Nearly one month later, the Democratic Party and the pundits and other politics experts are continuing to study the wreckage of the 2024 election. They are asking themselves how this could have possibly happened. How could we have been so wrong in assessing the country’s mood? They need to quickly come up with the correct answer because they are running out of time. Trump has promised a campaign of revenge and retribution against his perceived enemies. He is not kidding.
The public opinion polls suggested that the election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would be very close — and more specifically that Harris would be much more competitive, if not the victor. Of course, this did not happen. The fabled Democratic blue wall was easily smashed by Trump and his MAGA movement. Trump also made in-roads as he won support from key parts of the Democratic Party’s base across the country. This hinted at a larger trend as Kamala Harris and the Democrats experienced a collapse of support among a wide range of voters. The result: Trump would increase his support by more than two million votes as compared to the 2020 election. By comparison, Harris received seven million fewer votes than President Biden did in 2020.
In a recent essay at The Conversation, historian and media critic W. Joseph Campbell offers this assessment:
So it went for pollsters in the 2024 presidential election. Their collective performance, while not stellar, was improved from that of four years earlier. Overall, polls signaled a close outcome in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
That is what the election produced: a modest win for Trump….
Campbell continues:
A significant question facing pollsters this year – their great known unknown – was whether modifications made to sampling techniques would allow them to avoid underestimating Trump’s support, as they had in 2016 and 2020.
Misjudging Trump’s backing is a nagging problem for pollsters. The results of the 2024 election indicate that the shortcoming persists. By margins ranging from 0.9 points to 2.7 points, polls overall understated Trump’s support in the seven swing states, for example.
Some polls misjudged Trump’s backing by even greater margins. CNN, for example, underestimated Trump’s vote by 4.3 points in North Carolina, by more than 6 points in Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Arizona.
Results that misfire in the same direction suggest that adjustments to sampling methodologies were inadequate or ineffective for pollsters in seeking to reach Trump backers of all stripes.
At the Columbia Journalism Review, Meghnad Bose makes this intervention about how the news media chooses to present the polls in the context of other information:
Now that the smoke has cleared from Election Day, it appears that the polls and statistical models mostly got the story right. But if it doesn’t quite feel that way — the race seemed to be a nail-biter, then Donald Trump won decisively — that may have been a result of how the numbers were presented, and the conclusions that journalists (and news consumers) drew from the data. “If we want to minimise the risk of nasty shocks,” John Burn-Murdoch, a chief data reporter for the Financial Times, wrote last week, “and we want pollsters to get a fair hearing when the results are in, both sides need to accept that polls deal in fuzzy ranges, not hard numbers.”
That tension — between editorial desire for a straightforward narrative and blurry reality — is made more complicated by herding, when polling firms toss results that don’t align with a dominant plotline.
Here is one of the main challenges of public opinion polls, even high-quality ones and how the news media uses them: public opinion polls represent a snapshot in time that gains more meaning in hindsight after we see how and if they were correct and accurate or not relative to the final results of a given election. Polls usually do not explain how and why a given person (or cohort) feels about a given issue and their reasoning for that conclusion.
In a global moment of discontent with democracy and the order of things, the “why?” of emotions and political decision-making among the mass public are of paramount importance. Populism, in its most raw form, is collective action based on shared emotions, meaning, reality and feelings of community and collective experience(s) in service to a leader(s) and “the cause.” To ignore this aspect of politics is to overlook one of the main drivers of Trump’s enduring power and appeal, specifically, and that of the MAGA movement and American fascism, more generally.
In total, what the mainstream news media and political class need is a better understanding of what social theorists describe as “life worlds,” the subjective reality that a given individual(s) uses to make sense of the world and which develops relative to material circumstances and relationships. As a whole, the mainstream news media, the political class and other elites generally assume that their understanding of reality and “the facts” — and of course what constitutes “rational behavior” — are universal. They are not.
In a recent article, Salon staff reporter Russell Payne offers this important example of the dynamic dogging Democrats:
According to Shakir, however, the problems with the Democratic Party’s structure and the way it runs campaigns go beyond just media consultants and the party’s love of paid ads. The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input.
“He’s just a rich dude, why does he have so much of a say in what the party does?”
“We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren’t in the elite bubble,” Shakir said. “You can be a good person with good character trying to do the right thing to try and help Kamala Harris win but when you are surrounded by monied interests you have to figure out how you don’t become bubblized.” …
Shakir did, however, offer a reason for optimism: Democrats across the ideological spectrum “from Blue Dog Democrats to the Bernie wing” are realizing that the needs of working-class people need to be in the driver’s seat of future campaigns.
Such hubris and arrogance are one of the main reasons why the mainstream news media (especially the centrists and the liberals and progressives who have a platform in the legacy news media) and the Democrats and their consultants were caught so off guard by Trump’s win in 2024 (and also in 2016).
To that point, focus groups revealed a much different story, one that I would suggest was a better predictor of Trump’s win than a “conventional wisdom” born of obsessive readings and interpretations of the public opinion polls. For example, in a Nov. 3 column at The New York Times ominously (and presciently) titled “Our 61 Focus Groups Make Me Think Trump Has a Good Chance of Winning”, Patrick Healey writes:
After 61 focus groups for New York Times Opinion, listening to voters on the Biden presidency, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and holding sessions with police officers, teachers, “Yellowstone” fans, young women, Black men, transgender people, tweens, 80-somethings and many others — what did we learn from it all?
[…]
Covid changed and scarred America. Desperation set in for people who thought of themselves as financially stable or middle class. The frustration we heard in our early focus groups in 2022 metastasized into anxiety in 2023 and intensified into anger in 2024. Listening to them, I stopped seeing anxiety and anger as two distinct emotions. They were one and the same by the time the presidential general election began this year.
So many people talked about their lives before and after Covid that it influenced how I saw Mr. Trump’s chances and Mr. Biden’s challenges in this election (and how those challenges, inevitably, shifted onto Ms. Harris).
A main takeaway from our groups is that a cross-section of independents, Republicans and Democrats liked how America was under Mr. Trump — they liked the economy, the perception of relative global stability, the restraint of divided government and the image that this outsider businessman was not beholden to Washington insiders, lobbyists and big money (the unholy trio of turpitude for many of our participants). There were plenty of things that they didn’t like about Mr. Trump — his behavior and tweets most of all — but those didn’t matter as much. Then Covid happened and Americans wanted a more stable leader.
The Times continues:
In other words, a clear takeaway from our groups is that the two biggest reasons Ms. Harris may lose on Tuesday are the economy and Joe Biden insisting on running for re-election….
There’s something else that the Democrats have misread, something that voters across a range of backgrounds brought up since we began talking to them. Either on Tuesday or some other point in the future, the party is in for a rude awakening over illegal immigration.
In September, The New York Times shared the results of another focus group that also signaled great trouble ahead for Kamala Harris and the Democrats:
In our latest Times Opinion focus group, we gathered 15 voters who have some particular insight: They all voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, and most of them have somewhat favorable views of Ms. Harris, yet they are soft in their support of her or have yet to fully commit. The participants felt torn about whether America’s best days were ahead or in the past and had seen some modest improvements in the economy — especially the job and housing markets — but felt worried personally about inflation and the future.
Perhaps most intriguing of all: None of them wanted Mr. Biden to still be in the race, but their enthusiasm for Ms. Harris was low, too — the sort of middling feelings that come from not knowing someone well or long enough. The participants reviled Mr. Trump; this group wasn’t undecided in the sense that most would swing to him. (A few praised him on the economy.) Rather, the group’s low enthusiasm for her is a warning sign that with just five weeks to go before Election Day, she has not persuaded the winning Biden coalition in the swing states to a degree that she can bank on.
The participants didn’t know a lot about her policies on the economy, Israel and Gaza, climate change, transgender kids, housing and immigration. Several didn’t think a Harris presidency would change much for them or the country. Listening to these voters, you get the sense that they felt she was not giving them enough reason to vote for her — aside, of course, from stopping Mr. Trump’s return to power. Will that be enough in the end? It’s an open question. The tight polls in the swing states make more sense after listening to these 15 voters.
In this much-discussed example, one voter told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he knows that Donald Trump is like “Hitler”, but he supported him anyway. This is only one man’s explanation, but it is still very insightful and illustrative of the broader trends that led to Trump’s victory and Harris’ defeat.
In Scranton on Wednesday…. a 45-year-old former construction worker, looked around at poverty in the Rust Belt city and thought the nation needed a change in leadership.
[He] said he didn’t love the dictatorial aspect of Trump’s personality, but thought it could help keep the country out of wars and maybe bring peace to some other conflicts, including in Ukraine.
“He’s good and bad. People say he’s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler,” [he] said. “But I voted for the man.”
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Of course, this is not the ideal model of civic virtue, reasoning, “rational behavior” or placing that thing known as “democracy” — however vaguely defined and (mis)understood by the public — above all other concerns that the Democrats, mainstream news media and responsible political class assumed would be a winning and self-evident message to the American voting public. Moreover, and perhaps even more troubling for what it portends about the enduring power of American fascism and authoritarianism, is how this Pennsylvania voter’s reasoning for why he supported Trump is a damning indictment of the country’s larger culture. For many Americans, “Hitler” and “fascism” are just words and images that have no factual or reality-based historical grounding or meaning. This is a function of a culture of distraction and amusement and how so many Americans live in a type of survival mode where larger concerns about society and the future are overridden by the individual and the immediate. The legitimacy crisis facing America’s (and the world’s) democratic and other governing institutions is very real and will not be dissipating any time soon.
As social theorist Henry Giroux writes in a recent essay at CounterPunch:
But perhaps one of the most overlooked failures of liberalism and Third Way democrats, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, about forgetting that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion. Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of civic education. Historical amnesia has always provided a cover for America’s long-standing racism, nativism, disavowal of women’s right. Capitalizing on far right propaganda machines, Trump managed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, to convince millions of Americans that they “simply could not accept the idea of a non-White and female president.” Nor could they insert themselves in a history of collective struggle, resistance, and the fight for a better world.
Such an environment is toxic for a healthy democracy. Desperate people yearn for strongmen and other such autocrats and dictators who promise easy solutions to complex problems. If one wants a parsimonious or unifying explanation for Trump and the MAGA movement’s “surprise” victory in the 2024 election it is that.
Ultimately, the Democrats, the mainstream news media and other defenders of “the institutions” will find few truly meaningful answers in polling or focus groups or some other tool or measure in isolation.
Instead, they need to look at the larger picture of the social forces and emotions and meaning – and crisis – that explains how we “the Americans” got here and hopefully how we can escape the Age of Trump.
