Harris didn’t lose the election so much as Trump won

Democrats face the need to reassess their strategy after Kamala Harris's narrow losses in swing states and a decline in working-class and non-college-educated voter support.
Democrats face the need to reassess their strategy after Kamala Harris's narrow losses in swing states and a decline in working-class and non-college-educated voter support.

Summary

If Democrats want to win in the future, they need to grasp how he did it.

As Republicans prepare to take control of the federal government, Democrats are assessing what went wrong in the 2024 election and what they need to change. If they want to win future elections, it’s essential for them to get the story right.

The predominant view of the election among Democrats goes like this: While Kamala Harris’s campaign managed to recover much of the ground that Joe Biden had lost, her record and a handful of strategic mistakes limited her appeal, opening the door for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Two bodies of evidence complicate this narrative. First, pre-election surveys consistently showed that Ms. Harris’s ceiling was substantially higher than Mr. Trump’s, meaning a higher percentage of voters said they’d consider voting for her than him. Ms. Harris’s eventual share of the nationwide popular vote was much lower than the percentage of these persuadable voters. Postelection surveys show that late-deciding voters broke decisively for Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris failed to win over a small but vital share of the electorate, which was disproportionately younger, male, Hispanic and non-college-educated.

Second, the election involved two different contests: one in the seven swing states, the other in the rest of the country. In the latter, where advertisements and voter mobilization were scarce, support for Ms. Harris receded from the high-water mark Mr. Biden had established in the 2020 election—especially in blue states. In both Illinois and New Jersey, Ms. Harris received about 400,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden did four years earlier. In New York, Ms. Harris fell short of Mr. Biden by about 600,000. In California, the shortfall reached 1.8 million votes, a 16.5% drop from 2020.

By contrast, in the swing states Ms. Harris came close to matching Mr. Biden’s performance, falling short by only 0.3%. This wasn’t enough, however, because Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 showing by 6.2%. Yes, Ms. Harris lost all seven swing states, but it’s more accurate to say that Mr. Trump won them with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.

In the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris fell short of Mr. Biden’s 2020 performance by only about 35,000 votes, while Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 performance by about 166,000. In Luzerne County, a microcosm of the working-class revolt against the contemporary Democratic Party, Ms. Harris fell only about 2,000 votes short of Mr. Biden’s 2020 performance. Meanwhile Mr. Trump continued to expand his working-class base, improving on his 2020 total in the county by about 5,500 votes.

Mr. Trump has substantially expanded the Republican vote in Luzerne County. In 2012, about 58,000 voters in the county picked Mitt Romney. In the 2024 election, more than 92,000 picked Mr. Trump—a nearly 60% increase over 12 years, even though the county’s population size has barely changed and Ms. Harris’s vote was only marginally smaller than Barack Obama’s. The story is less about Democratic erosion than Republican mobilization.

This is part of a larger story—the transformation of American politics during the past two decades of intensifying partisan polarization. In the seven presidential contests from 1976 to 2000, voter turnout never came close to 60%, averaged only about 54%, and fell below 50% in 1996. In the six contests from 2004 to 2024, turnout averaged 61.8%, in 2020 reached its highest level since 1900, and has fallen below 60% only once.

Voters with high levels of education tend to vote regularly, even in lower-intensity elections, while less-educated voters are more likely to turn out when they feel a strong and direct stake in the outcome. Through most of the 20th century, intensity benefited Democrats, who performed well with voters without college degrees. But now the Republicans hold the edge among working-class voters and do best when these voters see clear differences between the parties.

Although the share of college-educated voters in the electorate has risen sharply in recent decades, Americans without college degrees still made up 57% of all voters nationally in the 2024 election—and 60% in the swing states. If Democrats wish to rebuild their national majority, they can’t continue to give ground in this crucial portion of the electorate.

The past four years should teach party reformers that abstract appeals to the benefits of long-term economic investments won’t suffice. Working-class voters have little slack in their family budgets and don’t have the luxury of waiting. They need to see tangible improvements in their lives within the span of a single presidential term. The onus is on Democrats to produce a new economic agenda that credibly promises—and then produces—this result.

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