How did this happen?

A closer look at the data

I am feeling exhausted and annoyed with the news, newsletters, and social media right now. There are a lot of very strong emotions and very little data. People are just publicly processing their emotions and I guess that’s okay. I get it. Personally, I think the media could do better, but at the end of the day media is a business too and news outlets mostly share opinions because that’s what people like. This article, on the other hand, will never go viral because it is boring as f*ck, but I want to share some of the more interesting data and analyses about this election (because I happen to like data) and then I am going to go stick my head in a bucket for the next month, like that brilliant TikTok sheep.

I think the first key point here is that this election represented a major realignment based on socioeconomic status. This post (below) from Jeff Stein at the Washington Post is fascinating to me. When Biden won, he carried more voters under $100k, whereas Trump carried the majority of working and middle class voters in this election (while the majority of affluent voters picked Harris).

What else? Exit polls showed that Harris voters were mostly concerned about the state of democracy. Trump supporters were mostly concerned about the economy. The divide here is FLOORING. Harris voters really believe this is the end of democracy and Trump supporters are not worried about that AT ALL (fewer than 20%). Trump supporters REALLY care about the state of the economy and Harris supporters did not give a poo (again, less than 20%). Neither Harris or Trump voters apparently cared that much about abortion as a national issue (as compared with the economy and democracy), which makes sense to me. Abortion is undeniably an important issue, but is it reasonable to expect people to care more about it than about protecting democracy and their livelihoods?

Now let’s talk about breakdowns by gender and race.

Women apparently liked Kamala less than Hillary and Biden, despite the fact that she made abortion her number one issue. Hillary Clinton won women’s vote by 13 points compared with Trump in 2016. Joe Biden won women’s vote by 15 points. Kamala won women’s vote by only 10 points. The biggest gender-divide was among young people, with a 16-point gap between young men and young women. 

Exit polls show that the majority of white women (53%) voted for Donald Trump, despite the theory that some magical “silent majority” of these women was going to break away from their right-wing husbands and vote for Harris because of abortion. 63% of white women without a college degree voted for Trump. The VAST majority of Black women voted for Harris (91%!!!!). Again, the class and racial divides here are staggering.

A Times/Sienna poll conducted shortly before the election found that for white women, the economy and inflation were their top concerns. Abortion rights were second. So, it’s not that white women did not care about abortion, it’s just that they cared more about rising prices.

Further proof of this is that in seven out of ten states where abortion was proposed as a ballot amendment, voters were overwhelmingly pro-choice, even in red states. In Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Arizona - all states that went for Trump in this election - voters enshrined the right to abortion by significant majorities. In Florida, where a measure to protect abortion rights failed, 57% nevertheless voted in favor of protecting it (the measure needed a 60% majority to pass).

This may also partially explain the gender-gap in voting among young people. Young women are less concerned about price hikes because young women are not in deep economic shit the way families in this country are. As Elizabeth Warren has shown in The Two Income Trap, it is families that are going bankrupt at alarming rates, not the young and childless. 

Are Americans right to be so concerned about prices?

The best analysis I have read of this issue is this brilliant Atlantic piece, Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost, by Annie Lowrey. In it, she explains how food prices went up a staggering 11.8% in 2022 alone (a year when overall inflation was 6.5%). Home prices have jumped 47% since 2020, and rent is up 20% in some placed (and has doubled in others) since Covid. Because the Fed’s response was to hike rates, credit-card APRs spiked through the roof. Because many families in America live paycheck to paycheck and rely on credit cards to bridge the gap, this further hurt the working class. If you include the cost of borrowing, inflation peaked at 18 percent, not 9 percent.

The Democratic counter-argument to this was that real wages also increased under the Biden administration (as much as 13% for the lowest-income workers, but certainly not by enough to counter rising prices in some areas). The other problem is that people tend to interpret wage gains as the product of their own effort, while they believe that high prices are a policy problem. As Lowrey puts it, “In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.”

Of course, everything is easier in hindsight, but I am angry at the Democrats for not recognizing the obvious and for not listening to people. It’s true that Harris was caught between a rock and a hard place, since she was viewed as the incumbent, and people blamed Biden for inflation. But the Dems (and the liberal media) could have done more to address people’s very real economic concerns. Harris failed to differentiate herself from Biden in the eyes of voters and to address rising prices in a way that was sufficiently convincing for middle America (there was some brief talk at the beginning of her campaign about breaking up big food corporations but that quickly evaporated). Instead the Dems (or maybe I should say the liberal media, which once again let Donald Trump suck up 95% of the coverage) doubled down on abortion (simply not a big enough national concern for most people) and Trump’s threat to democracy (whether or not its a real concern, it’s not a policy).

My aim with this piece is not to stoke up more anger and frustration with the Democrats and how they handled the election (though I am genuinely frustrated) but rather to help you understand and forgive the people who voted differently from you. On the other hand, if you just need some time to yell and break things, that’s fine too.