There are going to be plenty of postmortems of the last election, trying to understand how Trump managed to win. These analyses will look at exit poll data to see what they can learn about who people voted for and why, and break it down by demographic categories. There will of course be analyses of many factors such as campaign messages, strategy, and tactics.
I looked at data on the number of votes going back to the 2008 election and have made the chart below. Each vote total is in millions, as is the US population at that time. We see that the percentage of the US population that voted this year was roughly the same as past election years, except for the sharp increase in 2020.
The one thing that jumps out (and has already been noted by others) is the huge drop in the number of votes that Kamala Harris got compared to what Joe Biden got. It was lower by a whopping 13.3 million, while Trump’s dropped by just 1.6 million. The decline in Trump’s votes can be explained by people getting disenchanted with him. But what could explain the massive drop for Harris? There was hardly any difference between Harris and Biden in terms of policies and she was a better campaigner than him.
We need to note that Trump won when running against women (Clinton, Harris) but lost when he ran against a man (Biden). This fact, coupled with the sharp drop in Harris’s vote totals, bcak to Clinton levels, suggests to me the possibility that Harris lost not because people switched to Trump but because many Biden voters could not bring themselves to vote for a woman and simply did not vote. The fact that Barack Obama was able to win suggests that being Black was not as disqualifying factor for him so that leaves gender as a possibility.
I am not saying that this was the only reason. Things are never that simple and there are many other factors would likely have contributed and there does need to be an analysis to see to what extent the Democratic party has alienated itself from the aspirations of the general population, though this having such a major effect in just four years would be hard to explain. The AP’s VoteCast survey says that people who said the economy was their main concern broke hard for Trump.
The importance of gender is purely an untested hypothesis on my part. I am sure that it will have struck many other people too but it is going to be hard to test it because it will require interrogating people who voted for Biden and did not vote for Harris. Finding non-voters is not easy. And even if they are found, they are unlikely to come right out and say that gender was the reason. They would likely find some alternative, more acceptable, reason to give, such as they felt that she would not be good at dealing with foreign leaders or the economy or some such thing. Such people may have rationalized this for themselves because most people don’t like to think of themselves as sexist.
If this hypothesis happens to have some validity, the wrong conclusion to draw would be that Democrats should only run male candidates. At times like this, I take comfort in the words of legendary journalist I. F. Stone, who said:
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.”
This is how earlier struggles by people to get civil rights played out. Those early people lost and lost before they broke through. It will be the same with getting a woman president in the US. We have to face the fact that the US is particularly backward when compared to pretty much the rest of the world in regard to their willingness to accept a woman leader.
It was the unfortunate lot of Clinton and Harris to go up against a particularly vile piece of humanity, so their losses particularly sting. We need to look on the two of them as a kind of vanguard for women’s advancement, whose defeats pave the way for a woman to win in the future. If the Trump presidency turns out to be as terrible for the country and the world as I fully expect it to be, maybe those who voted for him or abstained from voting for Harris because of her gender will experience a reckoning and reconsider their gender prejudices.
As Harris said in her concession speech:
To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win.
But here’s the thing – sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win, that doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power. And don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.
You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world.
And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.
One hopes that the third woman who attempts this will be successful.
Here’s a much more comprehensive postmortem that doesn’t rule out sexism, but includes a whole host of other factors along with it:
https://meidasnews.com/news/what-went-wrong-how-to-fix-it
Short answer: lots of people who voted for Biden gave up on Harris because they just didn’t see either of them doing that much to actually stop Trumpism, or hear him speaking out consistently against all of Trump’s lies on a multitude of issues.
… the huge drop in the number of votes that Kamala Harris got compared to … Joe Biden …
The Associated Press fact-checker notes:
NB: the AP story does not include anything about the numerous and suspicious voter-roll purges before the election.
Inflation is always bad for incumbents, and we’ve just had a period of inflation higher than any since 1981. For a significant chunk of the electorate, high inflation is something they have literally never experienced, or don’t really remember because they were too young for it to register. Basically nobody under the age of 60 remembers what 7% inflation feels like (and for those that do, it’s not a good memory). For a lot of people, the last couple of years have been completely unprecedented, even without thinking about the pandemic.
I’m pretty comfortably off, but even so, the difference between what a normal load of groceries used to cost and what it costs now has been shocking -- the difference is, I can absorb it. Plenty of people can’t, and when you pitch macroeconomic indicators, or the state of the stock market, against people’s day to day experience of looking at their shopping and thinking “how much?” with a mixture of horror and incredulity, and then try and tell them the economy is doing great… Well, let’s just say you are not going to be well received. (The fact that Trump’s prescriptions on the economy are at best incoherent, and and worst likely to make things much, much worse is neither here not there -- most people aren’t voting on economic policy, just economic feelings.)
Yeah, there’s a lot of other stuff going on too, but that’s probably my top pick.
As for the comparison between Clinton and Harris… You can always draw a great trend line if you’ve only got two data points. Harris stood in the worst economic period in over 40 years, and Clinton was arguably the most thoroughly demonised politician in modern American political history. Plus the Dems had just had 8 years, and it’s pretty rare for the presidency to stay with the same party when the previous incumbent hits the term limit. Is there a strong current of misogyny in American politics? Undoubtedly. Did it make the difference in and of itself? Maybe, but I’m not convinced.
One hopes that the third woman who attempts this will be successful.
Unless her name is Taylor Greene. Or Boebert. Or Blackburn. Or Mace. Or Cammack. Or Trump. Or …
Just been looking at the exit poll data. Trump’s biggest supporter share by percentage is middle-aged (45-64), uneducated (didn’t graduate college), white, men. So far so obvious? But I don’t mean to malign all middle-aged uneducated white men. Almost a quarter of them did vote for Harris if my maths is correct.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0lp48ldgyeo
Just looking at the data you presented, it looks like a regression to the mean. That is, 2020 is an outlier while the other elections have roughly the same level of participation. I thought that I would look two elections further back, to 2000, and what I see is that Obama got a bump, which dwindled a bit in the second term, and Clinton 2 appears to have done better than Kerry in 2004.
The 2020 election was an outlier. Trump was not expected to win in 2016, but once he did he gained supporters who wanted him to win again in 2020. But Trump as alienated a lot of people in his first term, which gave them a real impetus to go out and vote against him.
I expect a lot of people thought, “Trump would never win again. To many people hate him, and he’s obviously a cranky old man. I don’t need to bother this time.” The same people who didn’t bother to vote for Clinton in 2016. They were too optimistic about their candidate’s chances, even with the polls being reported as being close, so they didn’t bother to vote.
I’m not certain there is a much deeper lesson to learn that that.
These two statements are contradictory.
If you mean never, ever run a female candidate again, then obviously that’s the wrong conclusion. At some point, one would hope, if there’s ever any progress, then eventually running a woman as candidate for President will not be electoral suicide, and even if she still doesn’t win, but loses for reasons other than endemic American misogyny, then that will be a good day..
If, as I suspect, you mean run another female candidate in the foreseeable/near future, when the data available makes it clear and you openly admit that the electorate is NOT READY, well, I can only conclude that you are one of those lefties who actually actively wants to lose, because losing makes you feel virtuous or something.
Harris was suited to power, and wanted it and deserved it. Only one of those things is true of Trump, and it’s possible he doesn’t actually want the power per se, just the money and kudos that comes with it.
I’m a lefty, and my first, foremost requirement of my candidates is not that they’re ideologically pure, or that they have right on their side, or that they’re the right gender/race/age/class/sexuality/whatever. It’s that they WIN. Because if they can’t do that, then they’re no fucking use to me or anyone else. You think a principled opposition is any USE during a Trump presidency? If so, you appear not to have been paying attention.
Don’t hold your breath. By definition such people are not too hot on introspection. Come to that, I wouldn’t expect most of them to be able to spell it, much less do it.
I’d pay good money to watch Harris look Candace Fails in the eye and repeat that platitude. https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala
@flex, 6:
Look back over this blog’s coverage of Trump since 2021. Time and time and time again it’s been “this is it, this is surely the end for Trump, he can’t possible escape jail time/become the Republican candidate/win the debate/win the next debate/win the election NOW!”. I’m not saying these specific examples of infuriating complacency contributed to Trump’s victory. I am saying I agree with you that this attitude was widespread and anyone who propagated it or worse, acted on it should have a talk with themselves.
Good article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/07/joe-rogan-elon-musk-heterodoxy-trump-win-reaction
Specifically:
Maybe, possibly, Democrats should think about appealing more directly to that demographic. It has worked for the right. The left has mostly just complained about that fact, rather than trying to do something positive about it. It remains to be seen if they can regain the confidence of men, and in particular young men. I hope so. It’s going to be a tough four years, and anyone forced to spend them in the US has my sympathy.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that we have exactly the same amount of evidence for the proposition that America will not elect a woman President as we do for the proposition that, given the chance, America will always elect a Black man as President. Now, does anybody think that is a reasonable conclusion to draw?
One thing which occurred in my office on Tuesday surprised me a little. There is one young co-worker who I already knew was going to vote for Trump, but he spouted off on why. I overheard the conversation, and did not participate for a couple reasons. First, I’ve listened to him before and realized that he was not open to discussion. He has his beliefs and will stick to them. Second, he’s one of those fast talkers who never lets you speak if you are at all polite about listening to him. I feel it is impolite to interrupt people who are talking, but I find that there are some people who feel it is acceptable to start talking over others.
Anyway, in the space of a couple minutes he very confidently made the following statements (paraphrased);
“Everything Harris says is a lie.”
“Trump was never convicted of any crime.”
“The government in Ukraine is corrupt.”
“I’ve studied history and Ukraine was always part of the Russian Empire.”
I have no idea where he got those beliefs, but I have to suspect that the people he socializes with share them.
> Finding non-voters is not easy. And even if they are found, they are unlikely to come right out and say that gender was the reason. They would likely find some alternative, more acceptable, reason to give, such as they felt that she would not be good at dealing with foreign leaders or the economy or some such thing. Such people may have rationalized this for themselves because most people don’t like to think of themselves as sexist.
This isn’t how such research is done. There are many well-tested and well-validated research instruments psychologists and sociologists use for detecting bias that work for both overt and hidden bias. What you want is a sample of people who voted and didn’t vote in the last election, then to give them bias tests.
For your hypothesis (and it’s one I’ve advanced myself, so let’s say “our hypothesis) to hold up, we’d want to find more bias in the group that voted in 2020 but not 2024 than the group that voted in both elections.
This isn’t that hard, you recruit people ostensibly for some other purpose/s, then give them a questionnaire designed to detect bias that includes some additional questions about voting habits + some other stuff designed to disguise the nature of the research. Stuff about participating in local sports leagues or book clubs. Call it a civil/social engagement measurement or whatever. Voting fits in so long as the camouflage issues are broad enough. (“Are you a member of the PTA? Do you go to city or county council meetings? Are you a Big Brother/Big Sister? Do you attend church regularly? How many hours per week do you volunteer to good causes? What about frogs?”)
You retain the data about bias, elections voted in, and political party and ignore the camouflage issues, then compare whether or not bias correlates with voting patterns generally, for registered Republicans, for registered Democrats, for those who lean right and those who lean left.
You would expect that there’s a stronger delta-bias between Dems and LeanLefts that voted in the last 3 presidential elections compared to those who only voted in 2020 than the delta-bias you would find between GOP and LeanRights that voted in the last presidential 3 elections or only in 2020.
There are probably factors I’m not considering, but I’m not a professional sociologist and this is a solid outline of a methodology, so I’m sure that they can come up with even better investigations to substantiate or falsify the sexism hypothesis.
I expect a lot of people thought, “Trump would never win again. To many people hate him, and he’s obviously a cranky old man. I don’t need to bother this time.”
From what I’ve read so far, I suspect it’s more a case of lots of people who voted for Biden in 2020 thinking “Biden didn’t do enough to stop Trump and Harris is no better, so why bother this time?”
@Raging Bee, could be, the Overton window has moved so far to the right that I see only disenchantment on the left. I can’t understand why so many people couldn’t put their ideologies aside to vote against the criminal that’s going to fuck up their democracy (such as it is) though. Even well-known figures in the Republican Party were advocating that.
Im getting tired of the media stories of which demographic switched how much to Trump because they arent covering why his raw numbers didnt increase -- because roughly as much switched over as stayed home. 2020 was an outlier (Trumps Covid response bnut even he saw his numbers increase in 2020?)
Maybe true but its also a combination of black + woman (+ liberal ?). I know of atleast couple of people who will be meek if criticized by a black male or a white woman but lose it if its a woman of color.
I think those who support minorities are always prepared to lose (by definition ! there are more of the majority after all -- and if you can unit the majority by hate of a minority , its almost certain they will win elections -- see India for e.g)
Some things we know: There has been a shift to the right in this election over most of the country. The shift is more pronounced in the vote for president vs votes for senators, governors, issues -- that is, there was a lot of ticket-splitting. Also, the shift in the presidential election is less pronounced in the swing states, where Harris focused her campaigning. So this isn’t a rejection of Democrats as a whole, nor is there evidence for poor campaigning/messaging by Harris. Worldwide, there has been a trend of anti-incumbency bias since 2022, and the US is part of that trend. This trend is related to the pandemic recovery. People expect politicians to perform feats of economical magic, and when this doesn’t happen they turn on them. Harris, as Biden’s VP, suffered from this.
I am personally curious how long the anti-incumbency bias will hold. Will we have an 8-consecutive years president again in the next 20-30 years? Maybe the best time for a woman to run for president is after a president from the rival party doesn’t run.
And on the subject of gender, Iraq’s parliament is about to lower the age of marriage to 9.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/08/16/iraq-parliament-poised-legalize-child-marriage
In support of my claim in @14, see the graphic here. US Democrats were among the top performing incumbent parties in 2024 so far.
And to correct my final speculation, these days it looks like the best time for a woman to run is against an incumbent from a rival party.
@Dunc, 8:
False. We have data points for TWO women, but only ONE black man. Call us back when another Black man stands and wins.
What Obama’s election does tell us is that the US is, or at least for a while there was, ready for a Black president. In other words, next time a Black man is the candidate, claiming it was because he was Black won’t wash.
If I were in a minority (and in pretty much every way that matters, I’m not) I’m not sure I’d appreciate “support” that consisted of someone who might be in a position to climb a ladder and throw me down a rope choosing instead to stay down in the mud and shit with me out of “solidarity” or whatever, eschewing the ladder as the tool of my oppressor. Climb the fucking ladder and throw me down a rope, please.
Well, we could argue* about whether Obama winning twice should count as two data points or one (with a side order of arguments about incumbency bias, both for and against), but the fact remains that either way, it’s an absurdly small sample to draw a conclusion from. Would you look at the history of women PMs in Britain and conclude that they’ve all been terrible in one way or another, so based on the available evidence to date, we should never have another one? This sort of naive Bayesianism can leads to all sort of ludicrous conclusions if you’re not careful.
Randall Munroe made an excellent point along these lines way back in 2012: https://xkcd.com/1122/.
(And on the subject of naive Bayesianism: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines)
* I’m not going to, as this is my third comment on this post.
And Canada’s only had one female PM, and she wasn’t elected in a general election. She badly lost the general afterward, but that was definitely not her fault; the center-right party she was running for had just had a very unpopular leader retire and was also being outflanked by a harder-right party at the time, and vote splitting reduced the previously majority party to two seats. She was also, in some ways, too honest for the top job; like Paul Martin after her, she did far better in a high cabinet position where she wasn’t the one in front of the cameras and news cycle all the time.
(Honestly my personal take on Kim Campbell was ‘I disagree with her on a lot of things, but she would have worked as a caretaker PM not making too many waves’, and the fact that her project for replacing most of Canada’s military helicopters was cancelled by the next PM is one of many reasons the Canadian military is such an obsolete mess in terms of equipment.)
The problem with that line of thought is that you’d be forced to conclude we should probably never elect a man either and start giving e.g. cats a dogs a look-in. Ludicrous conclusions for the win.
We’ve had THREE women PMs. Two of them won general elections, one of them won THREE, in 1979, 1983 and 1987. So that’s a really terrible example, to the point that if in future a woman is a candidate for PM in the UK and she loses then (a) that’s literally the first time that’s ever happened in history and (b) one thing you can DEFINITELY rule out it is the idea that the loss was because she’s a woman.
So the history of women PMs in the UK would suggest that on the available evidence a party that wants to win should ONLY have women as their leader -- historically, they never lose, right? Ludicrous conclusions cut both ways, eh?
But we’re not talking about the UK. We’re talking about somewhere demonstrably, proudly much nastier, much more anti-woman than the UK. Somewhere where, when a woman stands for office and loses, “it’s because she’s a woman” is depressingly very likely at least partly true, rather than the bleating of someone trying to find an excuse for their failure.
They could do worse though -- I saw a poll many years ago (I think before Obama) where US voters were asked if they could ever vote for a [$thing] for President. Possible answers included “woman”, “Black man” and “Jew”. Various proportions of Americans said they would or would not be able to vote for such people. What struck me was the least popular category -- less popular, even in the relatively recent aftermath of 9/11, than “Muslim” -- and that category was “atheist”.
And yet… does anyone think Donald Trump believes there’s a being in the universe more important than himself?
…
Three and done, good night.
If this is true, it’s a big facepalm. There have been women on the helm in major countries, UK, Germany, Scandinavian and Baltic states. In Mexico of all places, there was a race between two women. Even in Japan a woman recently lost by a tiny margin (luckily, because she is a hardline nationalist). So why the US?
For the benefit of your readers I am from Sri Lanka, so look at things from a distance.But about the comparision between Clinton/ Harris and Obama didn’t Obama get a great boost from the prevailing financial crisis,just as they had a negative effect on McCain.
Here is a quote:
“Obama, on the trail in Colorado, pounced on that remark, seeing a chance to tie his opponent to Bush’s economic policies.
“This is what happens when you see seven years of incomes falling for the average worker while Wall Street is booming and declare, as Sen. McCain did earlier this year, that we’ve made great economic progress under George Bush,” Obama said at the time.
Find the full article at https://www.npr.org/2009/09/08/112651600/financial-crisis-gave-candidate-obama-a-boost
I am not underrating the gender factor; Only saying we cannot ‘ Rush to Judgement’
BTW, I was as appalled by the result as any of you.
Amal
Why the obsession on Female Presidents? The issue is the set of policies advocated by the ruling party, not the figurehead of said party.
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In the USA, there are female Senators, female Congresspersons, female Governors, female Mayors. Thus there is no misogyny in the USA. Female elected politicians bring no gender-related advantage over Male elected politicians.
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If there is to be a female American President, it will be a Conservative Woman.
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Given that Progressive/Socialists are confused on what is a woman, I identify Joseph Biden to be a woman and thus the USA had a Woman President since 2021. Case settled.