This is the right answer. Sadly, it really is this uncomplicated.
I mean, those could all be valid explanations, but the simplest and most obvious one is that incumbent parties lost voters everywhere – the UK, Germany, France, off the top of my head. Inflation made voters angry and they took it out on whatever party was in power.
And, as further proof, the Republicans lost seats in the House, so even that incumbency was damaged.
Misogyny played the biggest role. A lot of people just aren’t ready for a female president. Is it right? No, but that’s the cards we’ve been dealt. It’s no accident that the only elections won by the most evil person this nation has ever produced have been against female opponents. Add to it racism. Racists were excited about voting for one of their own and turned out massively while the good people too often stayed home. Add to the mix the stupid factor- people somehow think the president is in control of inflation. Add to the mix the desire for quick and easy solutions- “Kamala has a lot of plans but I don’t understand them, I’ll vote for the guy who says he’ll magically make all my troubles go away”.
Furthermore, if Biden had dropped out shortly after the midterms, I’m not convinced Harris would have done any better than she did in 2020. Sure, she had more name recognition, but I think she’d still be a poor campaigner. Also, at some point the Democrats have got to recognize the folly of running a sitting VP. She failed. Gore failed. Nixon failed. After Bush, I think you have to go back to the 19th century to find someone who won as a sitting VP and not someone who was running as a sitting president after succeeding into the office. (So no LBJ, Truman, TR, etc.)
I’m NOT believing that this was fraud, but if it was, here’s an IMHO quite likely explanation: they’re bad at it. Good enough to win enough swing states, but not good enough to make it the MAGA landslide that Der Fuehrer wanted. And nobody was willing to say “Let’s not waste effort on the solid blue states”.
While thats possible, I don’t know if that explains all of it.
I know others have said that Harris’s vote share in CA in 2024 was about the same as Clinton’s vote share in CA in 2016. But 2 million people in CA who wouldn’t be willing to vote for a woman? I find that hard to believe.
Keep in mind Harris only got 6 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. California makes up 11% of the population of the entire US. That means if the entire US was as opposed to Harris vs Biden as CA was, then Harris would’ve lost 17 million votes vs Biden, instead of just 6 million votes.
That means that CA is 3x more misogynistic than all the other states in the US, which I find hard to believe.
In MI, Harris only lost 64k votes vs Biden. She lost 35k votes in PA. Harris gained 40k votes in WI over Biden, but sadly Trump gained 90k votes in WI vs his 2020 run.
So Harris did not underperform nearly as badly in midwestern rust belt states compared to Biden. She actually gained votes in WI and her losses in MI and PA were tiny.
CA has a population 3x the size of PA, but Harris lost 57x more votes in CA vs PA (2 million vs 35k)
I have a hard time believing that CA is vastly more misogynistic and racist than PA.
Harris lost votes on the left due to Gaza, she lost votes in the center because of the barrage of anti-trans ads. She lost enough votes to lose the election.
OK, now explain the incumbents being kicked out in other Western countries:
The center-right party in the UK had its biggest loss since 1932, for example.
Maybe not. As @RitterSport points out, incumbents lost everywhere.
But I can imagine a world where in a swing state, when you know your vote really matters, a person might vote for a woman even if they hold a deep-seated belief that a woman is not “capable” of being President. Whereas the same person in a “safe” state might not be bothered.
It’s definitely over-determined. Maybe it was sexism. Maybe it was anti-incumbent sentiment. Maybe it was a change in the voter laws. Most likely it was some combination of all of them, and trying to determine which was most important is a fool’s errand.
My hunch is that people were very motivated to get rid of Trump in 2020, so they turned out in numbers beyond all expectation. Biden was safe enough (read: old cis white male), and voting was easy enough, that lots of low-engagement left- and center-leaning voters turned out. Harris was just unpopular enough (due to sex, race, and anti-incumbent sentiment) that while Trump’s base still turned out, the lower-engagement left- and center-leaning voters that pushed Biden over the edge didn’t bother to turn out for Harris. This was exaggerated in safe blue states where the motivation to vote is lower, and barriers to vote were marginally higher than 2020. And possibly slightly exacerbated even more in the left-most states where anti-Gaza sentiment might have caused some of the left-base to sit it out.
This seems right to me. Too many people voted for the guy whose lies they liked. I don’t see that changing any time soon, unfortunately.
This would be my guess as well.
There was some cheating, it seems:
The Republicans had better stories to tell. Lies, mostly, but peole liked them better. Here is Steve Bannon talking to the NYT telling wonderful BS. He is an asshole, this is clear, and he likes being it. And he tells it like many people would like it to be, which is almost as good as “like it is”. Perhaps it is even better:
And then there is misogyny, racism, Gaza, Kamala Harris being an ex-prosecutor, her lack of charisma, social media, the Murdocks, Putin manipulating, Musk spending 250 million (and not telling until it was too late) and a couple of other factors too.
Oh, yes, there was also the strange fact that tanTrump was not in jail, despite his crimes. That was a shame.
My hypothesis is that progressives are getting smarter.
I think many voters in safe blue States chose to withhold their votes from Harris due to dissatisfaction about Gaza, Biden, etc. Progressives in swing States, however, realized they did not have that option.
These voters were not tempted into wasting their votes on lunatic third party candidates, but simply left the top of the ballot blank. Neither did they stay home entirely, but showed up to vote in other races they cared about.
This explains the observed phenomenon of large declines in the Democratic Presidential vote, concentrated in areas where it would not actually hurt the Democratic candidate, and not accompanied by equivalent losses for downballot Democratic candidates.
Ya know, it might be simpler than all this.Maybe the Dems thought there was no way that Trump would win so why bother voting.
This must be a factor. As a Californian, my votes simply don’t matter on a national level. So why bother?
I vote because I feel it’s a civic duty, not because I have a prayer of influencing the outcome.
That was my explanation for 2016. I don’t think that explains 2024. The sad, but probably true, explanation is that a slim majority of American voters don’t want a functioning western democracy anymore. Democrats can’t change that by offering to bring back sanity. Voters have rejected that.
Any Democratic voters who believed that in 2024 weren’t paying attention to (or were choosing to ignore) the polls or the projections, which consistently showed a very tight race.
Most Americans on both sides of the aisle are clueless to what is going on in politics.
It’s not just Blue states. Trump did better in 2024 in over 90% of the 1300 counties nationwide.
Exit polls indicate that just 32% of voters identified as Democrats, the lowest in 40 years. Independents now comprise an equal share as Republicans.
9 posts were split to a new topic: DLKeur posts