In this live episode of The Science of Politics, panelists examined the class, race, and gender dynamics that shaped the 2024 election. The panel features Tom Edsall, Amanda Iovino, Patrick Ruffini, and Ruy Teixeira. Did the election cement a class realignment of American politics? Did Republicans peel off minority voters based on changing perceptions of the GOP as a working-class party? And how did these dynamics interact with the growing gender divide in voting?
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Welcome. Thanks for being with us. We’re just going to wait a few minutes to wait for folks to trickle in.
Good afternoon, and welcome to the Niskanen Center’s post-election panel on What Happened in 2024: Class, Race, and Gender in the Changing Party Coalitions. This will also be released as an episode of the Science of Politics Podcast and on The Liberal Patriot.
I’m Matt Grossmann, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. I’m very excited for today’s panel of experts who saw it all coming, or at least most of it, and I’ve drawn a lot from them in my own work, including my latest book, Polarized by Degrees.
We’ll be starting with three-minute opening takes, and then I’ll start the questioning, but you can submit your own questions in the Q&A box. We do have hundreds of registrants and more coming in, but we will get to as many as we can.
What a panel we have for you today. Tom Edsall has been covering politics for 50 years, presaging and following party change, most recently for his weekly New York Times column and his book, The Point of No Return. Amanda Iovino is a principal at WPA Intelligence. She served as polling and data director for Glenn Youngkin and on many other campaigns and helped several organizations to increase conservative women’s representation and has been at the forefront of seeing how the gender divide increased with the education divide.
Patrick Ruffini is co-founder of Echelon Insights and a veteran of data, technology, and polling for Republican campaigns. His book, Party of the People, predicted the Republicans’ multiracial populist coalition. And Ruy Teixeira is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of The Liberal Patriot. His co-authored book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, anticipated Democrats’ continued trouble with the working class.
We know it’s early in the post-election analysis, and we know that exit polls and some early data are not always trustworthy, but geographic and polling evidence together tells a similar story in 2024. A national shift toward the Republicans, more uniform than in 2016 or 2020, but with Republican gains concentrated among minorities, white ethnics, and the foreign-born in cities, and most limited with white-educated voters. Racial and age depolarization were pronounced, and although class shifts were modest in 2024, over the long term, the changes in party class representation are enormous.
We also know that not everything is under the control of the campaigns. Harris actually did better in the swing states and Democrats overperformed in some Senate races, but it’s still useful to review what the parties are presenting to voters. Some trends are looking steady. Several of today’s panelists have shown that changes in the party’s class coalitions and racial depolarization are likely to continue if the parties do not change. And governance and positioning still matter, and we have some successful practitioners here to help guide the parties.
So we’ll begin with initial three-minute hot takes on what we can learn from the election results, starting with Ruy.
Ruy Teixeira: Well, I think the best way to start then is really just to review some of the better data we have now in terms of what happened in this election. If you look at the non-college vote, sometimes called the working-class vote, we saw that white working-class voters increased their support of Trump by about five margin points, so there was a significant shift.
However, the real decline in democratic support was not among whites but among non-whites. If you look at the non-white working class, according to the AP VoteCast data, we go from 48-point advantage for the Democrats to only 33 points, or even was it 32 points in this election? So that’s a much bigger decline than we saw among white working class.
And it’s just a long-term trend that is poorly understood, I think, by most observers and analysts, that if we look at the movement of the working class toward the Republican Party, it is by no means just among whites. Very importantly, it’s now increasingly among non-whites, among Latinos and Blacks, particularly Latinos.
If you look at Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, sort of the last iteration of the Obama coalition, according to the catalyst data, he carried non-white working-class voters by 67 points. In this election, Democrats carried them by 32 points, I think. So that’s a 35-point decline. More than half of that margin has disappeared, evaporated, and that’s a extremely important part of understanding the increased class polarization and what you might call racial de-alignment in terms of people voting their racial identity. That has been very evident in recent elections.
You can look at the Hispanic working-class voters in particular. You can look at Black working-class voters in particular. Both of them in this election had substantial fall-offs in support, at least according to AP VoteCast, in support for the Democratic ticket, which is a little odd because people thought Kamala Harris, as a candidate of color, would actually do a lot better among Black voters and even hopefully among Hispanic voters according to Democrats, but that did not turn out to be the case. Instead, they moved fairly sharply in the direction of Donald Trump.
In the meantime, and this is a point that Patrick has made many times, if you’re looking from 2012 onward, and you’re trying to find a demographic where Democrats actually do better, it’s really just the college-educated and in particular the white college-educated. That has been the support growth demographic for the Democrats almost sort of by itself.
And now, we didn’t see, at least according to the most recent data, the best data we currently have available, that they improved their margin much over 2020 among white college graduates, but it was relatively steady. So for example, if you look at that big shift of non-white working class voters toward the Republicans from 2012, you also see an adjoining increase in support, because basically, Obama, in 2012, lost white college graduates by about three or four points, I think. Maybe it was more. Anyway, and now they carry them by 6, 8, 10, 12 points.
So this is a shift from a group that leaned Republican back in 2012, three short cycles ago, to a group that very reliably now leans Democratic and did in this election. Though they didn’t lean as democratic as Democrats hoped, because as they looked at the polling data coming through in this cycle, people would say, “Well, okay, we may be losing a little bit on the working-class side, but the white college graduates will make up for it,” but they didn’t.
So instead, in this election, we did see, again, increased class polarization, decreased racial polarization. That’s the world we now live in, and Democrats hope it’ll just snap back to normal, or their normal, or their preferred normal, but maybe not.
Matt Grossmann: [Next] we’ll have Amanda give her opening thoughts.
Amanda Iovino: Sure. Thanks for having me. Now, I work predominantly with Republican campaigns, and really, for the last few years, whenever polls come out of the fields, the first cross-step that I go to has been gender and education. And this year, that was true, probably much moreso than any year prior.
And I think when we’re talking class, the easiest approximation in polling is education, because it’s a lot easier to get someone to tell a pollster what their education level is than what their income level is. They’re less likely to lie. They’re still going to lie about their education level, but they’re less likely to do that than they are about income. And when a campaign needs a brush fire to decide which ad that they’re going to put up, deciding between two, and you’ve got three seconds to review the data, as Patrick knows, then really, you’ve got to do the best with what you’ve got.
Now, why am I looking at gender and education? I think to the points that were just made, race is an interesting factor. It’s a lessening factor. But with race, education, and gender, those three pieces really define how folks are consuming the news, which news they’re consuming, how they’re consuming it, whether it’s traditional or just on social media, which social media apps they’re using. It also defines what culture they’re consuming. Both of those things impact what issues we care about, how we talk about those issues, our politics generally, and even our views of politicians as people.
And really, as we’re looking through all of this, there’s no greater division in the country really right now than college-educated women and non-college-educated men. It’s really Mars and Venus in the old terminology. With one of my democratic colleagues, Celinda Lake, who looked at this in the New York Times op-ed a few weeks ago, and really showed kind of where we thought the gap was going.
And currently, according to the data that was available then, it looked to be a 43-point gap, which was already a record according to the exits and the data that we have so far. It was a 48-point gap with these non-college-educated men and college-educated women actually voting the exact inverse of each other, 61% of non-college men voting for Trump, 61% of college-educated women voting for Harris. So just a huge gap in this.
And actually, if you go to the next slide, if we look at it where it is in the swing states, there are some where it was even bigger than that. Arizona had the smallest of our swing states with only a 20-point gap between these groups. But Pennsylvania had a 65-point gap, again, according to the data that we have available right now, with 65% of non-college-educated men voting for Trump, and again, the exact inverse of college-educated women voting for Harris. Just a huge divide in how these two groups see the world, and that really leaves then, and well, I’m sure we’ll get to this later, college-educated men and non-college women as the new swing voters.
Matt Grossmann: All right. [Next, we have] Tom for his first thoughts.
Thomas Edsall: All right. Following really on both Amanda and Ruy’s points, I think the interesting thing is whether the Democratic Party has now really passed a tipping point and whether the domination of the party by basically very liberal white Democrats has now reached the point where the party cannot go back and try to readjust its views on controversial issues in a way that would be designed to appeal to working-class voters.
I was struck right after the election by two politicians. The chairman of the Texas Republican Party suggested that maybe the Democrats should rethink their views on transgender issues. In particular, the most controversial parts, transgender women participating in women’s sports, of bathrooms, and actually, the third, prisons, whether [inaudible 00:15:19] female prisons. He and two congressmen did the same thing, including a guy, Seth Moulton, up in Massachusetts. He proposed that there’d be some reconsideration of the more controversial aspects of transgender policies.
Both of those guys were jumped on. The Texas chairman of the Republican Party or Democratic Party issued an exhaustive apology the next day saying what he did was really bad and shouldn’t have done it. Seth Moulton was denounced by his own governor, by the chairman of his state party.
All I’m saying is that I don’t know if the party at this point can do things that a lot of people, including Rui, Bill Galston, and others that suggested that they try to get back to getting some white working-class support, whether it’s now really locked into a fairly elite liberal white-dominated party. And Matt put together a very interesting slide. I don’t know if that’s available right now-
Matt Grossmann: It is.
Thomas Edsall: … but it shows how at this point, that class, the college-educated voter now, is the dominant constituency, outnumbering both minority democrats and non-college democrats. So the party is in a situation where, I’m not sure, it may have to go into, if it’s going to become-
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. [inaudible 00:17:14].
Thomas Edsall: … competitive, it may have to really start thinking in terms less of going back, but how do you build a party that’s based solidly on elites? The elite status of the party, I would also argue, has really made it difficult for Democrats to appeal to working-class voters because they see the Democratic Party as an elite moral-imposing majority party, and it really undermines the ability to reach the voters that they have been seeking. But let me leave it at that point now and get more into it as we go on.
Matt Grossmann: Thank you. And Patrick, your opening thoughts?
Patrick Ruffini: Thank you. Well, I think what we’ve seen is a realignment in three parts. Obviously, 2016, really, Trump directly aiming for that upper Midwestern and post-industrial electorate and getting them largely to the surprise of many in 2020.
Trump somewhat unintentionally stumbling upon these Hispanic gains, these Asian gains. Obviously, he did not win the 2020 election, but those gains were enough to make it close, and those gains were frankly enough to make it plausible to a lot of folks to think that maybe Trump had won the 2020 election and that he was positioned for a comeback in the Republican primaries in 2024 if he had lost that election by the eight points that the polls predicted he would lose that election by.
I think it’s much less likely Trump actually comes back in 2024. And in 2024, Trump aims at a very different electorate, a younger electorate, younger men, Latino voters, African American voters. They’re very conscious and on alert, but for the fact that these groups are moving.
And I do think they somewhat intentionally recalibrated their campaign with their podcast strategy, with the images that were really coming out of the campaign, particularly in October. From the McDonald’s visit to the garbage truck, a stunt really creating these blue-collar visuals that really did permeate the consciousness of the election.
We did a poll, our final pre-election survey, and we asked what was the thing you most remember from the last month of the campaign? And it was the McDonald’s thing. And very few of Harris’s events, interviews, broke through. The events that she took two days off the campaign trail to do, either the big rallies or the big network interviews that she finally did, none of those broke through nearly as much as the images that Trump was able to project in those final closing weeks of the campaign.
I think another thing that stood out in our polling all throughout the year was simply the importance of the economy first and immigration second. I think if you look at the Gallup Times Series data, it’s pretty clear that the candidate who wins on the number-one or number-two issues is generally the candidate who wins the election. And Trump really had retained that advantage on the economy all throughout the election cycle, and particularly on the cost-of-living issue.
Now, that narrowed after Kamala Harris got into the race, but Trump never really relinquished that advantage, and he had an advantage on immigration. Meanwhile, Democrats had a perceived advantage on democracy and abortion, the two issues that they closed the campaign out with, with Kamala Harris giving her closing speech in Washington DC, a place that most swing voters don’t really love, on the Ellipse, the site of Donald Trump’s January 6th speech, really leaning in or really pivoting back in the closing days to that white college-educated electorate that Tom talked about. I think perhaps spooked by a lot of the early voting numbers that showed base democratic turnout lagging, democrats really not voting early in the same numbers that republicans were voting early.
I think with this, having looked at this diverse, multiracial electorate, we can say that in 2016, it really was a white working-class realignment. There really wasn’t much of a realignment with non-white voters in 2016. But it’s surprising to an extent that Trump actually did make some gains with Hispanics and some gains with African-Americans in 2016, despite the emphasis within the Democratic coalition on racial justice issues and on calling Trump either a fascist or a racist or a xenophobe. None of those messages actually did anything to move non-white voters into the Democratic fold more than they were already.
And obviously, in 2020, Trump had even bigger gains towards the end of the campaign. There was even more doubling down on that message.
… campaign, there was even more doubling down on that message on Trump specifically as this horrific figure that was outside the pale, outside the mainstream countenancing, jokes about Puerto Ricans at his Madison Square Garden rally, while it turns out that the people that were the target of that joke all slunk towards Donald Trump because the issues of the campaign ultimately favored him. I think if you actually look at the groups that moved, I do think that this was something where the moment met the opportunity in that these shifts were all forecasted in a lot of the pre-election polling. I look back at the New York Times/Siena poll one year before the election, this was right around the time Ruy’s book and my book came out that really showed Trump on track to get record shares of African-American voters, record shares of Hispanic voters.
And at the time, many Democrats said, “We don’t really buy this. This is just people expressing so-called expressive responding. People just taking out their frustrations on the Biden administration and then they’ll ultimately come home.” Well, there was maybe an idea that they would come home after Joe Biden was actually replaced as the candidate. Obviously, when you have a new candidate, that resets the polling to some degree. And we did see Kamala Harris made make a recovery, but as we entered October, we really started to see a reversion to somewhat of the Biden versus Trump coalitions that we were seeing in those polls. And I would urge you to take a look at really the trajectory of Nevada over the course of the campaign where it was a very working class state where the whites are 10 points lower on college education. The non-whites are 10 points lower on college education than let’s say folks in Arizona.
And what you really saw was a stronger than average swing in Nevada during the Biden versus Trump phase of the election. And then when Harris, immediately after Harris gets in, it’s the state that swings back strongest to Harris. And then in the closing weeks of the campaign, it ends up Trump is going to win Nevada by four points. It’s a state that has pretty much gone blue ever since the Obama era, so I think that was a barometer. Nevada particularly was not necessarily decisive. It was not going to be decisive in virtually any electoral college scenario, but it was a pretty good barometer of the trajectory of this election, particularly over those closing weeks.
Matt Grossmann: Yes, in the least educated state that Democrats were still winning until this election. Ruy, your book argues that Democrats have alienated and abandoned the voters that they’ve lost. We heard from Tom that a lot is baked in and hard to shift, but we heard from Patrick that some of the campaign dynamics did matter. How much was the Biden presidency or the Harris campaign responsible for the Democratic losses?
Ruy Teixeira: Well, I think voters made their judgment based on their, to use an oft-abused phrase, their lived experience. They had four years of the Biden-Harris administration, and they weren’t happy about it. When Biden was elected, let’s recall, he beats Donald Trump basically because he’s the candidate of normality, he’s going to get America back to normal. He’s going to put the end to the COVID epidemic. He’s going to bring the economy back to normal, he’s going to bring political discourse back to normal. And that’s not in fact what people got. Economically, they got a big spike in inflation in the early parts of the Biden administration, which actually did put a dent in people’s living standards. There’s a lot of argument about the data, but think a fair comparison of the Biden-Harris administration and how the median worker fared under that administration was not good.
And people continued to have a very negative view of the economy all the way through this election. And obviously that hurts the incumbent party and the Biden-Harris administration was walked into being responsible for it, not just because they were the incumbent party, but because they poo-pooed the whole effect of inflation to begin with. They said it was going to be transitory. They spent eight months while inflation was spiking, talking about how many trillions of dollars they were going to spend on Build Back Better. None of this really played well to the extent people were aware of it. But the median voter, they didn’t feel Democrats were on the cost of living case. And I think that continued to bedevil the Democrats through the election. And then in terms of other cultural issues or more culturally freighted issues like immigration, obviously the administration presided over a big spike in immigration.
Immigration presided over, at least in the first part on a spike in crime and just a general sense, Democrats aren’t on the case in terms of either border control or public order. These things were things that Democrats were associated with. There was a big drive to equity. There’s the transgender issues that have already been mentioned. The Biden administration, despite the fact it came in as a party of normality, did not in fact tack to the center on these issues. They pretty much went full bore on things that were congenial to the cultural left or the Democratic Party, the kinds of liberal white college graduates that Tom talked about in his remarks. They kind of set the tone, they staffed the administration, the group sat a seat at the table, all the various advocacy groups which are on board with all these kinds of things.
And the administration became imprinted with that image in which just further enforced an or existing Democratic Party image, so by the time people are casting their votes, they still see the Democrats as ineffective economically and way too far to the left culturally, and they made their judgments. I certainly think that that is… Whether the right course for them now is, as Tom says, to double and triple down and being the party of liberal white college graduates. I’m not so sure about that, but certainly you could defend that argument. But certainly the result of it, at least so far has been they’ve hemorrhaged working class support, including among their previously existing non-white base because of the things I just talked about. They’re not looked upon as being the party of the common man and woman, of the party of the working class, the party that’s primarily concerned about lifting up the working in middle classes and is less concerned with other things.
I think the median working class voter feels, the agenda of the Democratic Party is set by different priorities. There was actually a very good set of charts in the Financial Times today by John Burn-Murdoch that showed just how far the Democrats have moved in the last period of time, and particularly the most progressive parts away from the median voter in a lot of these issues. I think there’s just a reality, Democrats can decide they want to tack back to the center in a serious way and try to rectify that, or I suppose they can do what Tom thinks they may have to do, which has just become even more of an elitist party. We’ll see.
Matt Grossmann: I don’t think that was a Tom recommendation, just a prediction. Amanda, when I shared your charts online, no one thought it was surprising that the gap was increasing between college women and non-college men. But everyone objected to there being no big gain for college-educated women among the Democrats, so what happened this year that made Democrats expect that gain, especially with the abortion issue, and why didn’t it materialize?
Ruy Teixeira: Good question.
Amanda Iovino: I do think it materialized within certain swing states. In some ways it didn’t materialize more because there wasn’t much higher for it to go. Once you reach the 60% threshold with any of these gender education groups, when you’re in the sixties, you can’t really get too much higher. One of the things that we were working on with a lot of the Republican campaigns was how do we get to that 60% threshold with non-college men? Because once we’re talking about not including a race filter, we’re just talking about all non-college men, not just white non-college men, there’s also a ceiling on that number as well. Really, we were trying to figure out how to get those non-college men numbers to match whatever the college-educated women numbers were in any given state or district. But as you saw in Pennsylvania, I don’t know that you can get that college-educated women number any higher. And a lot of it depended on the issues that were at play. We talked a little bit about the economy, safety issues for federal campaigns, so it was definitely immigration. For state campaigns, it was more crime.
And then abortion is an issue that was really the issue for college-educated women. And I don’t think you can necessarily press that issue any more than the Harris campaign and the Democrats top to bottom did. But for college-educated voters, the economy’s doing pretty well. Low rates of unemployment, inflation is not necessarily hitting them in the same way that it’s hitting non-college-educated voters. And for college-educated men, it really depends on what you’re seeing on CNBC, whether the economy’s going well or not. For college-educated women, it’s different aspects of the economy are really showing up. I think for men and women broadly, the way that we perceive the economy is different. Generally what we’ve seen in more of a qualitative research is that men think about the economy in terms of the inputs into a family budget, jobs, wages, and the like.
Women are going to look at the economy in terms of the outputs of the family budget, how much are we spending on healthcare costs, how much are grass, how much are groceries? The way that we talk about the economy is slightly different. And I think Trump was able to pick up a little bit on both ends of that economic argument better than Harris was able to. And that’s why, especially for working-class voters, for non-college voters, he was able to spike the number for non-college women. They leaned in his favor, which decreased the gender gap that everyone was expecting. And it’s mostly because he did better with those non-college women than was expected as of probably about a month before the election.
Matt Grossmann: Tom, some of these trends will sound familiar to what you’ve been studying for decades, including the changing class images of the parties and the loss of the working class by the Democrats. How much strikes you as new in this current realignment in progress that we’re witnessing versus echoes of the past?
Thomas Edsall: I think really what’s interesting and what’s new is that class has reasserted itself. We had the class divisions of the New Deal all the way through the Depression into the mid-1960s. Then we had cultural and racial issues dominate. Now we’re getting not a wholesale shift, but a shift towards class politics. And the interesting thing about it is that the Republican Party is becoming the party at the bottom half of the income distribution, especially as it picks up Black and Hispanic voters. And the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly the party of the upper half of the income distribution. And education is a good metaphor for income, especially in a global economy where in order to compete and make a good living, you really have to have a college education. You see this class division emerging. And again, I said this in the earlier remarks, and I think this is really working to the detriment of Democrats because it’s pushing them into a place that is very uncomfortable for the party.
They are the elite now, and the Republican Party is challenging the elite. In American politics it’s not a good thing to be the elite. It’s just a part of the American tradition is to be opposed to those on top and to support the underdog. Democrats are now the overdog and it’s-
Ruy Teixeira: The overdog, yeah.
Thomas Edsall: … a shift of substantial consequences that if Democrats can’t find a way to remedy it, is going to hinder the competitive strength of the Democratic Party in the future elections. Now, it may well be that Trump will be a God awful President and screw up in ways that he has a lot of potential to do that and Democrats will make a comeback and nothing will really change. But if things were normal, Democrats should be very concerned about the trends that are going on now and where they will go. As it is, they now depend on Trump to be there foil, and he may accommodate them, but it’s not a internal party building process. It’s really, they are dependent on externalities in a way that is not comforting when you’re trying to be a regular full scale contributor.
Ruy Teixeira: Well said.
Thomas Edsall: Patrick, your book successfully predicted this multiracial populist coalition for the Republicans, but there is a bit of an interesting set of trends, especially among Hispanic and Asian American voters, that it doesn’t appear even to be restricted to non-college voters. And it appears pretty widespread and larger than people anticipated, so what is explaining this racial de-alignment?
Patrick Ruffini: I think there’s very interesting, and part of the reason is, why don’t I just divide it college and non-college, but the very beginning of my book, I say the multiracial populist coalition is non-whites plus white non-college voters. And why include all non-whites? Because the evidence from 2020 we had was that both college educated and non-college educated, non-white voters shifted to the Right. The issue set might be different, particularly among Asian-American voters where the majority of voters went to college. And so in many ways… And those voters have not voted with the Republican Party, but the exit polls this year show a pretty large shift among Asian-American voters, specifically you have in those communities, particularly in urban centers, a very high focus on crime and quality of life issues. And that’s in partly the working class, older or first generation immigrant communities. You saw something like 30, 40 points shifts in Corona and Flushing in Queens, huge Asian-American population centers.
But you’re also seeing a lot of controversy over college admissions and the fact that the equity agenda actually is hurting Asian-Americans. And I think that probably played some significant role. The interesting thing with Hispanics in this is that it is the one electorate where the old rules still apply in the sense of the higher income voters voting more Republican and people… And as an upwardly mobile electorate, as people are moving up that income ladder are voting more on the Right. And in research that was really underscored in research I did with Lance Harrens, who I believe is on this call, but really the economically upwardly mobile aspirational voter in places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that started out with a very strong democratic partisan identity because the identification of the Democratic Party as a working class party, as a party of the quote unquote “party of the poor.”
And in researching my book, I just talked to so many people, I heard the same thing over and over again from the people who eventually became Republicans who were told when they were growing up that we need to be Democrats because they were the party of the poor. And their response to that was, “What if we don’t want to be poor?” And so you see that manifest actually in some of the larger scale polling data or the upper income, the higher income Hispanics are more Republican. And that upper income is really a faster growing cohort, particularly in the Hispanic community. And that was true particularly during Trump’s first term. And so with the issues of COVID, lockdowns and particularly in a place like South Texas, oil and natural gas being a big employer, being a big economic engine and not something that Democrats were seen as being on the right side on.
Matt Grossmann: Tom, we have a question about democratic voters staying home. And it strikes me that we always have this debate about whether it was down to turnout versus actually people changing sides. How does this year’s debate compare to previous ones there?
Thomas Edsall: That’s really not going to be solved until we get the really quality polling from catalyst and others that gets into the real details. The Democrats are pointing to a decline in turnout in a sense, as an excuse for why they did poorly. The reality is that there was a shift in minority voting, and as Patrick noted, it has an ideological content. That’s what I think makes it particularly worrisome for Democrats. For a Latino or Black man or woman to change their voting patterns is a big decision. There’s a lot of social pressure the other way. It’s not a lightly taken decision.
For numbers of voters in those constituencies to shift indicates a real decision-making process where people made calculations that are going to be hard to reverse once they’ve made them. And so we’ll see about the degree to which declining turnout may have damaged Harris. And it may well have, but we also don’t know why those voters didn’t turn out. It could be the voters who work cross-pressured tend to be the most likely not to vote because they see minuses on both sides. And they may well have been Democrats who have begun to see minuses on their side that prevented them from really wanting to go down to the polls on election day, were to send in the envelope by the mail, and they lapsed. But it’s not a good sign either way, frankly.
Amanda Iovino: I do want to add something to that from some of the data that we saw throughout, but also especially intensifying toward the end of the campaign. We saw a lot of news about Harris not doing quite as well with Black voters. And I don’t want to say most of it had to do with the issues, but there was an undercurrent in some of the verbatims that we were seeing where there was an issue with her gender. I don’t think we need to stress this as much as it was stressed after the 2016 election, but there is a factor of some of these… It was Black men in particular, but it’s also, we are our own worst enemy sometimes, white working class women are also extraordinarily tough on women leaders.
I think voters without college degrees, we did a study in 2023, how confident are you in a woman’s ability to run a major American company? And take it out of the political context. And it was extraordinarily high in percentage of those who say full confidence, whether you’re talking about college educated men or college educated women, and actually college educated men were a little bit higher and then college educated women by a point or two. But there was a large 25 point gap between those without college degrees saying that they had full confidence in a woman’s ability to run a major American corporation. And it was even between non-college men and non-college women, so I do think that there’s also a gender element to this that we shouldn’t ignore, but it’s also, I think predominantly about the issues and the way that those issues were addressed.
Ruy Teixeira: If I could add a couple of thoughts here. We were talking about turnout. I actually did come across an analysis, so I haven’t seen the details of it. It basically was able to partition the shift against the Democrats into two thirds vote switching and one third turnout which on a broad brush sounds right to me. But then as Tom is, I think astutely pointing out, what does it mean when someone was distributed on the turnout? Is it because people who you normally might have expected to vote Democrat didn’t vote democratic because they felt cross pressure, there are things they now no longer like about the Democrats, or the favorite explanation of the progressive left of the party, the Democrats weren’t progressive enough. I’ve already heard this from a number of [inaudible 00:46:17]. Kamala and the Democrats spent too much time moving to the right, seeming like Republican lite, talking about being tough on the border, tough on crime, whatever. They moved too far to the right, and so the progressive left of the party was de-energized, right? That’s why turnout was a factor. I personally think that’s highly unlikely, but I do think that that is something we’ll hear more about.
Matt Grossmann: Patrick, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between the long-term explanations for the class realignment, which involve the emphasis on cultural issues and ideological sorting along cultural issue positions, and then the short-term change this year, which was, in voters own words, explained by economic performance. So how should we think about those two factors?
Patrick Ruffini: Yeah, I mean, I think that we are in a long-term trajectory, a long-term realignment trajectory where obviously the parties are trading sides in terms of their images as being the high status versus the low status party. And by the way, as you’ve noted, I mean this is global, right? I mean, this is happening in every country. So when people ask me if it’s just a Trump phenomenon, well, Donald Trump is not the president of France. Donald Trump is not the chancellor of Germany. These trends are to some extent happening everywhere, but Trump is certainly an accelerant of this. So I think you’ve got his personality that appeals to a certain group of voters that accelerated these trends over the course of these election cycles, you’ve also have the issue environment, which really coincided with these long-term trends to create a perfect storm, particularly among these younger, low propensity voters who are disproportionately non-white.
I do think that to some extent can the next iteration of a Republican count on the youth vote being as tight as it was this year? I’m not sure they can. I’m more confident though, in those racial realignment trends, because I think that is rooted in education, and as Tom alluded to, you do have very high quality survey data between 2016 and 2020 pointing to the fact that things became more ideologically aligned, right? That if you have somebody who today, or at least in 2020, was an African-American and labeled themselves as conservative, they were only 50/50. They were only a 50/50 voter, but that was a lot better than where they were in 2016 for Republicans when they were about an 80/20 voter for Clinton, and we’ll see where they end up.
But when you have this ideological voting becoming more sorted on an ideological line, the social pressure within these communities breaking down, it’s hard to see some… It is really kind of hard to see these trends fully reverting, right? Although you may have some aspects of it because of the economy that particularly was concentrated specifically among younger voters, you even had younger women shifting more than the electorate as a whole, at least in the national polls. I do think that those two things combine to create a really decisive shift. We may not have that in 2028, but I think we’ll have some version of either these realignment trends either cementing themselves or maybe reverting, but maybe slightly, but until we’re not, we’re still on that long-term trajectory.
Matt Grossmann: Tom, another version of this question references the successful Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. The idea being that some of this was more of a direct response to trends and unhappiness in the Biden administration, and I think the idea of the questioner is that might mean it’s more solvable if we look to these Democratic senate candidates for the Democrats. What do you think?
Thomas Edsall: Perhaps. I mean, it’s impossible to make an absolute judgment on these matters. I think though that the important thing is both this issue of ideology beginning to trump identity and racial and ethnic identity is important, and not only ideology, but there’s a very interesting survey of a study done of minority voters that showed that the minority voters who shift hold racial views that are closer to white working-class Democrats. They view on questions like if blacks would only work harder, they would do as well as Irish, Italians and others.
Ruy Teixeira: It’s the racial resentment questions, yeah?
Thomas Edsall: Though the black and Latino voters who share those views actually are the ones who shifted, most shifted to the other party. But how senators played this and how I think a lot of senators understood the electorate in their states better than Harris did, but I really, I’m just speculating.
Ruy Teixeira: Well, it just shows parties, politics isn’t a hundred percent nationalized at this point. People in states who run good campaigns can still separate themselves adequately from the national party. We saw it. I mean, that level of ticket splitting is pretty amazing based on recent cycles. So there’s a ray of sunshine there for the Democrats.
Amanda Iovino: I think we always have to look at [inaudible 00:52:39] advantage as part of things, and candidate quality. Those two factors definitely impact on the Senate side.
Matt Grossmann: Amanda, we had a question about this, about how much are the campaign spending matters? So we have, on the one hand, people are talking about the billion dollar ad campaign that didn’t work. On the other hand, Harris did do a little bit better in the swing states, and we do have some advantages that were consistent with spending advantages. So what did we learn from this election about whether these TV ads and mailers and campaign activity really can, how much difference they can make?
Amanda Iovino: I think we’ve all learned that we can’t look at our text messages during an election cycle. I think not just the amount of money that was spent, but where that money was spent. We’ve already kind of touched on Trump’s kind of non-typical media buying, and I think that more closely reflected where the swing voters and where his margins were made up, that’s where they were watching their news, that’s where they were getting their information from. And it seems that the Harris play was a little bit more traditional in its spending allocations, whereas Trump was a little bit less traditional. Really have to go, much like any advertising campaign, a candidate is a product and you have to go where your buyers are going to be, and I think there’s going to be an assessment on the campaigns of, “Okay, how can we actually get folks attention? How are we making sure that they’re seeing what we need them to see without just shoving a complete avalanche of information in front of them where they just then start to tune everything out?”
Matt Grossmann: Ruy, you said you were open to the views of the left, that it was just the left that didn’t turn out, but I think you and I are also pretty skeptical of that explanation, and you said, according to one of the questioners, you said that Democrats should tack back to the center. They want to know what you mean by that and what issues that would entail and whether it would work.
Ruy Teixeira: Yeah, no, this is a common question. I think the predicate to it tends to be, “Well, okay, you say Democrats need to move to the center in cultural issues, but wait a minute. Look at the ads that were run in some of the swing states. Look at what Kamala said about, I’m going to be tough on the border. I’ve got a Glock under my pillow.” Her campaign, not herself, but her campaign says, “I’m not for banning fracking.” I think the kind of mistake here is assuming that if your party has an image that is negative on issues like crime and immigration, on sort of racial and gender ideology, on sort of being too obsessed with climate stuff or whatever it might happen to be, being against fossil fuels, you can negate that simply by a couple months of advertising and not talking about it anymore. I think instead of being woke, I’m just not going to mention it, right?
It’s just not going to be something I talk about a lot, but there’s a difference between that and being able to convince voters you truly have a different point of view and a different set of policy priorities, and you actively denounce, disengage, throw under the bus the people who’ve been advocating the stuff that is really unpopular, and that’s the proverbial Sister Souljah moment, right? You don’t just not talk about dumb stuff, you actually call out the dumb stuff and the people who say the dumb stuff, and that creates controversy, and Patrick has made this point. Creating controversy is good when you want to make an impression about an issue like this and really unambiguously signal you are a different kind of Democrat. They never did that and they couldn’t do it with the kind of modest approach they had in the last few months of the campaign.
Thomas Edsall: That raises the question that I posed at the beginning.
Ruy Teixeira: Absolutely.
Thomas Edsall: I’m not sure that the Democratic party now can do, will tolerate a Sister Souljah step. 1992 when Clinton did, that was a very different Democratic party that had been getting beaten up by Dukakis, from McGovern to Dukakis, they had been just getting bang, bang, bang. Jimmy Carter. This is a different situation, but more importantly it’s a different party, right?
Ruy Teixeira: Right. Well Tom, do you mean by that they literally, if they did it wouldn’t work or just no one would have the guts to do it?
Thomas Edsall: No. That they party itself can’t do that. It just institutionally, the strength of the super progressive white liberal faction is now so strong and so dominant in the party that suddenly becoming the Sister Souljah party, denouncing, breaking with whoever it is, would be seen as a traitorous act as opposed to when in 1992, Clinton did that with Sister Souljah on the death penalty, on work versus welfare, a whole host of issues. If they tried that on immigration now even I think it would be a very rancorous situation.
Ruy Teixeira: Well, what’s wrong with the little rancor? I mean, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just means it would create controversy. What’s wrong with that?
Thomas Edsall: Because there’s too much in the party that’s against what you’re trying to do, and instead of creating a new image, you simply divide your own party and the people who would be screaming bloody murder at you would be just emphasizing once again how far left the party is, and I’m not sure now that the party can do that without the rancor really undermining the party itself as opposed to persuading the public.
Ruy Teixeira: Well, no guts, no glory. I mean, yeah, you may be right, you may be right.
Thomas Edsall: I’m not disagreeing with you.
Ruy Teixeira: You may be right.
Thomas Edsall: Even with Clinton, as soon as he got in office, basically checking out from his whole conservative agenda and moved to identity politics.
Ruy Teixeira: Fair point.
Matt Grossmann: So Patrick, enough with bashing the Democrats, what about the Republicans?
Ruy Teixeira: Let’s bash the Republicans a little bit here.
Matt Grossmann: I know that that Trump wasn’t your preferred candidate in 2016, but we have a lot of liberals asking us, why don’t these character issues matter? Why don’t these threats to democracy matter? And this time we had the strange circumstance of some candidates being considered too extreme like Kari Lake in Arizona with Trump as the seeming moderate. So how do you see the kind of role of candidate character and where the Republicans stand in terms of their perceived extremism?
Patrick Ruffini: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two things. One is that Donald Trump is just fundamentally on a different level as a political operator than a Kari Lake or a Mark Robinson, right? I mean, the MAGA JV team that was really kind of the front and center in the 2022 races couldn’t hold a candle to Trump in terms of the ability to connect to the Republican electorate and the license that he gets that no other politician will get. So I think that to some extent, it’s the political skill that he has to withstand whatever is thrown at him versus a Kari Lake does not really have.
I mean, look, does not really have the track record, the depth of feeling and sentiment among the Republican base to really power through something like that and still appeal to kind of lower information segments of the electorate. And I think very, it’s just a dynamic of a Senate race or a down ballot race that have to be run in more conventional ways than a presidential race, where a presidential race really is run entirely on earned media rather than paid media. So Trump’s ability to create these earned media moments that connect with voters just far greater than these other candidates. What I would say is where Democrats had success with this strategy in 2022 was not making a high-minded case about we need to protect constitutional norms, we need to protect democracy. It was just pointing out where these Republicans, these MAGA, so-called extreme MAGA Republicans, they seem just a little off. They seem a little crazy, and you saw hints of this in the strategy during the summer that Tim Walz kind of pioneered to, “You’re weird.”
And was kind like, we’re not taking ourselves so seriously with this pro-institution, pro-democracy message. That was really the, you had Mike Donilon with the Biden campaign saying, “Voters are definitely going into the booth thinking about January 6th.” And that was the campaign that Joe Biden was going to run. Now, eventually, I think the Harris campaign got there, but during the summer when they had their surge, it was really like, “Oh, this is kind of a little bit of a more fun vibe and look at those weird, strange, crazy MAGA people.” And that was sort of the approach. But I think the mistake with that approach is that fundamentally most voters are anti-system. They don’t think the institutions are working. They don’t think, particularly younger voters don’t think institutions are functioning well. Don’t think Washington DC functions well. And when you’re positioning yourself as the candidate of institutions, going so far as to make your closing speech in Washington DC in front of the White House, I think there was something a little off about that.
Ruy Teixeira: Protecting the system was more a bug than a feature of the final Harris campaign in a lot of voters’ eyes.
Matt Grossmann: Amanda, we’ve been talking about a lot of shifts, but we have a question about stability. The county level correlation was 0.99 with the previous election. The shift from one election to another at the state level was the smallest it’s been, and the trends were pretty uniform. So are we underestimating kind of the calcification here in the electorate?
Amanda Iovino: I mean, that’s a question for time to really be able to tell us, right? But I think what we’re seeing, the way that I’ve been looking at this is you’ve got that gender and education cross, and it really just puts those college educated men and non-college women as the swing voters, and if they all moved together, which it seems like they did, then that gives you that little bit of a shift. But it’s a very small sliver of voters that don’t have their mind made up now who they’re going to be voting for in 2028.
We’re talking about the January 6th and the weird and all of that commentary, I just want to make a point that we saw it work a little bit and it was working with college educated men. They were the voters with whom there wasn’t anything majorly wrong that they needed someone to correct, right? College educated women, abortion rights was the wrong that they were looking for Harris to correct. For working class voters, men and women, it was the economy. Women also had the abortion issue that they were looking to correct, which was kind of one of the push and pulls on their side, but college educated men, the economy’s doing okay, they only care about abortion and that they don’t want to sleep on the couch for a month, and safety is not necessarily a big existential issue for them and their family in the way that it is for some other voters.
So they were kind of the vibes voters of this election. They were the ones that were talking and thinking a little bit more about democracy in the swing states and in some of the swing districts that that’s the institution’s law and order these kind of more intellectual concepts because there wasn’t anything else going on that was really piercing the heart of this is the issue, I’m going to vote on this issue, and only one party has an actual answer for this issue. They were able to do a little bit more of a give and take.
And what we’ll see if that crystallizes in the next couple of years. I think we all need to remember that 2026 is not going to be an indicator here because working class voters are less likely to vote in midterm years, that’s why Republicans have done very well in the last 20 years plus in low turnout elections, because we could win college educated voters or at least keep it close. The voters that Trump turned out this year are not going to be turning out in 2026 unless we magically find some way to get them to care about midterm years. Typically they don’t. So we’re going to have to wait and finish that part of the discussion in 2028.
Matt Grossmann: Ruy, we have several questions about the media, the basic pattern that it might be reinforcing the democratic moves and has an increasing audience among these educated Democrats, but isn’t reaching the voters that might make a difference. We also had a question about the role of Joe Rogan and the podcast. So how much of a role do you think changes in the media and the sort of self-reinforcing cycle of who the media speaks to are playing?
Ruy Teixeira: Well, I think in terms of the views of sort of normie working class voters, I think that sort of legacy media that does lean fairly heavily to the democratic side these days, particularly the cultural white college educated liberal type view of the world. I mean, this is just the reality of who staffs these institutions now, these media entities and the kind of way they write about things, the kind of things they cover. I mean, I think it’s lost a significant amount of credibility, but perhaps worse than that is the bubble effect on Democrats, right? Democrats, they read the same stuff, the stuff that they read tells them the same stuff, and then they go tell their friends the same stuff, and it sort of reinforces a worldview that doesn’t really take the views of normie working class voters and people in vast areas of the country very seriously.
It underscores or helps accentuate what I once called the Fox News fallacy, which is conservatives are out there yelling about X and Y, and it’s on Fox News, and they’re saying there’s a crisis at the border and crime is a big issue, whatever it might happen to be. Nobody really cares about that. It’s just a Fox News talking point. It’s just the conservative media machine. That’s what’s doing it. And so our job is to ignore it and deny strenuously there’s any truth to it at all. But I’ve already heard from a number of liberal people I’ve run into that that was a problem in this election, right? They blame it on Fox News. They blame it on a very efficient conservative media ecosystem that has actually pushes out these misinformed and disinformed views into the willing brains of the great unwashed, and that was really the problem. And I think this all really does weaken the Democrat’s ability to understand what normal people think about the world and to calibrate their approach to a lot of issues so that it does comport more with the values of these voters and seems closer to them politically. Again, Tom’s point, they’re very attached to the views of the more liberal college-educated white people who tend to dominate these institutions. As for Joe Rogan, I think it was an enormous error on their part, but somewhat predictable.
Again, this is one way you can reach a lot of the voters, in theory, Democrats want to reach. And apparently, at least partly because of the views of staffers, they weren’t willing to do it because Joe Rogan is a bad person, despite the fact he actually has a lot of liberal views on a lot of different issues and he’s very heterodox. He’s just kind of a normal guy. He’s all over the place, and they didn’t want Kamala Harris to spend three hours talking to a normal person is going to go all over the place. So that was an error. That was a problem.
Matt Grossmann: Patrick, I know you might have to cut out soon. We have some questions about the-
Ruy Teixeira: Tom, did you have something to say? I saw you.
Matt Grossmann: Well, Patrick said he’s leaving soon, so I just want to give him one more, right?
Ruy Teixeira: All right. Okay.
Matt Grossmann: So how much do Republicans actually have to deliver here? Their focus on extending the Trump tax cuts is probably not aligned necessarily fully with their new constituents. They told Arab American voters and Jewish voters different things on that conflict. So how much does delivering matter?
Patrick Ruffini: Well, look, I’ll also a little bit of an optimistic note, although I do think there are significant roadblocks ahead, particularly if potentially with tariffs, tariffs being the populist part of the Trump agenda. But if it actually is something, if as the economists all say, that this is something that if they do it and it raises prices and that hits the working class hardest, I think that that is going to be a potential landmine there. I do think if you look at the though the track record of the first term in the sense of some of the ways they did get tripped up during the first term, I think are not going to be ways they get tripped up, which is the disconnect between the old school establishment wing of the Republican party pushing things like Obamacare repeal that Trump just kind of went along with, but his political instinct was just not to do anything, that no longer exists.
You really do have a machine that is going to be completely under his control, and it’s going to reflect him in all whatever that represents, right? So I think it’s going to be a more cohesive approach. And I think to the extent that he needs to “deliver,” it is going to be on the basis of just going back to the things that people remember positively about the first term in terms of the perceived economic performance. There was a bump economic perception when he was elected the first time. He seems to kind of overperform on driving, let’s say good economic vibes. So if he can do that and the numbers as… But Democrats pointed out, while the objective reality of the economy is good, but they could never fully capitalize on that in the same way that Trump can because of his image as a business person, as somebody who is very economically focused and no nonsense, just gets things done.
So I think if they can emphasize that part of the agenda and avoid maybe some of the tough decisions, particularly when it comes to entitlements and benefits programs that need to be made, but I don’t think Trump has any inclination whatsoever to tackle a lot of those questions that have clearly tripped up Republicans in previous administrations from George W. Bush’s second term to even Trump’s first term with Obamacare. So I do think that the delivery is going to be specifically how people perceive the economy six months and a year from now.
Matt Grossmann: Thanks, Patrick.
Patrick Ruffini: And I want to thank everyone. Sorry to have to leave.
Thomas Edsall: Good to see you.
Ruy Teixeira: Okay. See you later, Patrick.
Matt Grossmann: No problem. Tom, we have several questions about an economic agenda for the Democrats to reach the working class. You’ve been skeptical that they can write anyone off on the cultural issues, but what about better presenting an economic policy agenda? Does Bernie have a point there?
Thomas Edsall: Actually, I think Bernie does not have a point. I think the Biden administration went out of its way to help out white working class areas. And if you look at the distribution of the benefits flowing from the major Biden initiatives, they went to red states, and that it did not have any effect. The Democrats could propose these things, but I think that their credibility, because they are seen as basically elitist, it’s hard to convey that to voters who are not inclined to believe them especially on cultural issues. I think what’s happened in a sense is that cultural issues have become a litmus test of confidence, and if you don’t pass that test, that you’re not going to get the support and the belief that you need from proposing and enacting. And Biden did enact programs that actually benefit working-class people. The Democrat… I think this complaint that Bernie and others have said, including progressives, that the Democrats did not do enough to help out working-class people is really… Compared to previous administrations, he’s light years ahead of what Clinton did and what Obama did.
I was pretty struck by it, but its effect on the public thinking or the payoff politically is hard to find.
Matt Grossmann: Amanda, we have a few questions about the demographic trends in the polls. I think it’s interesting that this is the second election in a row where the pre-election polls seem to have over predicted the movement of black voters to the Republicans but under predicted the movement of Hispanic voters to the Republicans. And there’s still some questions about the exit polls showing flat white support or even some white gains when it looks like there was nationwide shifts. So the polls were only off a little bit, but they seem to be off in some similar ways. How good is our data in campaigns? And was anyone really seeing this right from the campaign?
Amanda Iovino: Yeah. At first, I think even public pollsters have done a very good job at reacting finally, most of them, to the lessons from 2016, and then 2020, which is generally that you need to wait on education. Otherwise you miss a lot of these movements that we’ve all been talking about here. And the other thing to do is have some sort of secondary party control measure. We use recall vote from the prior election. We can get very nerdy about all of that stuff, but you need to be very careful with your data because fewer and fewer people are answering the phones. And that’s one of the major things that it adds a mirage, and you’re not sure if it’s actually a mirage or not, into some minority vote because it is so small of a cross tab in a lot of this electorate unless you really spend the time and campaigns in very diverse states or going to spend the money and spend the time to do additional research on Hispanics out in the Southwest on black voters in even places like Virginia and the South.
We’re going to dig into those numbers a little bit more, do over samples of them, etc. Because what happens is the methods that you’re using to reach voters generally, but especially those minority voters, are going to skew who’s answering, and they’re going to skew their responses. And it’s not something that we can adapt to. We can’t necessarily control for where more middle class, and also urban black voters, are going to be answering. It’s harder to get rural black voters on the phone, and they fundamentally have a different view of issues and politicians and the like. So again, you really have to control for it. And the campaigns know, and they spend the money. The ones that are able to spend the money to really dig into those differences, but we have to, as consumers of polling data, public polling data especially, really look at this with kind of a skeptical eye where some of the movement’s going to be there, but it might not be as exaggerated in either direction as the polls are showing
Matt Grossmann: Ruy. We also have a question about over interpretation. Know we’re somewhat always guilty of now more than everism after an election that what we believed was shown. So folks are saying, “Look, every incumbent party in the world lost ground this year. There was economic circumstances beyond the control of the party in charge.” Are we over interpreting this?
Ruy Teixeira: Well, of course, we’re probably over interpreting it. Every postmortem session after every election, there probably are real lessons there, but they’re probably not quite the magnitude that some people take them to be. There is sort of a tendency to kind of walk them into whatever narrative you feel is appropriate at that current time and over interpreted. You can’t really understand this election, for example, unless you take into account how much people detested inflation, which was somewhat conjunctural to being the incumbent administration and the aftermath of COVID. That clearly had something to do with it, but I don’t think you can sort of just rest there and say that’s all there is to it because not only is that a factor, but it also tends to have an interaction effect with these other issues that people made to test the incumbent party about. It just sort of connects to an all around feeling like the incumbent party and it’s candidate don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re not my people, and I want to get rid of them.
So it all kind of comes together. We know that not only did Trump had an advantage on the economy, also had a big advantage to immigration, which was typically frequently the second issue in importance. So a lot of things come together in that. There was actually a recent study done by, or poll done by the Blueprint Survey Group, which is a democratic leading group that does a lot of detailed polling, and they found the three big issues were, one, the economy, two, immigration, and three, the belief that Democrats were obsessed with identity issues like transgender, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it was not insignificant that the Democrats were viewed as culturally out of touch, which then connected to the feeling that they were economically out of touch. So looking a little bit more broadly than that, I think the tendency to write this off is simply a reaction. Part of the global reaction against incumbents in a period of inflation in the post-COVID period essentially is letting, obviously, it’s letting the Democrats in the party off the hook, right?
What could you do? We shouldn’t have spent any money. We were doomed from the beginning, right? Campaigns don’t matter. Politics don’t matter. Cultural issues don’t matter. Nothing matters except for the fact we’re in this anti-inflation, anti-incumbent era, and therefore we’re innocent. “We are innocent,” as Peter Lorre would put it. So I don’t find that particularly credible, and I think it’s kind of a strange way to look at politics. This one variable model, I don’t think that’s adequate for where we are to understand the complexities of this election. That said, those who choose to interpret these shifts, their magnitude and what they produce, the trifecta, this is a true realignment. The Republicans will rule for decades.
Of course, that’s over interpretation. As John Judas and I put it in a op-ed, we just had in the New York Times, there should be different ingredients for a realignment that’s truly durable and really, really changes the nature of the country and the coalitions that dominate it. One is obviously they won an important election. Two is that the opposing party has to be in disarray. But here’s the third one, and it’s really important, you actually have to produce for the people who got you there. They actually have to believe, in the course of experiencing your administration as a potential realigning party, that you have actually made their lives a lot better. There’s a new settlement in the country that they really believe in. They believe prosperity happy days are here again. I like the administration, I like their values, I like what they’ve done economically. I feel like this is a party I could stick with for a while.
Otherwise you’re just renting those voters, and by a thermostatic reaction, you may get another anti-incumbent election in short order, at which point we’re back to this 50 50 toggling between the parties as opposed to any kind of real realignment. So them’s my views on that.
Matt Grossmann: Tom, related to that, we have an anti-system party essentially in charge of all the branches of government. Now, is that really going to… It’s one thing to sell that to voters, but another thing to actually do anything to reform the American elite or elite institutions. Do you see anything on the horizon that would actually change that?
Thomas Edsall: I think if you look at the appointees that Trump is making to start out, they’re pretty screwball, and he is doing things that I think are not going to benefit him in terms of doing what Ruy described, building a level of support because of the policies adopted. The attorney general is the extreme, but he’s not the only extreme. And I don’t think… Trump seems to be basing his administration entirely on who is loyal to him as opposed to who can get things done that will be beneficial to building the Republican party. And I think he’s blowing an opportunity, and it may turn out that we will have a 2026 and 2028 elections where people simply reject the incumbent party. But still, we don’t know. We don’t know what… The deportation stuff has got all potential kinds of consequences, a lot of them negative. The tariff stuff has a lot of similarly potentially negative stuff.
It’s a real gamble whether the Republican party can affirm its position. It’s in a good position now. But George Bush, for example, was a very good position after 9/11 and he proceeded to blow that right out the window way back by the election. Shortly after the election of 2004, he was in negative territory. These presidents have not been good managers of their own coalitions. Bill Clinton, I think, did the same thing. Obama did a lot of things that failed to really secure his position. It’s been a sustained period where incumbent presidents who have got some momentum behind them have not secured that momentum. And they’ve done that by acquiescing excessively to the kind of special interest groups within their own party. And I think Trump is so far showing just that inclination. So I think there’s a little bit of optimism there for Democrats, God forbid.
Matt Grossmann: One more question for Amanda before she has to go, and we’ll close it up here. You mentioned that gender attitudes had a role in the vote, and we know that one potential overinterpretation is that Democrats may decide that they ran two women for president and they shouldn’t do that anymore. But we also know that overall, women win at the same or higher rates for lower offices. So what should we be concluding along those lines?
Amanda Iovino: I hate to take the cop out, but the conclusion I think is that we need to figure out what the real difference is between when voters are willing to vote for a woman for legislative positions versus executive positions. And I think you see, especially with those working class voters are much more comfortable with a woman in a legislative position than they are with a woman in an executive spot. Kelly Ann being the new Republican woman governor in New Hampshire is probably the outlier here, but generally we’re seeing just… Even governors are more likely to be male, right? There’s something about executive leadership where there’s still a glass ceiling for women, whether we’re talking about at the state level. Even if we’re talking about at the corporate side, companies are getting more open to women in leadership positions. They become significantly more comfortable with it when a company’s about to go downhill, the glass cliff instead of the glass ceiling where they’ll put a woman or a person of color in charge just to watch the thing go down.
I think it’s a good thing that we’re not quite at that point as a country, that we’re putting a woman on a glass cliff as president, but we need to figure out what it is about that executive position that makes voters question whether or not a woman can be in charge.
Matt Grossmann: Well, I hate to end on a negative note, but we promised people an hour and a half.
Ruy Teixeira: Keep hope alive. That’s what I say.
Matt Grossmann: And I want to thank Amanda Iovino and Patrick Ruffini and Tom Edsall and Ruy Teixeira. And this will be available as a video broadcast and also via The Science of Politics podcast and on The Liberal Patriot. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today, and we will see you again soon. Bye-Bye.
Ruy Teixeira: Great.
Thomas Edsall: Thank you.
Amanda Iovino: Thank you.