Four THB Takeaways from the Incredible 2024 US Election

A major political realignment in U.S. politics

Red wave. Shift in presidential vote margin from 2020 to 2024. Red means more Republican. Source: New York Times, Noon ET 6 November, not all results are in.

In a classic 1955 paper, political scientist V.O. Key characterized a critical election:

“Even the most fleeting inspection of American elections suggests the existence of a category of elections in which voters are, at least from impressionistic evidence, unusually deeply concerned, in which the extent of electoral involvement is relatively quite high, and in which the decisive results of the voting reveal a sharp alteration of the pre-existing cleavage within the electorate. Moreover, and perhaps this is the truly differentiating characteristic of this sort of election, the realignment made manifest in the voting in such elections seems to persist for several succeeding elections.”

Political scientists like to argue over which elections result in a realignment, with pretty much everyone agreeing that the election of Franklin Roosevelt in1932 was a critical election, and more recently, many believing that Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 was the most recent.

Welcome to the club U.S. Election 2024!

The map at the top of this post shows that Donald Trump’s victory was not just decisive, but represents a comprehensive shift by U.S. voters toward Trump since 2020 — Not just in a few places, but pretty much everywhere. With this post I share some morning-after thoughts and invite your comments.

1. I got this one wrong (mostly).

It’s just math. Source: U.S. Census.

As a matter of basic accountability here at THB, I was wrong — I anticipated a Harris win. Why? Character. That is all. Not policy, not even politics. I suppose part of this was me wishing that character mattered more, even though I get it — It is like an iron law, as someone once said. That is democracy at work.

What did I miss? Well, I probably should first have listened to myself from 2022:

The core problem facing Democrats, in my view, is that they have become a party of the wealthy and the highly educated. . . The basic problem here for Democrats is simple electoral math. There are a lot more voters who do not have college degrees than do . . . The math here is not complicated. Democrats get a larger share of the smaller slice of the pie (those with a bachelor’s degree) and a smaller share of the larger slice (those without). You don’t have to be a campaign consultant to understand that electoral success is going to be difficult under these conditions. . . Earning votes is the basic currency of democratic governance. Priority one for the Democrats should be to understand why it is that their policies, platforms and performance do not win among the less well educated and less wealthy. Democrats must do better.

In my defense, I did much better anticipating the Senate and House outcomes.

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2. Policy is going to matter as much as ever, Congress too

I am a professional policy analyst, not a political pundit or operative. By definition that means I am a taker of political outcomes, not a maker of political outcomes. Political outcomes are boundary conditions for policy design, recommendation, and evaluation.

And remember, political victories don’t on their own make anything happen, other than people taking office. What makes things happen are policies. Effective policy making requires policy options that can work. That is where nerds like me and the broader THB community come in — Honest brokering is about expanding the scope of choice for decision making, in an effort to identify options that can work in practice and survive in politics.

The outcome of the House is currently still uncertain, but even if it goes to the Republicans, it will be by a very narrow margin. Governing will still be difficult for the next two years and if history is any indication, Republican control may not last more than two years, at which point governance would become even more complex.

I have long advocated for a more prominent role from the U.S. Congress in policy making. One reason is — well — that is actually how it is supposed to work. The legislative branch legislates and the executive branch executes. We are long overdue in getting back to fundamentals.

Another reason is that based on the first Trump presidency, I do not have high hopes for executive branch competency. Remember the pandemic? President Trump never established a high level expert advisory mechanism on the pandemic and bizarrely moved pandemic response leadership from HHS to FEMA and back again. Not really inspiring policy leadership. I could go on.

There is also the matter of some pretty poor policy recommendations that candidate Trump made — like on tariffs and mass deportations. We are going to need more thoughtful policy analyses than ever, and less politicking, political posturing, and culture wars — on all sides.¹

3. Independent media were a big winner in this election cycle

The best things I read during the election and today almost always come from independent media, many here on Substack. The major media — focused on the horserace, slavishly following flawed polls, and often cheerleading — largely missed the mark.²

Below are some of the very best independent media that I have come to appreciate, and I encourage you to subscribe. We are going to need folks like this more than ever over these next four years.

• Persuasion — Offers thoughtful and often heterodox arguments about important policy issues. Not predictable, and you’ll usually find something that makes you think and disagree.

• The Free Press — Led by Bari Weiss, The FP is a new effort in building a news organization that does actual journalism and presents a diversity of commentary.

• The Dispatch — A center right (but definitely not Republican) news and analysis site. The Dispatch will be very important to understanding the intellectual wing of conservative thinking during the next four years.

• The Liberal Patriot — One of the absolute best political sites with writers who have had the dynamics of this election right for months. If you read just one post today on the election, make it this one: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

• Good Authority — A group of nerdy political scientists (used to be The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, back in the day) with smart takes on politics based on scholarly work.

What sites do you find have value?

4. There is no such thing as a “climate voter”

America and Americans? Not a fan.

Writing at The Liberal Patriot today, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, and John B. Judis make a case — that I agree with — that at present, the best chance for reviving the promise of American democracy lies with Democrats (which might seem fairly obvious, having just been destroyed in yesterday’s election!). Their argument is worth quoting at length:

In our view, one prerequisite for reviving the promise of American democracy is the reemergence of a political party whose primary commitment is to look after the country’s working and middle classes. It could be the Republicans who end up being this party. There are new intellectual currents within the Republicans’ shadow party that are skeptical about the reign of big business and free market ideology and endorse a version of industrial policy. These include the think tank American Compass and the journal American Affairs. We wish them well. But we worry that they will be ignored because of the Republicans’ traditional commitment to business and the strength of business groups and donors within the Republicans’ shadow party. That was evident in the new House Republican majority’s first act in January 2023, which was to slash funds for the Internal Revenue Service that had been targeted for uncovering tax dodging by the wealthy. The Republicans, after all, have an even more influential radical side whose propensities for violence and contempt for democracy outweigh the foibles of the Democrats’ cultural radicals.

We place our hopes for change in the Democratic Party. We see evidence in the Biden administration’s first two years of a reevaluation of the party’s economic priorities on trade, taxes, and labor and on national economic growth that tries to bridge the Great Divide. The Democrats seem to have turned a corner from their deference to free markets and free trade during past administrations. The influence of Wall Street and Silicon Valley remains a problem with the Democrats, but the main problem we see with today’s Democratic Party is the cultural insularity and arrogance that surfaced clearly during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Most of the stands the party and its groups take on issues like race, crime, immigration, climate, sex, and gender are in response to real problems. There has been police brutality; the country’s eleven million illegal immigrants constitute an exploitable underclass that needs to be integrated into society; transgender people have suffered discrimination; and climate change is a genuine threat to the planet’s future. There are reasonable reforms that address these, but the radical solutions and the censorious outlook advanced by the Democrats’ shadow groups and by some Democratic politicians have been wrong-headed and divisive.

Many Democrats simply refuse to recognize this.

Having just decisively won an election, there is little reason to expect Republicans — currently under the spell of Donald Trump — to decide to offer anything new in their politics, why would they?³

Instead, there is an opportunity for Democrats to take a good hard look at the past 8 years and think about doing things differently. They should and rebuild from top to bottom.

Soon, Ruy Teixeira and I will share our full survey results and our interpretation of what Americans think about climate and energy. The short story is that most everyone is happy to address climate change and almost no one wants to pay much for it or change what they like about their lives.

In short, if there are “climate voters” — single issue focusers — then you can probably find them on university faculties, in niche NGOs, and posting on BlueSky.⁴ In contrast, most normal people care about the price of energy, their jobs, ease of transportation, costs of stuff at the store, basic safety and security, and so on.

Democrats would do well to design policies that serve the interests of normal people which also have the side benefit of accelerating decarbonization. That means turning climate from a special interest valued by the cultural elite into something largely invisible to most people, and folded into implementation of policies that make people better off — on their own terms.

We are at an inflection point in American politics — In the aftermath of a fundamental political realignment. What we do next really matters. Next week I plan on restating the core values that drive the work here at THB — We have our work together cut out for us!

1. Gentle reminder — THB is not really the best place for political cheerleading. Thanks!

2. The major media remains essential. I read the FT, WSJ and NYT every day. However, that diet of news is incomplete in 2024.

3. I have little interest in debates here over which party is “better.” Effective policy will require both parties, cooperation, and compromise. That is politics 101.

4. A broader argument could be made here about the Democrats recent tendency to take niche issues of the cultural elite and turn them into wedge issues to motivate a small part of their “base.” Republicans tend to do this too (transgender athletes, anyone?), but have avoided letting the top line issues fall off the top line (like inflation and immigration). Climate is the example I focus on here for obvious reasons.