New polling on where Democrats go next, Democrats as "hall monitors", Trump's streaming strategy, what the Left got wrong about Hispanics, the corn field champion
The just-released results of Echelon Insights’ latest national survey have a deep dive on what Democrats think about the future of the party and why Harris lost.
The results are a mixed bag for people hoping the party actually makes a decisive break from the failures of 2024:
On if Kamala Harris should continue to be the leading voice for Democrats, 49% of Democrats think so, while 36% say it’s time for someone else to fill this role.
On why Harris lost, ranked by the percentage saying this was a major reason why Harris lost: The economy 43%, Immigration 41%, Entering the race late 39%, Harris was a woman of color 38%, Not distancing herself from Joe Biden 29%, Biden’s unpopularity 29%, Harris’s past positions on issues like gender surgery for illegal immigrants 26%... Among the low-ranked reasons: Not going on podcasts like Joe Rogan 8%, Not liberal enough 11%, Not an effective campaigner 14%, Too liberal 16%.
Together with the majority sentiment that there was nothing Harris could have done to win (59%) vs. just 26% who say she could have been a better candidate, Democrats have bought into the structural reasons for their loss voiced by the Harris high command on Pod Save America, reducing the impetus for the party to change its ways.
The poll results are a win for the economic populist wing of the party: 70% say that the party should lean harder into economic populism, like breaking up big corporations and fighting worker exploitation, and 67% say it should generally project a more moderate image. Lower ranked are ideas like “nominating outsider candidates” at 53% and “focusing on winning back younger men” with an influencer/podcast strategy (51%). And lowest on the list is “focusing less on issues of race and gender identity” at 46%, to 40% who think they should not do this.
However, when focusing more on identity politics is juxtaposed with a focus on economic issues for the working class, a focus on working class economics wins 73-16.
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She made the case that Democrats have been focused on the wrong issues. For young people and voters of color, she said, “institutions have failed them” and “they may not embrace Trump for wanting to dismantle these institutions, but they certainly don’t hold it against him.”
She likewise warned Democrats to be “cautious” while attacking Trump for violating norms, arguing that though Democratic donors and the primary electorate care about those issues, the voters the party lost in November do not.
“Norms have not worked for them, and so we certainly shouldn’t ask them to clutch their pearls,” she said. “We risk sounding like the hall monitors.”
The Harris campaign’s financial advantage ended up not mattering. One of the reasons was that the Trump campaign was much more targeted in their efforts to reach battleground undecideds by betting big on addressable advertising on streaming services.
“In the seven states, we were talking to 6.3 million people — they were talking to 44.7 million,” explained David Lee, a top pollster for the super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc. “There’s roughly 38 million people that they’re hitting who’ve already made up their mind. So I don’t care how much more money you have than us to spend, you’re wasting 85 percent of your money.”
And they conducted a 20,000 person survey to figure out who the swing voters were 👀
Tony Fabrizio, who began the year as the lead pollster for Make America Great Again Inc., commissioned a 20,000-person survey in early 2024 to study not just who was genuinely persuadable in the swing states but also how they got their news.
Excellent Rogé Karma piece for The Atlantic on what the groups on the Left got wrong about the Latino vote.
If that analysis were true, then the nomination of the most virulently anti-immigration presidential candidate in modern history for three straight elections should have devastated the GOP’s Latino support. Instead, the opposite happened. Latinos, who make up about a quarter of the electorate, still lean Democratic, but they appear to have shifted toward Republicans by up to 20 points since 2012.
Ruy Teixeira on the Democrats' crash among Hispanic voters, and what it means for the party’s hopes of electoral majorities in the future:
But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.
It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.
Democrats are facing a deep structural disadvantage in the Senate:
Say it with me: The polls did their job. Nate Cohn runs down the big demographic and political trends that the polls forecast ahead of Election Day
Big Trump gains among young and nonwhite voters and a huge decline in racial polarization
A Trump advantage among low-turnout voters, one so great that it merited disregarding Democratic strength in special elections and off-year general elections
Surprising gains for Mr. Trump in the places where Republicans excelled in the midterm election, like Florida and New York City
A reduced gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College, and even a Trump popular vote victory… A national political environment that was deeply unfavorable to Democrats, including a Republican advantage in party identification.
The Cook Political Report released their key takeaways from their national popular vote tracker.
In the end, the 2024 election was decided by 229,766 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin out of about 155.2 million cast nationally, with Pennsylvania (a 1.7-point Trump margin) finishing as the “tipping point” state in the Electoral College. As narrow as it was, that’s about triple the 77,744-vote margin by which Trump won the Great Lakes trio in 2016, and five times the 42,918-vote margin by which Joe Biden won the decisive trio of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin in 2020.
Wisconsin was Kamala Harris’ best state out of the seven toss ups.
🗺️ Data Visualization
Progressive policies continue to fuel a mass exodus from deep blue states.
Percentage of state land occupation by corn fields.
