Taking it in

What we learned about campaigns from the 2024 election

Donald Trump’s victory in yesterday’s election is a lot to absorb. This election will have massive consequences for this country and for people around the world for decades to come, and I’m still trying to process it all. I expect to do a series of posts about those consequences, but I wanted to start with some thoughts about what we learned about campaigns. My narrative flow is a bit rusty right now so I’ll do this as a Q&A.

Do campaigns even matter?

This is a fair question. Kamala Harris ran, to my mind, a nearly flawless campaign. It was absurdly well resourced, had a sophisticated turnout organization, and included some very incisive and creative advertisements. She decimated her opponent in their one debate, headlined a well-orchestrated and well-received convention, picked an engaging running mate, and hit all the right themes in her speeches and interviews. Trump, by contrast, ran a sloppy, undisciplined campaign, was massively outspent, and it didn’t seem to matter.

You may disagree with some of the above characterizations, but I’m hard pressed to name something Harris should have done differently that obviously would have helped her. That doesn’t mean the campaigns had no effect; she might have lost by more if not for the $1 billion-plus she managed to raise and spend. But it’s hard to see a whole lot of minds being changed here.

Does governing matter?

A point I’ve tended to make about campaigns is that product is more important than salesmanship. This claim has taken on some water this year, as President Biden, by just about any objective measure, has managed the post-Covid economy well (better than just about any other large economy), and it did not benefit him or his party at all, and instead he was hounded off the Democratic ticket because he looked old. That said, we know that Americans were generally grumpy about the state of the country, and all the skilled speeches and ads couldn’t really change that. I maintain that it’s better for an incumbent part to be presiding over growth than recession and that skilled campaigning can only do so much to overcome that, but the direct role of the economy in affecting votes appears blurrier than it used to.

Was this all about Trump’s bigotry?

This is something to think about. As I wrote here, we’ve generally thought that overt bigotry is something candidates should avoid, but Trump has inverted this thinking, instead counting on moderate Republicans to show up for him no matter what, and more extreme bigots to be energized by his message.

Political scientist Tali Mendelberg’s 2001 book The Race Card effectively showed that George H.W. Bush’s use of coded racism (e.g.: the Willie Horton ad) was effective against Michael Dukakis in 1988 until it became more clear to voters that it was actually racist. At that point, thanks to a norm of equality, the messaging became less effective for Bush. And that may well have been true back in the 1980s and 90s. Trump essentially did a Reverse Mendelberg, demonstrating that overt bigotry is not only not disqualifying, but may actually engage parts of the potential electorate. The fact that the campaign spent the final week insulting Puerto Ricans, calling Harris stupid and garbage, calling Nancy Pelosi a bitch, and more, and still outperformed polls should tell us something.

Was the nation just not ready for a woman as president?

I get why people will go there but this is not my read on it at all. Harris replaced a nice safe old white guy on the Democratic ticket and suddenly was doing substantially better than he was. Plenty of evidence shows women candidates running as strongly as men in contests for governor, senator, and other races. Plenty of countries with far less progressive views on women’s rights have had women as presidents and prime ministers.

So what happened?

I know I beat this dead horse quite a bit, but this is a story about fundamentals. The last three presidential elections were all environments that were difficult for incumbent parties. To wit:

• 2016: Democrats had already held the White House for two terms and economic growth was modest.

• 2020: Republicans sought reelection amidst a pandemic and a chaotic economy.

• 2024: Democrats sought reelection in a post-Covid economy where people were still shaken by inflation and high interest rates and generally saw the economy and country as being on the wrong track.

The incumbent party lost in all three contests. Also, notably, the post-Covid electoral environment has been rough on incumbent parties in democracies all over the world, including the UK, Japan, South Korea, Portugal, and more. That was the environment Harris and Trump were running in, and it gave the out party a huge leg up that Harris simply could not overcome. Dave Karpf is right that it’s unserious to think that Harris could have beaten that environment by framing something differently or running a longer campaign.

Another thing to think about here is that fundamentals have a lag to them. Democrats did well in 2022 even though inflation was actually quite high then; it didn’t hurt them as much then because it was new. Inflation is much lower now but the effects and memories of it linger.

How did polling do?

For all the talk about it, polling overall did pretty well this year. The FiveThirtyEight aggregate polling numbers had Harris ahead of Trump by just over one point. We won’t know the popular vote this year for several weeks (California takes a long time to count and runs strongly Democratic), but Trump looks to have won that by about a point. Which means he’ll have overperformed his polls by about two points. That is well within expectations of polling.

Different polls tried different approaches to overcome some underestimates of Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020, including the use of weighting on 2020 vote recall. And while that definitely carries some risks, it looks to have been a reasonably smart move this year. The late-breaking Selzer poll showing Democratic strength in Iowa, and its no-frills turnout likelihood model, took a bit of a hit.

In future posts, I plan to look at what the parties should learn from this election, and how the election will affect the country for decades to come.