New data analysis of voter turnout in the 2024 presidential election pours cold water on the long-held Democratic notion that an energized base and voter turnout is the best way to elect a Democratic candidate for president.
Writing for Vox, Eric Levitz makes clear that “The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a ‘we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone’ strategy would’ve made things worse.”
This is but one stunning conclusion Levitz arrived at after interviewing David Shor, who Levitz hails as maybe “the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party”:
The Democratic firm Blue Rose Research recently synthesized such data into a unified account of Kamala Harris’s defeat. (Blue Rose Research did ad testing for Future Forward, the largest PAC supporting Harris, which had disputes on strategy with the campaign itself.) Its analysis will command a lot of attention. Few pollsters boast a larger data set than Blue Rose — the company conducted 26 million voter interviews in 2024. And the firm’s leader, David Shor, might be the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party.
Shor presented Levitz with a ton of fascinating that should come as not just a bitter pill for Democrats, but a whole bottle full of them.. Levitz writes:
The reality is that these things always tend to move in the same direction — parties that lose ground with swing voters tend to simultaneously see worse turnout. And for a simple reason. There were a lot of Democratic voters who were angry at their party last year. And they were mostly moderate and conservative Democrats angry about the cost of living and other issues. And even though they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Republican, a lot of them stayed home. But basically, their complaints were very similar to those of Biden voters who flipped to Trump.
The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse.
Screenshot from Vox.com
The interview offers insight from a Democratic pollster’s point of view, and also included the finding that TikTok consumers trended Republican.
Read the full interview at Vox.
