Some further random observations on the election:
Campaigns attract good folks. Let’s start with something positive. After 60 years of observing and interacting with people who have volunteered to work for campaigns — for Democratic and for Republican campaigns — I have come to this conclusion, which might be startling to some: The large majority of people who do volunteer political work are nice people.
They are pleasant, willing to work hard for very little psychic, much less monetary, compensation. They care about their country, their community, their family and friends, and they are acting to help them. Their main defect may be that many have unduly negative views about those volunteering on the other side. So, to those volunteers and activists, and to members of the apolitical public who encounter them, keep in mind that these are good people trying to do good work.
Kamala Harris’s strategy. A note on Kamala Harris’s strategy. One lesson that I took from my work as a political consultant for Democratic candidates in 1974-81, when I worked for the insightful and high-integrity pollster Peter Hart, is that the candidates who do best, in campaigns and in governing, are those who present themselves as what they are. A candidate for an executive position like a governor, for example, should emphasize a set of three or four issues, at least two of which are high among voters’ concerns, but others of which may only reflect the candidate’s personal priorities. They should emphasize personal traits that voters think are important, but they must be authentic because sooner or later, voters will detect any phoniness.
Did Kamala Harris’s campaign advisers start with similar assumptions? I suspect so, but that’s not what the candidate delivered. On personal traits, she tried to sound like an ordinary person who grew up in a small house in a neighborhood where people had lawns. Actually, it was a neighborhood in Berkeley, California, in one of America’s politically leftmost quarters. In 2000, for example, Berkeley voted 78% for Al Gore, 13% for Ralph Nader, and 8% for George W. Bush.
If I were running the Harris campaign, I would portray her as one who grew up in blue America but who, in the course of her public duties, particularly as vice president, had come to know the whole country, people of every color, and have come to appreciate and learn from those in various corners of America. I would show footage of her interacting with people of many backgrounds. I would have her explain sympathetically why she has changed her mind on some issues on which she took now-indefensible left-wing stands (taxpayer-paid sex change surgery for prison inmates?) in videotaped interviews that the Trump campaign was likely to feature in ads.
But Harris didn’t do that, even though I suspect her advisers thought that she should. Why not? Probably because there isn’t that much videotape of her interacting with ordinary people because she didn’t do that much. And it’s clear that there aren’t any issues on which she is willing to say she changed her mind because she hasn’t. So we got descriptions of a childhood neighborhood with lawns and avowals that “my values haven’t changed.”
This is thin gruel for a candidate about whose background views and priorities voters were naturally curious. But evidently, she and her advisers concluded she couldn’t win if she revealed what she really is and believes. So she campaigned by portraying Donald Trump as a shill for big corporations (when it’s obvious most big executives hate him) and accused one of America’s most competitive industries, grocery stores, of fixing prices.
Big cities have fewer voters because they have fewer people. In my Oct. 9 Washington Examiner column, I looked at the effect that population changes, as measured by the 2,000 Census count and the 2023 Census Bureau estimates, might have on the election results. I noted that three historically heavily Democratic counties in the three “blue wall” streets have lost population in this decade.
Start with Philadelphia County, coterminous with the central city. Turnout fell from (rounded off) 744,000 in 2020 to 706,000 in 2024, and Philadelphia’s Democratic margin fell from 471,000 to 414,000. A 2020 turnout and Democratic margin would not have eliminated Donald Trump’s 141,000 margin this year, but it would have cut it in half.
If you were following Michigan returns on election night, you would have noticed that, as usual, Detroit’s Wayne County was the last of the 83 counties to report full results. As usual, the count from Detroit was late — but this time, it was lower. Some 246,000 votes were cast, with a 202,000 Democratic margin in the 80+% black city. But that’s far below the 336,000 votes and 317,000 Democratic margin cast when former President Barack Obama was first elected in 2008. The Republican percentage increased from John McCain’s 2.6 % to Donald Trump’s 8.0 %. Even so, a popular vote margin like Obama’s would have switched Michigan’s electoral votes to Kamala Harris.
Milwaukee County showed only a slight decline in turnout, from 460,000 in 2020 to 452,000 in 2024, with the Democratic percentage and turnout only tenths of a percentage point different and a popular vote margin (177,000) only slightly diminished. But Milwaukee County is no longer the Democrats’ top performer. Dane County, home of the state Capitol and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cast fewer voters, 345,000 in 2020 and 366,000 in 2024, but produced a higher Democratic percentage and popular vote margin (189,000).
Note that Democratic percentages declined and Republican percentages increased, reflecting Trump’s gains among Hispanic and black voters and Arab-Americans in Detroit. The bottom line for Democrats is that there is no going back to the golden days when their candidates could pile up decisive majorities in central cities. They have to go prospecting elsewhere among different kinds of voters. You can only elect the first black president once, and the People of Color concept means nothing to ordinary people. The bottom line for Republicans is that even a small amount of effort and attention can produce votes where that seemed impossible before.
The wisdom of Sean Trende. One election analyst to whom not enough attention is paid is Real Clear Politics senior election analyst Sean Trende, a non-resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and a former practicing lawyer who returned to campus to earn a political science Ph.D. from Ohio State University. His 2012 book The Lost Majority made the case that Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton established new partisan patterns that prevailed for three decades in the former case and two in the latter, as of 2012 — and not much more than two after the defeat of Clinton’s wife until now.
I bucked at accepting his thesis then, but I have come to find it a persuasive rejection of the thesis that Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan created enduring majorities for their parties. Democrats never achieved FDR-like presidential majorities after his death except in the peace/prosperity/post-assassination year of 1964, and Republicans have not achieved Reagan-like presidential majorities since 1988, his last full year in office. I’d qualify that by saying that Roosevelt’s Democrats and Reagan’s Republicans have dominated congressional elections in the years since their administrations, though with mixed policy results.
Sean was also one of the three writers I cited — the other two being iconoclastic blogger Steve Sailer and Harry Enten, then with 538 and now with CNN — eight years ago for having predicted Donald Trump’s 2016 breakthrough with non-college-graduate whites who had been unwilling to vote Republican for president.
Now he has come forward, in an X thread based on a much longer paper, to proclaim that the 2022 election results came close to presaging the results this year. This is contrary to the widespread impression that 2022 was a vindication of Biden administration policies, an impression widely accepted in the press and, to their detriment, by the strategists of the Biden and Harris campaigns.
But I’ll let Trende, the sage of Delaware County, Ohio, lay out his case. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to understand the politics of our time. Here’s his seminal thread, with links to his longer paper. Does this mean that the Eisenhower majority and the Clinton majority are about to be replaced by a Trump majority, with the opposition tending to dominate House elections? I never thought so before this week, but now it looks like a possibility …
Good work, Sean.
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This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
