Busting Myths About the 2024 Election

Democrats can't decide where to go if they don't acknowledge reality.

Photo by Laurie Shaull

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Progressive and centrist Democrats are making essentially the same argument about the 2024 election, even though it leads them to opposite conclusions about what their party should do next. It goes like this:

We just got wiped out. The American people have rejected both us personally and the things we’re trying to sell them. We need a complete overhaul if we’re going to be successful in the future. 

If you’ve been paying attention in the two weeks since the election, you’ve heard some version of this argument a hundred times. Yet it’s wrong in every respect. 

Before we go farther, let me make absolutely clear that I am not saying Democrats shouldn’t reexamine their choices. I am not saying everything is fine. They could do a much better job in policy, politics, and communication. They should have a frank and thoughtful debate about what their party stands for, what it prioritizes, and how it communicates to the public. 

But if you want to alter your strategy in effective ways, you have to begin with a clear understanding of reality. Which is why it’s important to puncture some of the myths that keep getting repeated.

This election wasn’t a blowout, it was a squeaker

There’s not much mystery about why so many Democrats are acting as though the election was a rout: If you’re trying to convince your party to make major changes, it’s in your interest to argue that you just got utterly massacred, and therefore anything but radical change would be a failure. Democrats of all kinds are now saying this; to take one example, Sen. Chris Murphy called the election “a cataclysm.” Listening to these conversations, you’d think it was a blowout on the level of 1984, 1972, or 1964. 

But it wasn’t. This was an extremely close election — in fact, it was one of the closest presidential elections in American history. Let’s compare it to the elections of the last 40 years:

We don’t have final results yet, but at the moment, Trump is leading Harris in the popular vote by 1.7 percent. That makes it the closest election in the last 24 years, the second-closest in half a century, and the fourth-closest in the last 132 years; only 2000, 1968, and 1960 were closer. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a larger margin than Trump won it this year.

That doesn’t mean the next four years won’t be a horror, nor does it mean Democrats should do nothing in response to losing. But it does suggest that the American public did not rise up as one to reject the Democratic Party and everything it stands for. 

What about down ballot? The results there show very much of a split decision — not great for Democrats, but also not a blowout. In the Senate, there were seven truly competitive races this year, in Arizona, Montana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (plus a few that one party or the other hoped would be competitive but really weren’t: Maryland, Florida, Texas, and Nebraska). Two of those, Montana and Ohio, were in solidly red states; Democrats unsurprisingly lost both. Of the remaining five, Democrats won four and lost one, presuming that the result in Pennsylvania holds.

Losing the Senate is very, very bad. But if we’re just asking how Democrats performed in Senate races, the answer is that they did pretty well, perhaps better than one might have expected in a year in which they lost the presidential race. 

What about the House? Did Democrats get blown away there? No. There are some races still to be called, but it looks like the most likely outcome will be a zero net gain for either party; at most it will be a seat or two in either direction. In historical context, this is also not bad — sometimes the incoming president’s party wins House seats, but not always:

You can argue that in a better world Democrats would have kept the presidency and won every contested Senate and House race, and that would indeed be a better world. But in this one, they didn’t perform all that badly. 

The Kamala Harris campaign, real and imaginary

The second kind of myth-making going on right now concerns the campaign Harris ran. Everyone’s argument boils down to If Harris had done this thing that I have always believed every Democrat should do, she would have won. Progressives say she should have been more progressive, centrists say she should have been more centrist, advocates of populism say she should have been more populist, etc. The problem is that these arguments are increasingly disconnected from the campaign she actually ran.

For instance, some are claiming that the party in general and Harris in particular are just too darn woke. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” said Rep. Seth Moulton. If only Harris hadn’t centered her campaign on trans rights! But of course, she didn’t do that, and neither did any Democrat running for any federal office. “It’s not just Kamala,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class.” Even some Democrats claim that “identity politics” is something only Democrats do, and when Donald Trump runs a campaign built on hatred of immigrants and trans people, that’s not “identity politics.” 

The fact that people like Moulton have to put the blame on something no prominent Democratic candidate actually did suggests a fundamental weakness in their argument. If running to the center was a perfect strategy, Harris would have swept to a spectacular victory, since that’s exactly the strategy she employed. She made a clear decision that there were more votes to be gained from persuading wavering Republicans than mobilizing indifferent Democrats. She talked tough on immigration, bragged about owning a gun, and spent much of the race’s final days campaigning with Liz Cheney. She contrasted her approach to her political opponents with Trump’s: “He wants to put them in jail — I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

You can argue that this was a poor strategy. You can also argue that it was in fact the best one, and she would have lost by more if she hadn’t run to the center. But it’s what she did, and acknowledging that is where you have to start. 

That brings us to the most important factor in this election: inflation. In the imaginary campaign, Harris went around telling voters that the economy was great and they were fools for believing otherwise. She threw statistics at them while ignoring their lived experience. “They failed to address inflation, saying that it wasn’t a big issue or that the pain that working people feel right now isn’t real,” said a labor leader. Or as one writer put it in The Atlantic, Democrats “noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley.” 

But which Democrats ran ads and gave speeches arguing that inflation was a global phenomenon and that’s what should matter to voters, or that their pain isn’t real? The answer is, none of them. Analysts pointed the former out (myself included), and noted how America recovered far more quickly and completely than other countries, because it’s true and it’s our job to examine reality. But no Democrat used anything like it as their message about inflation.  

The Democratic line was “prices are still too high,” and Harris had a plan to bring them down. Was that an effective message? Somewhat — as the campaign went on, Harris steadily improved in polls on the question of which candidate voters trusted on the economy. But it wasn’t enough.

If you want to argue that there is an economic message that would have produced a different outcome for Democrats, and would be better to deploy in the future, that’s great. But at least compare it to the actual message Democrats used, and not one they bent over backward to avoid. 

Voters don’t have highly sophisticated ideological views

The last bit of unreality at work is that the results of the election show a sweeping, nuanced, and fundamentally ideological rejection of the Democratic Party. Whether the person making the argument thinks Democrats are too liberal, too conservative, or too elitist, the idea is that the voters who changed their minds this time — especially working-class voters — did so because they made a careful judgment about who Democrats are and rejected them. 

I haven’t seen any evidence that this is true for the voters who were actually up for grabs in this election. The far more compelling explanation is simply that, just like voters in every country that had national elections this year, they essentially said “Ugh, inflation sucked" and voted for the opposition party.  

The attraction of the ideological/identity explanation is that it means these swing voters will never choose another Democrat until the party utterly transforms itself, and therefore my advice must be followed or the party will always fail. But if the real explanation is more mundane, then the need for transformation is less urgent, and failing to follow whatever piece of genius advice is being offered won’t necessarily be such a catastrophe. 

There are a hundred dysfunctional and counterproductive things about how Democrats on both the center and left go about doing politics, and none of them should be immune from examination. Let’s have the debate; I’ll say more about where I think Democrats ought to go in future posts. But for now, we should at least agree to keep ourselves grounded in reality.