unpatriotic, and then win again in 2004 as the Iraq War clings to majority support.  That book seemed like a cruel joke.  So now Democrats are pissed that we didn't get the majority we wanted.  Teixeira has been whining for years that this is going to be our fault when we lose.  And it is.  He's been saying pay attention to the working class.  You can't afford to lose them.  Now more Democrats will listen.   No more "LatinX."

Democrats should be kind of ashamed of how poorly we did among low-income voters of every race.  Kind of.  But not as ashamed as Republicans, who pandered to the worst resentments of people.  Trump called Kamala Harris low IQ and lazy, trashed immigrant vermin, and offered next to nothing real to the pocketbooks of low income voters.  "No taxes on tips" is about it.  Now that they are empowered, Republicans will cut health care assistance, and give huge hog feed tax cuts and tax breaks to billionaires.  Democrats don't have to be ashamed of that. 

My bitch with my party is we didn't fight hard enough for the working class, like AMLO did in Mexico.  That said, AMLO had the votes to get his legislation passed.  Biden didn't, especially on the class-based and labor issues.   But Team Trump will have the same problems, on steroids.   Will oil company CEOs insist that Trump give tax credits to low-income Latino Moms?  Don't hold your breath.  The Moms will be told that tax cuts and tax breaks to oil company CEOs will trickle down to you at the gas pump.  Maybe.

How A Handful Of Grassroots Groups Built The Ground Game Critical To Trump’s Victory

 

I'm a little skeptical about that article.  Simply because everyone always wants to take credit for a victory.  Whether what they did had anything to do with it or not.  

I've read repeatedly that Team Harris says their ground game helped make things less bad, also.  The statistic thrown around is that Harris lost by 1.5 % in swing states, versus 4 % everywhere else.  Or something like that.  I will wait for a more thorough analysis.

What is absolutely undeniable is Florida is the model of success for how you get people to register as Republicans, and then vote.  They have built something like a 1 million registered voter advantage.  

We also know now that all those articles that said chasing absentee ballots and getting Republicans to vote early would give Republicans an advantage turned out to be correct. 

Early voting shows strong Republican mobilization in swing states

 

Eventually voter file studies will come out that tell us how many of those Republican voters would have voted anyway, and how many were low propensity voters that Trump's ground game got to register and/or vote.  But it's very easy to believe that Republicans proved what Democrats have always said:  if you get non-voters to vote, it is to your benefit.

The irony is that a lot of those low-propensity voters probably were younger and lower-income as well.  Exactly the groups that tend to vote Democratic.  So it is not at all unrealistic to think that the people that don't vote usually and did vote for Trump in 2024 could vote for a populist Democrat in 2028.  As that article above says, in some ways all Team Trump had to do was offer these voters "more than the time of day".

I've watched more than one podcast in witch politicos who know ground game well joked about how, post-COVID, the last thing voters want is strangers knocking at their door to talk about Donald Trump.   So I'm interested to see what will emerge about what worked and what didn't work on both sides.    Check out the Turning Point website.   Lots of politicos, including Republicans, trashed the idea that they would get the turnout Trump needed.  I didn't believe they would.  And the verdict on how well this turnout strategy worked is still out.  But just like Obama 2012 figured out how to use digital to their advantage, the young brash Trumpys may have figured out some things that work better than old-fashioned door knocking.

Whatever we learn about details that organizers care about, I think the big picture is already clear.  Inflation was the wall of lava that did Kamala Harris in.  It was an ugly and painful death.  But much less ugly and painful than the death of Joe Biden and lots of other Democrats would have been, had he been on top of the ticket.

I was interested to learn that there were conservatives doing this in California as well.  There was a significant shift toward Trump in California.  He got 38 % of the vote in 2024, compared to 34 % in 2020.  But how it happened is telling.  Trump right now has just under 6 million votes in California, compared to just over 6 million in 2020.   So no real gain.  Harris right now has 9.2 million votes in California, compared to 11.1 million for Biden in 2020.  It was not that people embraced Trump.  It's that they were not inspired enough to vote for Democrats.

Despite this, Democrats picked up one House seat in California, and are likely to pick up a second in Orange County's 45th District in the next few days.  Both of these seats represent areas that were solid Republican until Trump came along.  So this is not like the Reagan landslides of 1980 or 1984.  The opposite.  Democrats have been and still are gaining in areas that used to be be the heart and soul of Reagan country.