One last look at why Harris lost the 2024 election.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.

Analyzing something like an election outcome through the fog of war is very difficult to do. Sometimes, that can remain difficult for not just weeks but months, years, and even decades.

Still, we can give it our best shot. More than a week has now passed since Election Day, and before we fully pivot to focusing on the end of Biden's presidency, the current Supreme Court term, the new Congress, Trump’s appointees and the incoming administration, I think it's important to give one (potentially final) breakdown of the election we just had.

I've been thinking for a few days about how best to do that, and what I came up with was a four-part newsletter:

1. How should we accurately describe the results of this election?
2. What was the deciding factor in this election?
3. What other issues made a difference on the margins?
4. What pre-election narratives should be put to bed?

I hope that, by going through these four parts, I can give our readers a better understanding of what happened and be ready to see what’s coming in the near future. Before we begin, I want to offer one framing thought:

Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.

How should we describe the results of this election?

On the morning after Election Day, the press generally framed the results as a decisive, electoral blowout. For the most part, I think the framing rings true a week later: Trump won all seven battleground states, Republicans went from a minority in the Senate to winning a three-seat majority, and they held the House of Representatives, too.

Still, I think it is worth contextualizing the scale of the victory. At the presidential level, Harris won more votes in total than Biden did in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Combined across the “Blue Wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris lost the election by about 200,000 votes. The 2016 race was decided by Trump winning by about 80,000 votes across those three states. And while Trump is going to win the popular vote this year, he'll do so by a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 or Joe Biden did in 2020 — Biden won it by about 7 million votes, Clinton won it by 3 million, and Trump looks on pace to win by a little more than 2 million votes.

Trump beat Hillary with 306 Electoral College votes in 2016. Biden beat Trump with 306 Electoral College votes in 2020. And Trump beat Harris with 312 Electoral College votes in 2024. For context: President Barack Obama won 332 electoral college votes in 2012 and 365 in 2008. President George W. Bush won with 286 electoral college votes in 2004 and 271 in 2000. So in the last quarter-century, Trump achieved a better margin than any president except Obama's two electoral victories, but his win was roughly on par with his victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020. And of course, Trump will also become the first Republican since Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote.

So: Trump won, and he won decisively. He didn't achieve a historic blowout, but he and the Republican party have definitively taken the federal levers of power in the U.S.

What was the deciding factor?

It was the economy, stupid. In 2022, we wrote a newsletter titled "It's abortion, stupid" to explain Democrats' success in breaking the red wave in that year’s midterms. I stand by a lot of what I wrote then, but it's very obvious to me that 2024 was not a referendum on abortion. Abortion rights groups were able to win a slew of ballot initiatives (even in red states), but Kamala Harris was not able to make abortion the issue that defined the election. Instead, for a lot of swing voters, the primary issue was the economy.

We can debate the actual amount of control the chief executive has over the economy, but there’s no doubt government policy has some impact. And, naturally, what we can't debate is that voters hold incumbent governments accountable for how their lives are going. The Biden-Harris administration presided over years of painful inflation, and many voters blamed their policies for it. 

A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this. That being said, one writer — Annie Lowrey from The Atlantic — made the point better than I could. So I'm just going to steal a big chunk of her writing from her piece, "The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything," here:

To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.

But headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.

During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

Government transfers buoyed families early in the Biden administration. But they contributed to inflation, and much of the money went away in the second half of Biden’s term. The food-stamp boost, the extended child tax credit, the big unemployment-insurance payments—each expired. And the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.

Interest rates were a problem too. The mortgage rate more than doubled during the Biden-Harris years, making credit-card balances, car payments, and homes unaffordable. A family purchasing a $400,000 apartment with 20 percent down would pay roughly $2,500 a month today versus $1,800 three years ago.

Indeed, the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

And that's really just it. This is why I thought Trump would win, and this is why he did win. Far too many persuadable voters had genuine gripes with how things were going, and far too few Democrats were able to speak to those gripes. 

What else contributed?

To set the table here, I’m going to share this chart from the Democratic polling group Blueprint, which I think paints a clear picture of what mattered and what didn't:

These are all good things to keep in mind when thinking about why Democrats lost. But they don’t tell the full story, either. I’ve identified five other major factors that I believe were key to Trump's win.

The demographic re-alignment.

First, Trump continued to eat into Democrats' share of non-white voters. Here's a fact to consider: Kamala Harris did better with white voters than Joe Biden did, but worse with nonwhite voters. Not only that, but the group that has shifted most toward Democrats since Trump broke onto the scene is white men. Democrats lost because everyone except for white voters moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle. How is that for a narrative buster?

Also, Trump outperformed his previous numbers with younger voters and low-income voters. This performance was a continuation of the success Trump had in 2020 — success many people doubted would be replicated this time around. Instead, it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.

If you want to understand this trend better, I highly recommend reading Musa Al-Gharbi, listening to Patrick Ruffini on Ezra Klein's podcast, or reading Ruffini’s book, Party of the People, which he published after the 2020 election.

Being an incumbent was really hard this year.