Elliott, you may have published this and I missed it: have you analyzed the '25 voters to see if they are statistically representative of a mid-term election voter pool?
I feel like an analysis of the composition of the 2025 vs 2024 electorate as a whole would be a good complement to this article.
Like, I think if the groups that moved the most were also the groups that had a highest drop-off in voter turnout in this off-off-cycle year, I think it tells a very different story.
For example, most of the groups highlighted in the VA governor chart (Non-white, age 18-29, <50k income) are specifically groups that tend to have lower turnout. It stand to reason that the voters in those categories who did vote in an off-off-cycle election may not be very representative of those groups as a whole.
It would be a stronger analysis and argument if that were addressed. Not that the argument is wrong, per se. There's also evidence presented here from polls and stuff that support it, but it would also be stronger if the compositional changes were included.
Elliot: I served in the Virginia House fm NoVa many years ago but I’ve been following what happens ther. Flipping 13 (and perhaps one more) has never happened there ever! As you know full well, virtually all of those 13 districts are established R districts or marginal R districts. I submit that this enormous flip in a state with a R Gov must be sending a message for the next 13 months in a purple state? What’s your reading of this remarkable political event? Many thanks; I love your analysis of the results last night!!
"The gender gap persisted but both halves moved left: men by 17 points and women by 29"
Statement is inconsistent with the first (Main) table in the text but is consistent with the table at the end of the article - can you please further clarify why there are two tables and which one should the reader focus on and why? Thank you.
MALE shift of only 3% does not feel consistent with the much larger shifts shown in the rest of the table - is it possible for you to add rows for M/F by ethnicities?
What I do not understand and think neither pollsters nor political analysts have been able to explain is the appeal of Trump. His first term was a disaster, however you want to look at it. Yes, Biden and the Federal Reserve together with too many politicians overstimulated the economy to jerk us out of economic mess caused by the pandemic, which generated inflation that most Americans hadn't seen before. That was the background for the 2024 election. But why did Trump generate such appeal in the 2024 election given his first term, his legal history, and the political agenda he openly campaigned on in 2024? Why can Trump get people to ignore his history but why can't most politicians with far less of a damaged reputation do the same? Cuomo being the latest who couldn't begin to overcome his history in his most recent election? What does Trump do allows so many voters to overlook his shortcomings?
"Yes, Biden and the Federal Reserve together with too many politicians overstimulated the economy to jerk us out of economic mess caused by the pandemic, which generated inflation..." So why was it then that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon which was resolved significantly faster and with less pain in the United States?
He’s a magnet for people who need to consistently blanket blame large groups of people, for their own failures in life.
MAGA is a propaganda machine, spitting out lies, excuses, and blame. Lowering societal/behavioral norms, and wrecking higher expectations which becomes a powerful mental crutch/boost for anyone avoiding personal accountability.
I’m just referring to the people who continue to excuse Trump no matter what. “MAGA”
I'm old enough to remember that in 04, Bush got 44 percent of the Latino vote, and 46 percent of voters under 30. I recall Rove et al. discussing a realignment and a permanent Republican Majority. We all know how things went 2 and 4 years later. A combination of partisan priors and recency bias was at play, and I'm glad you've been calling it out.
Really glad today's post wasn't of the nyah, nyah gloating, post-election type you wrote which is (I bet) primarilyof interest to you personally and your competition. I much prefer straight analysis to internecine statistician/pollster finger-pointing. (And yes, I know you were tired.) The simplest way to (quietly) make that argument is through links to past posts, as you did today. Thank you for that.
I think those claims of “realignment” were not just highly exaggerated, they were at best disingenuous and at worst, disinformation.
Why? Because leading up to 2024's election, here were the fundamentals:
- First, let’s not forget that in 2016, nearly 3M more Americans voted for Clinton. And in 2020, more than double 2016’s number, nearly 8M Americans voted for Biden. Why did those 91M Americans who’d voted for Biden/Dems since 2016, suddenly switch their vote?
- Skipping to June 2022, the Tr*mp-appointed and previously bought-and-sold MAGA Justices on the Roberts Court took away Roe v. Wade’s protections of our reproductive freedoms, by putatively ceding control to state government. But following that, voters deciding state ballot initiatives (even in red states like Alabama, Kansas, and Kentucky) loudly spoke out to defend their rights. In the seven ballot elections following Dobbs, voter turnout had been more intense than expected (i.e., polled), and voters had been far more pro-reproductive freedoms than forecasted (i.e., polled). Remember: KS was supposed to be razor close; the results were anything but.
- The reality of a post-Roe/Dobbs world were no longer theoretical (similar to today's Project 2025 dystopia in action); it had become the law of the land in nearly 25 MAGA-controlled states with restrictions or bans, including in some, criminalization of patients, doctors and/or caregivers helping patients seeking healthcare...that had already driven record numbers of women to vote, and continued to drive out even MORE women to vote for control of their bodies and lives (and the candidate(s) who shared their values). Reproductive freedom was on the ballot in 10 states, including key battlegrounds like Arizona, Montana, and Nevada. How wouldn't that do anything but juice democratic turnout, as it did in the 2022 midterm?
- With key groups that backed Harris (i.e., young women, young people, people of color), NEW voter registration had gone through the roof. For example, per TargetSmart analysis, which compared updated voter files this summer against the same July - August period in 2020, new registrations increased by an eye-popping 262% among Black women under 30! Unprecedented registration jumps like this happened first with the Dobbs decision, and then again (and in fact, surpassing the post-Dobbs jumps). Also, NEW registrants didn't get counted in polls of registered or likely voters.
- Now, let’s rewind to July 21 of 2024. From then on, the Harris/Walz campaign had not only raised a RECORD $1B, doing so in record-short period of time—but also, via record numbers of small and first-time donors. That starkly contrasted with Tr*mp where GOP donations were down (other than from billionaires like Elon Musk, using dark money Super Pacs to illegally buy votes).
- In late October, Harris was more popular at that same point than Biden had been in the election cycle (both in head-to-head and favorability), and remember he won by a huge margin. This is if you were considering only the quality, topline polls since July 24—not the now 30+ MAGA Repub pollsters who ended up flooding the zone with fake polls to move the average, as they did in the midterms to create the ‘red wave’ mirage.
- From 2020 to 2024, Tr*mp's base actually decreased. Consider three data points: how he did in the primaries compared to Biden (he underperformed Biden from 4 to 20+ pts in AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, & PA), his shrinking rally sizes (which were always overinflated), with bored audiences wandering off, and Truth Social (his social media platform had dropped from 1,199,616 million app downloads when it launched in 2022, to an anemic 40,293 downloads in October of 2024).
- There was a literal, unheralded army of grassroots volunteers (active since 2016) that worked on GOTV. Election-focused volunteers in organizations like Sister District Project (70,000 ) and Swing Left (1 million), and so, so many others were (are) a movement that’s gone almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream media. While I personally know over 150 people doing this work in my own social circles, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions (perhaps 3.5% of Americans) across the country, quietly volunteering and making a difference.
- And then…there’s was this: from June of 2022 to October of 2024, in over 65(!) special Congressional/state legislative elections in battleground and non-battleground states (where people actually voted, not answered some random poll), Dems had averaged 3.5pts better than Biden in 2020! Why would that winning streak, along with the preceding streak of Democratic wins in 2018, 2020, and the 2022 midterms, suddenly flip in favor of the demented train wreck that was/is (has always been) Tr*mp?
It certainly was NOT realignment, but we also do a disservice to ourselves to think it was purely anti-incumbents-itis.
And finally, while we'd prefer to avoid this like a third rail, there were demonstrable aberrations in voting patterns in swing states—namely that Harris consistently got fewer votes than the second candidate on the ballot in every county in NC and AZ, as well as other states (i.e., reverse down-ballot roll off).
I'm old enough to remember double-digit inflation and when inflation was usually more than 5 percent. I object to the narrative that inflation is high now. Back then, higher inflation was countered by higher cost-of-living pay increases to all workers. What's happening now has more to do with the exploitation of the lower and middle classes than inflation.
Sometimes I wonder if the frustration with "inflation" has less to do with the post-Covid inflationary episode itself, and more to do with a long-simmering cost of living crisis for which that episode provided the breaking point. I remember moving to DC from Pittsburgh in the mid-2000s and being totally floored by how expensive everything was. What of true of DC then has become true of metro areas throughout the country in the years since.
Agree with this post: eggs are still $7.99 a dozen, butter is still $7.99 per pound and ditto milk. Things were not that expensive during the pandemic but started to rise thereafter. A "reasonable" person might believe that this was due to the Covid giveaways meant to support those who could not work and also scammed by an unknown ? number. Someone had to pay the piper. Trump claims that energy costs are down but surely has not seen my electric bill. To quote Don Rumsfeld, there are the ".... known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know". I drift toward the last one having lost any semblence of reality in this chaotic time. Yet I know the world is a very complicated place. The American mindset is not currently very grounded, wavering between entitlement vs depression vs fear. I appreciate the efforts by this substack to try and clarify, one step at a time.
So, basically, if Dems can promote AND carry out policies that help voters to be able to afford groceries, housing, healthcare, child care, and higher education, (things we've stood for for decades but haven't always achieved, thanks to Republican propaganda about unworthy people getting unearned benefits from "hard-working" people), we can win back control of government and GOVERN better than a bunch of fascist mediocrities.
I think we will still have the ongoing problem of people WANTING to believe that others are taking more than their fair share of benefits. We cannot escape the real power of propaganda and disinformation inflicted upon gullible minds these last 15 years (remember the ridiculous Obama birther conspiracy?)
As a teacher, I have done my best to teach and expect critical thinking skills from my students, but the power of suggestion is still strong in humans. The quality of primary and secondary education varies wildly from state to state.
Back around Inauguration Day I told my friends (friend) that Trump would be historically unpopular by the end of the year.
The thing is, everything that he's broken has consequences that come with a lag. We haven't even begun to feel the pain due to his relentless destruction of norms and government and economic capability. He's super unpopular and that's before the wave of unemployment, potential debt crisis, inflation re-acceleration, etc - to say nothing of the run-of-the-mill exogenous shocks that come from living on a planet with 8 billion people.
Big thumbs-down to the "sponsored content". I didn't even know this was a thing on Substack, none of my other paid subscriptions include any. I come here for authors beholden to their readers, not to megacorp ownership or whatever lucrative side-deals they can negotiate. The very first word of your bio blurb is "Independent".
Then there's the content itself: The entire first paragraph is carefully designed to mislead me into believing I'm still reading real content. If I didn't recognize the sponsor from Youtube, I might have gotten even further. It's not sufficient to place a disclaimer at the very end "oh lol that was all paid content, back to the news".
Elliott, you may have published this and I missed it: have you analyzed the '25 voters to see if they are statistically representative of a mid-term election voter pool?
I feel like an analysis of the composition of the 2025 vs 2024 electorate as a whole would be a good complement to this article.
Like, I think if the groups that moved the most were also the groups that had a highest drop-off in voter turnout in this off-off-cycle year, I think it tells a very different story.
For example, most of the groups highlighted in the VA governor chart (Non-white, age 18-29, <50k income) are specifically groups that tend to have lower turnout. It stand to reason that the voters in those categories who did vote in an off-off-cycle election may not be very representative of those groups as a whole.
It would be a stronger analysis and argument if that were addressed. Not that the argument is wrong, per se. There's also evidence presented here from polls and stuff that support it, but it would also be stronger if the compositional changes were included.
Elliot: I served in the Virginia House fm NoVa many years ago but I’ve been following what happens ther. Flipping 13 (and perhaps one more) has never happened there ever! As you know full well, virtually all of those 13 districts are established R districts or marginal R districts. I submit that this enormous flip in a state with a R Gov must be sending a message for the next 13 months in a purple state? What’s your reading of this remarkable political event? Many thanks; I love your analysis of the results last night!!
“It’s complicated” is 🎯
It always seemed to me like Trump won simply bc more people didn’t vote than did.
And that MANY people who could have were purged from voter rolls.
"The gender gap persisted but both halves moved left: men by 17 points and women by 29"
Statement is inconsistent with the first (Main) table in the text but is consistent with the table at the end of the article - can you please further clarify why there are two tables and which one should the reader focus on and why? Thank you.
MALE shift of only 3% does not feel consistent with the much larger shifts shown in the rest of the table - is it possible for you to add rows for M/F by ethnicities?
Thank you.
What I do not understand and think neither pollsters nor political analysts have been able to explain is the appeal of Trump. His first term was a disaster, however you want to look at it. Yes, Biden and the Federal Reserve together with too many politicians overstimulated the economy to jerk us out of economic mess caused by the pandemic, which generated inflation that most Americans hadn't seen before. That was the background for the 2024 election. But why did Trump generate such appeal in the 2024 election given his first term, his legal history, and the political agenda he openly campaigned on in 2024? Why can Trump get people to ignore his history but why can't most politicians with far less of a damaged reputation do the same? Cuomo being the latest who couldn't begin to overcome his history in his most recent election? What does Trump do allows so many voters to overlook his shortcomings?
"Yes, Biden and the Federal Reserve together with too many politicians overstimulated the economy to jerk us out of economic mess caused by the pandemic, which generated inflation..." So why was it then that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon which was resolved significantly faster and with less pain in the United States?
He’s a magnet for people who need to consistently blanket blame large groups of people, for their own failures in life.
MAGA is a propaganda machine, spitting out lies, excuses, and blame. Lowering societal/behavioral norms, and wrecking higher expectations which becomes a powerful mental crutch/boost for anyone avoiding personal accountability.
I’m just referring to the people who continue to excuse Trump no matter what. “MAGA”
I'm old enough to remember that in 04, Bush got 44 percent of the Latino vote, and 46 percent of voters under 30. I recall Rove et al. discussing a realignment and a permanent Republican Majority. We all know how things went 2 and 4 years later. A combination of partisan priors and recency bias was at play, and I'm glad you've been calling it out.
Really glad today's post wasn't of the nyah, nyah gloating, post-election type you wrote which is (I bet) primarilyof interest to you personally and your competition. I much prefer straight analysis to internecine statistician/pollster finger-pointing. (And yes, I know you were tired.) The simplest way to (quietly) make that argument is through links to past posts, as you did today. Thank you for that.
I think those claims of “realignment” were not just highly exaggerated, they were at best disingenuous and at worst, disinformation.
Why? Because leading up to 2024's election, here were the fundamentals:
- First, let’s not forget that in 2016, nearly 3M more Americans voted for Clinton. And in 2020, more than double 2016’s number, nearly 8M Americans voted for Biden. Why did those 91M Americans who’d voted for Biden/Dems since 2016, suddenly switch their vote?
- Skipping to June 2022, the Tr*mp-appointed and previously bought-and-sold MAGA Justices on the Roberts Court took away Roe v. Wade’s protections of our reproductive freedoms, by putatively ceding control to state government. But following that, voters deciding state ballot initiatives (even in red states like Alabama, Kansas, and Kentucky) loudly spoke out to defend their rights. In the seven ballot elections following Dobbs, voter turnout had been more intense than expected (i.e., polled), and voters had been far more pro-reproductive freedoms than forecasted (i.e., polled). Remember: KS was supposed to be razor close; the results were anything but.
- The reality of a post-Roe/Dobbs world were no longer theoretical (similar to today's Project 2025 dystopia in action); it had become the law of the land in nearly 25 MAGA-controlled states with restrictions or bans, including in some, criminalization of patients, doctors and/or caregivers helping patients seeking healthcare...that had already driven record numbers of women to vote, and continued to drive out even MORE women to vote for control of their bodies and lives (and the candidate(s) who shared their values). Reproductive freedom was on the ballot in 10 states, including key battlegrounds like Arizona, Montana, and Nevada. How wouldn't that do anything but juice democratic turnout, as it did in the 2022 midterm?
- With key groups that backed Harris (i.e., young women, young people, people of color), NEW voter registration had gone through the roof. For example, per TargetSmart analysis, which compared updated voter files this summer against the same July - August period in 2020, new registrations increased by an eye-popping 262% among Black women under 30! Unprecedented registration jumps like this happened first with the Dobbs decision, and then again (and in fact, surpassing the post-Dobbs jumps). Also, NEW registrants didn't get counted in polls of registered or likely voters.
- Now, let’s rewind to July 21 of 2024. From then on, the Harris/Walz campaign had not only raised a RECORD $1B, doing so in record-short period of time—but also, via record numbers of small and first-time donors. That starkly contrasted with Tr*mp where GOP donations were down (other than from billionaires like Elon Musk, using dark money Super Pacs to illegally buy votes).
- In late October, Harris was more popular at that same point than Biden had been in the election cycle (both in head-to-head and favorability), and remember he won by a huge margin. This is if you were considering only the quality, topline polls since July 24—not the now 30+ MAGA Repub pollsters who ended up flooding the zone with fake polls to move the average, as they did in the midterms to create the ‘red wave’ mirage.
- From 2020 to 2024, Tr*mp's base actually decreased. Consider three data points: how he did in the primaries compared to Biden (he underperformed Biden from 4 to 20+ pts in AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, & PA), his shrinking rally sizes (which were always overinflated), with bored audiences wandering off, and Truth Social (his social media platform had dropped from 1,199,616 million app downloads when it launched in 2022, to an anemic 40,293 downloads in October of 2024).
- There was a literal, unheralded army of grassroots volunteers (active since 2016) that worked on GOTV. Election-focused volunteers in organizations like Sister District Project (70,000 ) and Swing Left (1 million), and so, so many others were (are) a movement that’s gone almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream media. While I personally know over 150 people doing this work in my own social circles, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions (perhaps 3.5% of Americans) across the country, quietly volunteering and making a difference.
- And then…there’s was this: from June of 2022 to October of 2024, in over 65(!) special Congressional/state legislative elections in battleground and non-battleground states (where people actually voted, not answered some random poll), Dems had averaged 3.5pts better than Biden in 2020! Why would that winning streak, along with the preceding streak of Democratic wins in 2018, 2020, and the 2022 midterms, suddenly flip in favor of the demented train wreck that was/is (has always been) Tr*mp?
It certainly was NOT realignment, but we also do a disservice to ourselves to think it was purely anti-incumbents-itis.
We must also consider that 4.7 million voters were purged in 2024 alone (at least 19 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2020 and 2022 per Brennan https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/voter-purges).
And finally, while we'd prefer to avoid this like a third rail, there were demonstrable aberrations in voting patterns in swing states—namely that Harris consistently got fewer votes than the second candidate on the ballot in every county in NC and AZ, as well as other states (i.e., reverse down-ballot roll off).
Sources here (https://smartelections.substack.com/p/so-clean) and here (https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-voting-machines-trump-investigation-2018890).
I'm old enough to remember double-digit inflation and when inflation was usually more than 5 percent. I object to the narrative that inflation is high now. Back then, higher inflation was countered by higher cost-of-living pay increases to all workers. What's happening now has more to do with the exploitation of the lower and middle classes than inflation.
Sometimes I wonder if the frustration with "inflation" has less to do with the post-Covid inflationary episode itself, and more to do with a long-simmering cost of living crisis for which that episode provided the breaking point. I remember moving to DC from Pittsburgh in the mid-2000s and being totally floored by how expensive everything was. What of true of DC then has become true of metro areas throughout the country in the years since.
Agree with this post: eggs are still $7.99 a dozen, butter is still $7.99 per pound and ditto milk. Things were not that expensive during the pandemic but started to rise thereafter. A "reasonable" person might believe that this was due to the Covid giveaways meant to support those who could not work and also scammed by an unknown ? number. Someone had to pay the piper. Trump claims that energy costs are down but surely has not seen my electric bill. To quote Don Rumsfeld, there are the ".... known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know". I drift toward the last one having lost any semblence of reality in this chaotic time. Yet I know the world is a very complicated place. The American mindset is not currently very grounded, wavering between entitlement vs depression vs fear. I appreciate the efforts by this substack to try and clarify, one step at a time.
I think declining economic mobility has a lot to do with the low sentiment indices today.
Yeeeha!
So, basically, if Dems can promote AND carry out policies that help voters to be able to afford groceries, housing, healthcare, child care, and higher education, (things we've stood for for decades but haven't always achieved, thanks to Republican propaganda about unworthy people getting unearned benefits from "hard-working" people), we can win back control of government and GOVERN better than a bunch of fascist mediocrities.
I think we will still have the ongoing problem of people WANTING to believe that others are taking more than their fair share of benefits. We cannot escape the real power of propaganda and disinformation inflicted upon gullible minds these last 15 years (remember the ridiculous Obama birther conspiracy?)
As a teacher, I have done my best to teach and expect critical thinking skills from my students, but the power of suggestion is still strong in humans. The quality of primary and secondary education varies wildly from state to state.
There are many variables here.
Back around Inauguration Day I told my friends (friend) that Trump would be historically unpopular by the end of the year.
The thing is, everything that he's broken has consequences that come with a lag. We haven't even begun to feel the pain due to his relentless destruction of norms and government and economic capability. He's super unpopular and that's before the wave of unemployment, potential debt crisis, inflation re-acceleration, etc - to say nothing of the run-of-the-mill exogenous shocks that come from living on a planet with 8 billion people.
Big thumbs-down to the "sponsored content". I didn't even know this was a thing on Substack, none of my other paid subscriptions include any. I come here for authors beholden to their readers, not to megacorp ownership or whatever lucrative side-deals they can negotiate. The very first word of your bio blurb is "Independent".
Then there's the content itself: The entire first paragraph is carefully designed to mislead me into believing I'm still reading real content. If I didn't recognize the sponsor from Youtube, I might have gotten even further. It's not sufficient to place a disclaimer at the very end "oh lol that was all paid content, back to the news".
Hi Kevin. Thanks for your feedback on this.