Nov. 19, 2024, 3:29 p.m.
President-elect Trump got more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris; that’s what happened.
The tallies are not yet final, but as of Tuesday, about 2.6 million more people voted for Trump than Harris, which is about 1.7 percent of voters. In the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump won by less than 2 percentage points.
Yet reading the media coverage and social media discourse, it would be understandable to think Democrats got walloped up and down the ballot on the scale of 1984, when President Reagan won all but one state. So it’s worth considering the role of the media in the entire 2024 campaign process.
It’s true that there was a national rightward shift, but it’s also important to keep the scope of it in perspective. President Biden won with 51 percent of the vote in 2020, and Harris dropped down to about 48 percent. Meanwhile, Trump increased from 47 percent to 50 percent. The changes were smaller in the closest swing states—the Rust Belt trifecta of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Democrats lost four Senate seats, but they also held seats in states that Harris lost—Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania is the only swing state in which a Democratic Senate candidate lost. The Senate seats Democratic incumbents lost were largely uphill battles to begin with in Montana and Ohio, along with West Virginia. And the House looks to be a wash—each party flipped a few seats, with no meaningful changes to the power dynamics.
With the entire picture in focus, sure, this was absolutely not the election that Democrats wanted, particularly following the wave of enthusiasm in late July and August when Harris took over the top of the ticket. In retrospect, could that have been more relief than enthusiasm? Biden looked to be headed for a loss, and many in the media participated in the push to get him to bow out of the race. Harris represented a fighting chance, which the media happily grabbed onto.
Explaining a Harris win would have been easy: Voters rejected Trump and his ilk, just as they did in 2020. A Trump win seems more difficult to explain. Everyone knows who he is now! Surely the majority would reject him, even if he won the Electoral College. But instead, Trump not only won the Electoral College, he won the popular vote.
And now we get a zillion media think pieces on what Democrats did wrong and what the ideological fights are between the center and the Left.
The funny thing is that there is a good way to know what happened: Talk to voters. The obsession with pre-election horse-race polling has given way to completely ignoring what voters said on the major Election Day surveys and polls conducted since then.
The explanations are not cut-and-dried; they never are. But it’s also not difficult to see that swing voters rejected an administration they felt didn’t help them. As for what they knew about Trump—well, I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of swing voters only pay attention to politics long enough to cast their ballots. They are not watching rallies. They are annoyed by political ads and ignore mailers. This is why searches of “did Joe Biden drop out” surged on Election Day.
Logically, voters who didn’t even know who was on the ballot were probably unlikely to cast a ballot for the candidate they didn’t know (Harris). They did know Trump, and they knew their perception that the economy was better—mostly because prices were lower—during his term.
Those swing voters who did know enough to have the right candidates in mind, but not much more, went with a gut feeling of some sort. In an environment where the current administration is unpopular and people think the country is on the wrong track, that vote wasn’t going to Harris. Plus, isn’t Trump a great businessman or something?
These are the stories you only rarely see in the media. It is uncomfortable to learn how swing voters actually make decisions. It is also uncomfortable to think about how much money was spent trying to sway their decisions, when they came down to a gut feeling or something they only saw in passing. We spend a lot of time and money trying to catch them in passing.
Eventually, more data will help us sort out what happened. In the meantime, all of the media explainers would do well to consider that there might not be some grand theory of what happened. Maybe we just have a low-information swing electorate that is busy living their lives and votes on a whim. It’s just not what we want to see from inside our political bubbles.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
