I want to lay out some things that I think I know or at least I think that I think.
- Lots of people are going to be hurt. The leopards are going to be feasting on faces of people who voted for the leopard eating faces party. Lots of people who voted against the leopards are going to be hurt too.
- It looks like the national shift was a near uniform
4 to 56 points to the right from 2020.- Internationally, being an incumbent party in 2024 is a truly bad spot to be with historic wipeouts not uncommon
- The big exception to
4 or 5 point6 shift to the right were in the swing states where there was a very active and engaged campaign. - The swing states moved right by
12 to 3 points. - The Harris campaign in these states likely had a substantial pro-DEM campaign effect of several points
- I’m betting that we can disaggregate mobilization effects to advertising/media effects by looking at vote swings in counties/precincts in non-swing states that get swing state messaging (ie the South Carolina suburbs of Charlotte got bombarded by TV ads but did not get the full GOTV mobilization effort while a decent chunk of SC got nearly no advertising nor GOTV mobilization from the national party… was there differential swing in the SC Charlotte suburbs relative to Charlestown or Columbia SC or was the NC result entirely a ground game result)
- Everyone in the Democratic Party has a very strong incentive to make immediate and large claims about what the problem was and how to fix it as a way to claim within faction positions and priorities.
- We are unlikely to have good enough voter file data for these arguments for a few months
- UPDATE: Hell, several states have yet to receive or count a substantial percentage of their ballots yet. We won’t have rough near final counts for another week or more.
- Given near uniform swings in big states and small states, red states and blue states, causal explanations that are hyper campaign/tactical focused are pushing one hell of a boulder up the evidentiary hill.
- The GOP did not have substantial Presidential coat-tails
- The Senate GOP pick-ups were 2 ruby red (MT and WV), 1 pretty red (Ohio) and perhaps 1 swing state (PA) pick-ups
- The GOP January House Caucus is +/-2 members from their Caucus size today
- I don’t think there was a governorship flip in either direction
Check in on your people today.
Build community, solidarity and kindness as we’re going to need it for the next fifty months.
But let’s figure out what happened instead of what we believe to have happened as engaging with reality as it is instead of as it is wished to be makes recovery more likely.
No One of Consequence
Baud would never have done this.
It would have been MUCH worse.
I think, given this electorate, that this will be a Winning Message.
Baud / TireRims 2028 !!!
-NOoC
J. Arthur Crank
Well yeah. They probably stink to high heaven.
J. Arthur Crank
Also too: I have been reaching out individually to those around me to check in and to offer support. Right now that is the best I can do.
Omnes Omnibus
I reached out to my 21 y/o niece yesterday. Angry and in disbelief is where she’s at. As a senior in college preparing to be an elementary school teacher, it hit her doubly hard.
Baud
You obviously need a remedial course on Internet basics.
Steve LaBonne
Thank you. I endorse every word of this.
David Anderson
@Baud: I am aware of all internet traditions
Melancholy Jaques
Point 2(1) shows that it isn’t just American voters who are stupid. Blaming the persons & parties in power for the residual impacts of a global pandemic is willful stupidity.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Let’s not overlook this. NC is the poster child for that observation.
The only sad surprise was as you pointed out, PA Senate. Hell, I thought the MD Senate race would have been the one that could have gone to the odious ex-governor.
K-Mo
Good summary and thoughtful advice on how to go forward from here.
trollhattan
Hi David,
I spend several days through to election eve in your state, shuttling between Raleigh and Winston Salem. I left modestly convinced Kamala had a chance based on folks’ general mood and encountering more Harris-Walz signage than Trump crap.
Boy howdy, I got every little thing wrong. Are all the nazis in Charlotte?
Mai Naem mobile
@No One of Consequence: Baud/Big Blingy Tire Rims 2028 to attract the young male vote.
VFX Lurker
In Michigan, a million T***p voters didn’t bother to vote in the downballot MI Supreme Court race. Almost all of the Harris voters did. Both Democratic-backed candidates (Kyra Bolden and Kimberly Thomas) won in landslide votes.
Mai Naem mobile
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: i was worried about Maryland as well, especially since Alsobrooks’ grandmas property tax issue seemed to be catching on at the end. I hope she pays that thing off with her first Senate paycheck. She said she was still making payments. I’m not surprised about Casey. I didn’t think it had called yet though. He just seemed to have loser stink around him during his appearances with Harris and Obama.
gene108
I think a big problem that has developed is people no longer have a shared set of values and expectations. The divisions between the “America hating” people protesting the Iraq War, and all the people cheering it on has just gotten worse.
There’s nothing that a Republican politician can do that seems a bridge too far for voters, because there are legions of people around to make excuses, justify it, or through a lot of “whataboutism” around to obfuscate the issue.
I think this has had and will continue to have a negative effect on the country, due to information bubbles, that people operating in bad faith will exploit for their own benefit.
trollhattan
@VFX Lurker: Jeez, that’s weird. Fortunate, and weird.
Eural Joiner
In my classes (high school) I’m hitting them with the global perspective you mentioned: COVID, inflation, election results, etc. are all following a massive global pattern. We are being pushed by the Great Wave of History (yes, I’ve got the poster on the wall!) and – although we all can make a difference in our small spot – there’s very little we can do about it. Just something to keep in mind as we dissect and argue over the minutiae in the mountains of data we will have. :)
The Other Bob
@VFX Lurker:
I have looked at a substantial amount of county-wide Michigan data and found that you are correct. For the most part, Trump ran ahead of the Republican base, but every other Republican ran at base. Trump brought in new voters, but that did not help the Republicans much. Elissa Slotkin also won for this reason.
cmorenc
@trollhattan:
The presidential results in NC has a lot to do with the deeper reddening of counties out away from the big blue urban crescent running from Raleigh to Greensboro/WS to Charlotte. North Carolina has a track record running back at least 30 years to the 1990 Helms v Gantt Senate race in NC – of consistently dashing the expectations of NC purpling toward blue by a point or two.
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
He’s now in South Carolina, at USC-Columbia. But that just happened in the past few months; before that, he was in NC.
NeenerNeener
I want some of what Pelosi was smoking when she said we were going to take the House, no problem. She must be deeply embarrassed right now.
The Unmitigated Gaul
I don’t think I’ve ever been so consistently wrong about anything in my life as I have been about Trump – yet at the same time, so absolutely right. It’s a conundrum!
My slowly-forming view now is that, given how little he achieved in his first term when he had, briefly, some half-way competent people in his Administration – a large tax cut for corporations, Supreme Court appointments, mandated by Lenard Leo, which lead to the abortion decision, anything else? – what will he manage this time, with his current bottom-of-the-barrel crew of Kash Patels and Rick Grenells and a sullen and mocked bureaucracy slow-walking his every whim?
Of course, given my predictive record, Wall Street titans and Rhodes Scholars and Hollywood superstars may well now flock to his side – but I don’t think so.
OId Man Shadow
Good.
Zero sympathy. Zero fucks given right now. Maybe they’ll learn.
If that’s any of you, tell me how I can help you.
Jeffro
David, you are asking that we look at actual data and stuff before opening our yaps. A bridge too far, sir, a bridge too far!
LOL
Anyway, I saw this
and thought, “that’s also my Virginia! shifted but stayed BLUE woot woot!” =)
OId Man Shadow
The stock market is having a great day because the wolves know the shepherds are going to be fired and it’ll be an all you can eat buffet of sheep.
NaijaGal
@Melancholy Jaques: I think part of the problem is the news/media environment. Did voters hear a truthful explanation of the fact that every country was hit by inflation because of the pandemic and that the US economy was actually doing better than most? Without that context, it’s easy to blame the government of the day (I’m aware that people might still vote the government out even given that context).
We’ll find out whether voters come to understand what actively voting for fascism means in a media environment controlled by corporations and oligarchs that think they will benefit from that fascist government. There’s always some out group to blame for every problem unless you have an effective news/media counter.
Building several nonprofit news entities that adhere to ethical standards of journalism is necessary but I don’t know who will fund them or if they can even break through. We are all marinating in right wing nonsense and it definitely has an impact.
Gin & Tonic
My immediate family (just children and spouses) are in varying stages of shock. My Mexican, green-card-holding daughter-in-law is understandably very apprehensive. Dear wife and I are doing what we can to provide support.
But beyond that? Honestly, I’m tired. I cut my political teeth in anti-Vietnam-War protests, and have worked for the last half-century to try to make America a better place. It looks like it doesn’t want to be. I’m going to work on me and my family, and the rest….
Steve LaBonne
@The Other Bob: This is the one thing that makes me feel a tiny bit of optimism IF we can manage to keep having somewhat free elections. I strongly believe they don’t have a replacement for Trump and won’t be able to find one. For those who know the Foundation stories, he is the Mule.
jeff47
This may be a little pedantic, but I’m not a fan of using “shift” in situations like this.
A whole lot of analysis of elections discusses it as if the electorate is constant. It’s a lot easier to do, so a huge pile of pundits do it. “Shift” does that too – it implies that the constant pool of people moved to the right instead of 2024 voters being composed of different people than 2020 voters.
But doing it this way IMO obscures the real problem: Turnout. Fixing turnout requires a completely different approach than fixing a shift of a constant pool. And we’ve spent far too many decades approaching losses as a shift.
This is why we keep having Democratic leadership demand we “move to the center”. Because they view voters as a constant pool. And when they lose, they demand we “move to the center” because we lost. Very little effort is spent trying to figure out why our “attract the moderate Republican” campaigns are failing to get left-leaning Millennials and GenZ to turn out.
cmorenc
@David Anderson:
For over 150 years in the US, the owners of the leopards have used promotion of provocative distracting resentment to override rational voter self-interest and override their inclinations to question whether the leopards can turn cannibal on those helping feed them in order that they can attack their resented opponents.
Steve LaBonne
@NaijaGal: We already have things like ProPublica and to some extent TPM. We need to support them. Also the Guardian, which for all its flaws is somewhat beyond the reach of Trumpreich retaliation because of being based outside the country.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist:
Oops, my bad. Forgot he decamped Duke. (And those local rivalries–they’re real and they’re spectacular.)
David Anderson
@NeenerNeener: She was probably off in her estimate by 1% national swing…. that is a reasonable degree of being off. Given that all three Dem Nevada seats are holds, and WA-3 also looks like a hold, the range of the GOP majority is 219-216 to 221-2014.
David Anderson
@trollhattan: I split my time between Columbia SC and Chapel Hill NC (will be doing that drive tonight)
David Anderson
@jeff47: Let’s wait until we get actual data… I can buy this argument on its face but there is not enough data yet on how much is mobilization and how much is persuasion
Big C
*Longtime lurker unlurking for a moment* Votes are still being counted, but it looks like 10 million or more 2020 Biden voters stayed home on Tuesday. Not switched to Trump, but just said “F*** it, who cares” and stayed home. I’m sure there’s lots of speculation on the source of that apathy but it seems like that means there are definitely folks out there we can reach. Probably the next major disaster(s) of the Trump administration will show them they should probably not sit out the next election.
Belafon
@NaijaGal: This is a major problem. We know what’s going on because politics is our hobby. Everyone else relied/relies on what they get from summaries, primarily newspapers and tv news. It shouldn’t require everyone to have politics as a hobby to know what’s going on, because it will never happen unless things get really, I mean Great Depression/Black Plague levels.
AM in NC
@trollhattan: A friend of mine from Ireland relocated from Charlotte to the Triangle and has been so much happier here. She says Charlotte suburbs are still really red and she had a lot of trouble finding “her people” there.
trollhattan
@cmorenc: That’s pretty interesting. Took the time to parse where their growth has occurred, given the state’s overall growth, and it’s not evenly distributed, even a little bit. Imagine the many transplants have upended whatever the innate growth patterns had been.
At least they left Robinson in the trash bin. Wonder which cabinet position he gets?
JML
Lot of excellent points here. 2 that immediately jumped out was the reminder that 2024 was a bad year to be an incumbent internationally and the lack of coattails for the GOP.
I feel like when Kamala took over as the nominee Team Blue felt like we were now the campaign for change because of the new energy and so forth. But we were still the incumbent party and that may have overridden any change vibes we were putting out…and we may have missed it, especially in terms of how much enthusiasm we were actually generating.
The lack of coattails suggests that there really is no GOP, only the Party of Trump. Which “works” so long as he’s on the ballot and so forth. How strong of a showing do they muster when he’s not there? they thought they had a “red wave” in 2022 and it fizzled. We know he won’t hand things off gracefully to anyone, so is there anyone in the GOP that can generate this kind of weird/scary blend of nationalist/populist cult of personality?
Steve LaBonne
@Belafon: Most people actively don’t want to know.
trollhattan
@AM in NC: Good to hear. I enjoyed Winston-Salem the best, not least because that’s where the kid is, but it’s also pretty, downtown is legit walkable (NC pedestrians are an endangered species, generally) and has a vibrant arts and cultural scene. Fall color is stunning.
frosty
@Gin & Tonic: I am tired too. Twenty years of canvassing every two years. As a tongue-tied introvert I’m no good at it and don’t want to do it anymore. I’m ready to put Mencken’s summary on my FB page and disengage.
Maybe on my front lawn too
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Poe Larity
12M more voters didn’t think Joe was the greatest thing ever in 2020. They were sick of Trump and Covid.
Trump got what, 1M more votes? That’s not earth shattering. Harris got 5M more votes than Clinton.
If you need to win swing states, you need a candidate optimized for that or hope for a bad economy, pandemic or worse.
If you can hold back the gag reflex, you should read Bobo’s interview of Bannon this summer. He isn’t a fan of Bobo or even really Trump. Trump is a vessel. They’re building and they’re in it to win the war.
JoyceH
I’m just tired and disgusted and ashamed of my country.
I’ve always believed and still believe that there are more decent people than not. These people might not be actively out there, working soup kitchens and being Big Brothers and all that, but what makes them decent is that they let people be and don’t actively and deliberately hurt people.
And all these decent people had to do to prevent an enormous indecency was to show up and vote. In some places they didn’t even have to go anywhere, just drop their vote in the mail. In other places they could choose a huge variety of days to go vote when it was convenient for them. They didn’t even have to crawl over broken glass, just do this one simple thing.
And they couldn’t be bothered.
AM in NC
@NaijaGal: This is what I have been thinking for a long time now. The media ecosystem is THE problem. I lost a father to FOX/Clear Channel Radio in the early 2000s, so I know propaganda works. And the rise of the social media platforms for disinformation has made the problem even worse.
I think we need crowd-sourced funding for new media – we’ve shown the liberal grassroots can raise BANK; we need to support existing outlets like Pro-Publica; to leave Twitter and other rightwing hellsites; to crowdfund a large legal fund to sue the fuck out of rightwing media for libel and slander; and to act as citizen informers to break people out of their bubbles.
WE need stickers with Trump’s nasty face saying “Trump Did This!” to paste on gas pumps and all around Walmart when prices start to go up.
We need to Xerox and plaster articles of each and every Post-Dobbs death in bathroom stalls across America with “Another Woman killed by Republican Office Holders – THIS is the reality of a Republican vote”.
Every time ANY negative news comes out, we need to publicize the hell out of it IN THE REAL WORLD. MAGAS and norms don’t consume any news media that is reasonable so we won’t reach them like we used to. We are playing under the old rules and losing badly. Propaganda works, and we need to get our truthful side out there.
And whenever we get a future payoff from some Biden policy, we need to make sure Trump taking credit for it is shown to be a LIE. Only we can save us.
chemiclord
@VFX Lurker: What this tells me, and will be our sole salvation, is the Cult of Trump is for Trump alone. The same message from any other lips is not received nearly as well.
Once that creep passes, his entire base will crumble. We need to hang on and be ready for the opportunity.
Torrey
Aside from the fact that I really appreciate the elegant turn of phrase here, it is a real relief to see someone taking a data-over-dogma* approach and applying serious analytical expertise to understanding what happened. Thank you!
*Acknowledgement footnote: phrase stolen from Dan McClellan, Ph.D., a serious expert in the Bible and cognitive science of religion, who runs a podcast by that title which lives up to its name.
Steve LaBonne
@JoyceH: I’m afraid that for most people decency doesn’t extend beyond their own families, homes, and close friends. Our culture gives people license not to care about anything or anybody else.
tam1MI
I don’t think this is all that surprising. Trump attacks the Republican party as much as he does the Dems, his message is always that he, and only he, is worthy of his followers votes.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Big C:
I pointed this out yesterday, Carter’s drop off between 76 and 80 was about 13%. Harris’s was/is around 17%. Somebody noted the commonality between the two was inflation (real or imagined or media-spun).
I don’t know about any correlation as that commenter made but it’s interesting to see the drop off rates between the two.
Quinerly
Probably been posted.
Trump’s victory adds $64 billion to wealth of richest top 10
26 billion to Musk alone.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/07/trump-victory-adds-record-wealth-richest-top-10
Remember now…all those suburban White women and, 30 yo bros, and Hispanic men voted for this.
Mai Naem mobile
@chemiclord: i think all this electoral strategy, attracting people, GOTV is a waste of time. Face it, this country only wants the Dems when shit is really really bad and shit needs to be fixed. Otherwise they’re happy being their racist bigoted misogynistic selves voting for straight white salesmen.
JoyceH
@Steve LaBonne: my Mom used to have the selfish man’s prayer she would recite sometimes. Goes like this: “God bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and no more.”
Steve LaBonne
@Mai Naem mobile: We kept most people from Finding Out as long as we could. Now we can’t stop it and I propose to focus on helping people who need and deserve it to whatever limited extent we can.
dww44
@AM in NC: We do have to build a progressive and pervasive media platform to combat the omnipresent Conservative ones. And sooner. Not later.
I’m sitting in my hairstyle place right now. Since I was last here 3 months ago they’ve put up a TV on the wall and it was tuned to Fox News. I politely asked for the channel to be changed to the WC. This also happened in 2008. Their brains are broken by the possibility of a person of color in the White House.
We can only combat this if we have new and strong media outlets.
tam1MI
@Big C: Votes are still being counted, but it looks like 10 million or more 2020 Biden voters stayed home on Tuesday. Not switched to Trump, but just said “F*** it, who cares” and stayed home.
There are 2 theories emerging as to why this happened. One (the one I lean towards), is that Biden supporters pissed at the way he was forced out stayed home because of that. The other is that people who felt strongly about Gaza stayed home to (all together now) Teach the Dems a Lesson. There is kind of a silver lining to both theories in that neither of those things will be a factor in the next Presidential election. Biden will be long out of office by then and the circumstances of his ouster are (hopefully) not replicable, and, sadly, after this election the Gaza issue will be resolved in exactly the way that nobody wanted.
gene108
@Steve LaBonne:
Trump showed how it is done. Republican senate candidate largely followed Trump’s script in PA.
In sports, when one team finds a new play that no one thought of and works, other teams adopt it to the players they have.
That’s what will happen if Trump can’t run in 2028.
A bunch of people are going to take their acting lessons and emulate Trump as best as they can.
JoyceH
@gene108: DeSantis emulated Trump as best he could and how did that work for him on the national stage? I do think (and hope) that Trump was/is a Black Swan event, probably due to a long-running television show convincing millions of gullible people that he was a glamorous and successful businessman.
greengoblin
Regarding the shift: Washington shifted bluer and I just received an email notifying us workers of a mass protest this weekend in supporting migrant rights.
Hopefully my state is not alone.
BobbyK
8 million fewer democratic voters is what happened.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/11/eight-million-missing-democratic-voters
Citizen Alan
Everyone who rejected Kamala over the Gaza issue will be complicit in the coming genocide.
Melancholy Jaques
I suppose we will never know, but I really do wonder what each campaign’s internals were showing them because the last week or so of the campaign, Harris’s entire team looked and acted like they were winning and Trump’s whole world looked and acted like they were losing.
Being forced to admit that Nate Silver was right might move me to the dark side of the force.
Barry
@JoyceH: That was against Trump, the original.
Darkrose
@Steve LaBonne: This is where I’m at right now. I will try my best to help and protect those who need it, but I’ve got no energy to spare on being compassionate and understanding to those who’ve chosen the path of selfishness and harm to others. They’re about to learn what Martin Niemöller meant, and it’s not going to be pretty.
OId Man Shadow
Everyone keeps assuming there will be another election… or at least an election that can be won by the opposition party.
Geminid
@greengoblin:
Andrew Villaneuve of the Northwest Progressive Policy Institute put up.an artivle yesterday about this. Its title and introduction:
I’ve read only two of Villaneuve’s articles, but he impresses me as a good, honest reporter and analyst. The article is worth looking up even if I botch this link as I often do:
https://www.nwprogressive.org/a-tale-of-two-elections-washington-and-oregon-get-more-democratic-as-battleground-states-swing-to-donald-trump
Villeneuve seems to head up the NPPI, and his news site covers a lot of Washington stories political and otherwise.
Ed. Unsurprisingly, the link does not work. I found the article by looking up Northwest Progressive Policy Institute Twitter, but it can also be accessed on NPPI’s home page.
Darkrose
@tam1MI: In 2020, people were terrified by the pandemic and Trump’s response. In 2024, people have decided to memory hole the pandemic and blame the Democrats for the fact that we didn’t go right back to the world of 2019. 45% of voters said that they were worse off now than in 2020, when you couldn’t buy toilet paper. Their lack of object permanence is going to bite them in the ass when Trump’s tariffs hit.
(Also, Biden was the comforting white grandpa and not a competent, intelligent Black woman.)
sixthdoctor
I think Imani Gandy also brings up a good point:
So given that 15 million people stayed home, is the pandemic the only reason Biden won in 2020? Because they were mailing out ballots like AOL CDs?
Quinerly
@David Anderson:
Excellent post. TY.
UncleEbeneezer
It’s wild to me how very smart people I know are like (and I’m thinking of Liberals/Progressives to be clear):
“things are complex, there are multiple determinants of election results, etc.”
all year long. Then as soon as an election happens they pivot to the assumption that there can only be one reason we lost. They also acknowledge that world trends apply to the United States as well, until someone suggests they contributed to Trump winning. Looking at the trend that:
It’s hard for me to reconcile that with claims that Trump only won because of Racism and Misogyny. I think those were both huge factors as always, but they aren’t the only ones.
Quinerly
@cmorenc:
Most everything east of Raleigh/Research Triangle pretty Red. Bluish in Greenville, NC because of ECU. Go Pirates! I’m actually wearing my 1992 Peach Bowl sweat shirt today that my mom sent me long ago. ECU 37 vs NC State 34! Can’t find my old Liberty Bowl t shirt.
No One of Consequence
@Mai Naem mobile: So, so much better. An imma jelly I didna think of it. So much for my mad marketing skillz.
Darkrose
@UncleEbeneezer: Racism and misogyny weren’t the only factors, and I don’t think anyone is saying that they were. That said, men across all demographics shifting in favor of Trump to some degree is an important piece of the puzzle.
Quinerly
Lots of interesting and smart comments on this thread.
Quinerly
@Darkrose:
I’m cleaning my house. MSNBC on in the background. This little tidbit reported…Baron Trump was the one who pushed for all the guy centric podcasts like Joe Rogan. This is an entire world this 63 yo chick knew nothing about. Plus, he and Don Jr. Pushed for that anti Trans ad run at football games…”She’s for They/Them. We are for You/ Us.” (Something like that) I really missed all the stuff about that ad. They spent over $20 million on it.
Oh…now found a link
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/18/politics/trump-transgender-attack-ads-harris/index.html
Geminid
Regarding the apparent decline in Democratic voters from 2020 to 2024: not all voters who chose Biden in 2029 were Democrats. He carried a majority of Independents, and Independents are 30% or more of the electorate in many states. I think some portion of decline in the Democratic votes can be debited to Biden/Trump Indies.
We’ll know more after the votes are finally tabulated, and analysts will be diving into voter files when they are are released. I guess we’ll never know the whole story, but I suspect a shift in Independents was part of it.
fancycwabs
I think there are probably three root causes for the results:
Democrats are going to have to work extra hard on addressing that first root cause if we’re going to succeed going forward, because the Lie Machine is getting toeholds at a lot of more established media outlets and making it that much harder to know what’s true.
Quinerly
@Geminid:
First 15 mins of “Deadline White House” very good. MSNBC.
In a nutshell, Biden’s approval rating going into the election was 40%. In elections past, an incumbent party’s approval rating going into an election is usually very close to the the vote share in election. (See Carter, GWB in 2016). Harris will end up around 48%. She overperformed her incumbent’s party by 8%.
Timill
@Geminid: Looks like it moved: https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2024/11/a-tale-of-two-elections-washington-and-oregon-get-more-democratic-as-battleground-states-swing-to-donald-trump.html
Geminid
@Timill: Ahh, thank you.
Fake Irishman
@The Other Bob:
Yes this. Also, Dems took a few losses in the state ledges, but pretty close to a wash. This was not 2010 or 2014, even with lower Dem turnout.
If they have low propensity voters who only turn out in presidential election years when Trump is in the ballot (and in general think about how Dems over turnout in special elections and in 2022 battlegrounds), we might have some hooks for a long-term strategy here…..
colleeniem
@Timill: Thank you for this!
billcinsd
The shift is mainly because 2020 Dem voters did not show up in as big of numbers in 2024. Why that happened is anybody’s guess
Mad_Econ
Very long time lurker here (2004?). Could the voter suppression laws passed in the interim have anything to do with it? I think that’s what happened in Florida.
Dave's Dad
I have been reading, watching and listening to the losing party talking heads after Tuesday’s election…that pity party is over…Trump and his followers had a good night on Tuesday…they earned the votes they got…while I disagree with the winners on a lot…they won…now losers get back to work.
We lost some Senate and House (not sure yet on total number in Senate and House) seats …that had good people in them…Democrats and Independents had a lot of seats to defend…those loses could have been greater as I write this…there are still a few Senate seats with no declared winners yet…The President Elect…made a lot of promises…to a lot of people and groups….accountability is the key….My feeling is Trump loves to enhance his proformance…Trump can’t run again…but his supporters for the most part will…those people are to beheld accountable…if the past is any clue…Trump won’t care….keep your heads up and get back to work