Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump is acting like he has a mandate to do whatever he wants. In reality, the election was close. Yes, he won the Electoral College 312-226, but that is not a good measure of closeness due to its winner-take-all nature (except in two states). Imagine that a candidate wins every state and D.C. 50.1% to 49.9%. The candidate would win the Electoral College 538-0, but it would still be a close election.
How does the 2024 election compare to other recent ones? Here is a nice chart showing the popular vote for the two major parties since 2000:
About 96% of the vote has been counted so far. Most of the remaining vote is on the West Coast and is largely about provisional ballots and ballots that need to be cured of something before vaccinations are banned. It is likely that Donald Trump's margin will continue to shrink when the full count is in. The most recent count has Trump winning by 77.1 million to 74.7 million votes or 49.78% to 48.23%, a margin of 1.55%. You have to go back to 2000 to find an election that close. Trump's margin in the three blue wall states was even smaller, 1.3%.
As we have pointed out before, Trump got 2.7 million more votes in 2024 than in 2020, but the big story is that Kamala Harris got 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden. Even if 2.7 million Democrats switched sides in 2024, that's still 4.1 million Democrats who sat it out rather than vote for her. They didn't vote third-party because the third-party vote this year was 540,000 votes fewer than in 2020. Four million Democrats decided they didn't like any candidate and didn't vote. If they had voted, maybe they would have voted for Kamala Harris, maybe they would not have. Clearly they didn't like her enough to bother voting. But in any event, their not voting is not a mandate for Trump.
Now let's look at the issues. Did voters like what Trump was selling? There were two large exit polls, the Edison exit poll and the VoteCast sample, of the actual electorate. They give us some information on various issues. To start with, 70% of the voters were unhappy with the direction of the country and two thirds of those voted for Trump. Here are the electorate's views on specific issues:
One issue not reported here is Gaza. However, CNN did an exit poll of Michigan, the state with the largest percentage of Arab Americans by far, at 2.1%. Even in Michigan, only 30% of the voters said the U.S. support of Israel has been too much, and even among them, 61% still voted for Harris, with 37% of the 30% (11%) voting for Trump. This doesn't seem to have been a big factor.
So, did Trump win a mandate? On nine of the ten top issues, the voters actually disagree with him on policy issues. Only on transgender treatments of minors did he have a majority on his side. The inescapable conclusion is that Trump did not get a mandate based on the issues, since the voters don't like his positions on the overwhelming majority of them. He won because eggs cost more than they used to and 4 million Democrats pouted and stayed home to punish Biden. It is also possible—but it is hard to prove—that some of the nonvoting Democrats were racist and/or sexist and that is why they didn't vote. In any event, this is not 1964 or 1980, where the president had a clear mandate. Trump won a squeaker based on external factors that no one had control over, not because voters wanted what he was selling.
So, is this actionable for the Democrats? That is to say, can they use this information to course-correct in the next election? We have three thoughts.
First, it is clear the Democrats had trouble convincing voters that they (the Democratic Party) are much more in alignment with the public than the Republicans are. However, this has been true for at least 20 years, if not longer. Maybe the voters are not being 100% truthful about what they really care about. Maybe the voters don't really know all that well what they want, and the exit polls give a false impression. Maybe the issues the Republicans happen to be "right" on are the dealbreaker issues. In any event, "Do a better job of communicating your ideas, Democrats!" sounds good on paper. But clearly it's not that simple, whatever the reasons may be.
Second, the sort of data you see here is often used to support the idea that the Democratic Party should be pursuing a Howard Dean-style 50-state strategy. That is to say, "The Party is with the voters on the issues, but needs to interact with voters outside the 20 or so blue/swing states, so that those voters know, and so that those voters feel heard." We don't necessarily disagree with this argument, but it's a long-term play. You're not going to reverse trends that are now decades-old in one election. So, this is not particularly actionable when it comes to the 2028 election.
Third, and we have a more detailed piece on this coming soon, if the economy is going to override most/all other concerns, then that largely turns the election into a crapshoot. Presidents and presidential candidates have relatively limited power to make the economy better in the short term (though they CAN make it worse). They have even less power to change voters' perceptions of the economy. This is not to say that political leaders cannot or should not do things to correct obvious problems, like the growing wealth gap between rich and poor, or home ownership becoming increasingly inaccessible, or the costs of daily needs. However, this is also a long-term play.
What happened in 2024 clearly indicates that the Democrats need to come up with a compelling message on the economy in 2028. But guess what? They already knew that. They knew it heading into the most recent election, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the last 30 before that. It's another thing that's easy to say, and nearly impossible to do. Think about everyone in the last century who has clearly won an election based on the poor state of the economy—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump. They did not win primarily because they could enunciate a compelling vision for the economy. Some of them didn't even HAVE a vision for the economy (ahem, Mr. Trump). They all won primarily because they could point to the guy/party in office and talk about how bad that person was doing, and how they (the challenger) could do better.
The point is that it is interesting and useful to get some fine-grained details on why the election turned out the way it did, but that information is not necessarily all that helpful for future elections. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "this is vaguely worth keeping in mind, I guess" and 10 is "forget 2028, this is something the Democrats should be doing tomorrow," we'd say the exit poll data is about a 2.5. It may seem useful in theory, but it's very tough to turn that theory into practice. Many very skillful politicians have tried, few have succeeded.
On the other hand, the personality of the presidential nominee speaks volumes. Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain" and was a good enough actor that people believed him. Barack Obama was a once-in-a-generation talent. Kamala Harris lost the 2019 Democratic primary before the voting even started. She is at best an average politician and not someone most voters look at and say: "That person understands me." She was supposed to bring out millions of new young Democrats who were awed by having a Black woman to vote for. Not only did that not happen, but fewer Democrats voted in 2024 than for the boring old white guy in 2020. Maybe the economy will suck in 2026 and/or 2028 and any Democrat can win any competitive race, but that is not a strategy. Finding an authentic, charismatic candidate who the voters love is a strategy, but not necessarily an easy one to execute, especially since the 2028 primaries will be free-for-alls. (V & Z)