Brief Thoughts on the 2024 Election

I would generally be cautious about post-election punditry. Everyone is sleep deprived, no one has had much time to think, and most of the data we have is unofficial county-level results. That said, I was on KARE 11’s morning show1 and had to develop an initial take, so I thought that I’d share it here.

• In the end, this election was basically a uniform swing of four or five points away from the Democrats. This map from the New York Times shows how the vote in each county changed between 2020 and 2024 (taken from this page at 1 PM on Nov 6):

  

  Cities, suburbs, rural areas – they all shifted towards Trump by roughly the same amount. This cuts against explanations for Trump’s win that rely on shifts in a particular group (e.g. young voters, Black and Hispanic voters, college or non-college educated whites), and towards broader explanations (e.g. general unhappiness with inflation and immigration).2

• Minnesota saw basically the same uniform swing, tempered slightly by Walz’s presence on the ticket.3 This filtered down to State House races, and the Republicans probably should have won the State House. However, they failed to recruit high-quality candidates in key suburban swing districts, and DFL incumbents won these by extremely slim margins.

• (I’ll do a more thorough review of my State House predictions in a future post. At first glance, I did pretty well. This seems like a good place to put these buttons:

• All of this points to an extremely ordinary election.

• This ordinariness can be difficult for highly-politically-engaged people to believe – Trump is not an ordinary candidate. But consider this story told from 40,000 feet:

  After winning a relatively close election, an incumbent party governs during a sharp spike in inflation, a period of global turmoil (the migrant/refugee crisis at the border, Israel-Hamas, Ukraine, the Afghanistan withdrawal), and enters the next election with low approval ratings. The opposition party gains a few percent of the vote and as a result wins by a relatively narrow margin.

  Nothing in this story is unusual – in fact, it’s exactly what we’d expect to happen in a basic retrospective theory of voting. Trump’s unusual qualities as a candidate don’t really enter into it.

• The fact that Trump’s unusual qualities as a candidate don’t enter into it is infuriating to many highly-engaged citizens4 – how can people vote for him after January 6, the civil and criminal trials (and conviction), his various offensive/threatening/autocratic statements, etc.? The positive spin on this is that Trump’s unusual qualities as a candidate aren’t some magic strategy to win elections. The voters who are deciding these elections aren’t voting for Trump because of these things, but they also aren’t voting against Trump because of these things. Trump wins and loses according to ordinary political forces.

• A corollary to this: At least right now, small-d democratic norms depend on elite consensus, not support from the masses.

• A lot of people, particularly though not exclusively liberals,5 thought of the last eight years as an aberration. They weren’t. This is the country we live in. The sooner everyone realizes this, the better.