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2024 Election: Rearview Takes
In the days and weeks that followed the 2024 election, there was no shortage of media post-mortems on the failed campaign of Kamala Harris. Here are a handful of analyses that took a longer view on what went wrong for the Democrats.
Mark Oppenheimer was one of the first writers out of the gate with an election post-mortem, offering up the day-after assessment that the election outcome was a function of candidate personality. ”In nearly every presidential election in my lifetime,” he writes, ”the winning candidate has had more charisma.”
Despite all of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, he won more a greater share of the Latino vote in 2024 than any GOP candidate in the past half-century. Geraldo Cadava attempts to understand what drove those voters, without resorting to the blame game so often parroted by losing candidates and their supporters.
Kamala Harris’ decision to trumpet a Clintonian pitch for an ”opportunity economy,” argues Lily Geismer, didn't necessarily torpedo her candidacy. But it sure didn’t help. That's because, says Geismer, it ”did not give voters in an economically precarious position a convincing narrative about who to blame for their problems.”
Speaking of Clintonism, many post-mortems have invoked James Carville’s famous phrase to imply that 2024 Dems focused too much on ”culture” issues and not enough on pocketbook ones. Here, Jacob Rosenberg argues that this misses the extent to which culture and economy are entwined, and that to win elections, a candidate must tell a compelling story that addresses both.
In this piece, Bruce Schulman argues that the election outcome may have been more about structural conditions than individual actors. In recent years, writes Schulman, ”intense partisanship, regional political blocs, voter suppression efforts, and new media have produced a quarter-century of close, volatile elections— much like in the Gilded Age.”
The class-based political map that prevailed in the mid-20th century, writes Stephanie Ternullo, has slowly but surely been inverted by deindustrialization, de-unionization, and the simultaneous rise of the ”knowledge economy.” To win elections, she argues, Democrats will need to accept that there's no going back to the old political map.
But what about the huge swaths of red on that map? Tarance Ray thinks the 2024 outcome shows — again — how ”the invention of the red-stater provided the liberal establishment with an alibi, absolving it of the obligation to win the votes or practice politics on behalf of a group of people who were increasingly displaced and insecure, wandering from abandoned industrial parks to jails to hospitals.” The Democrats, he writes, ”had to produce both Tim Walz and the neutralization of Tim Walz.”