Election Questions
some with answers
Now that the election is over, there are a number of interesting questions about it that it might be possible to answer. I have evidence on some of them; perhaps readers can point me at more.
Lawfare As Tactic
Did lawfare on net help or hurt the Democrats? Did the argument "Trump is a convicted felon" gain them more votes than the argument "The Democrats used a biased court and jury to convict him of multiple felonies for a minor act of accounting fraud on which the statute of limitations had run" and similar arguments on the other cases lost them, .
The Down-ballot Puzzle
Trump had a substantially better margin almost everywhere than in his previous elections but that result was not reflected in the House races. Is that because a lot more people than usual voted for Trump but not for the rest of the Republicans or because a lot more people than usual who voted for the down ballot Democrats didn't vote for the top of the ticket? Is it Trump’s popularity with people who are not Republicans or Harris’s unpopularity with people who are Democrats? What happened to the Never Trumpets, Republicans who didn’t like Trump, who should have pushed the results the other way?
There is a partial answer from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
The progressive lawmaker, who cruised to reelection in New York’s 14th congressional district, noted that many House Democrats outperformed the top of their ticket. In her district, voters swung toward Trump by a substantial margin compared to how they voted when the president-elect faced Joe Biden in 2020.
She asked voters to explain, adding:
This is not a place of judgment. I’m not gonna, like, put your stuff on blast or anything like that, or dunk on it. That’s like, genuinely not the intent here. I actually want to learn from you. I want to hear what you were thinking.
One response:
It’s real simple… trump and you care for the working class (Huffington Post)
What Trump and Vance want voters to believe.
Another:
I feel that you both are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less “establishment”
What about cases the other way around? I could not find any posts by a Republican candidate who won where Trump lost. There couldn’t be any from a senate candidate, since there are none who won in a state Trump lost. Republican Don Bacon was elected to the House in NE-02, which Harris carried;1 he is an incumbent, which could explain his winning, but also a critic of Trump, so not likely to complain about his supporters not voting for the presidential candidate of his party.
Where Did Harris Lose Votes?
Harris got substantially fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Did she lose them on her left or on her right, because she was viewed as too progressive or not progressive enough? That is relevant to how the next candidate will want to run. I have not yet found anything to answer the question but Bernie Sanders seems confident he knows. Very likely Joe Manchin does too.
More Divisive or Less?
The accepted view is that politics have become more divisive, but the evidence is mixed. To test the effect on various groups I looked at exit polls for 2020 and 2024 to see whether the difference between two groups in the percentage of the group’s voters who voted for the democratic candidate increased or decreased by more than 3 percentage points. An increase is evidence that politics is, in that respect, more divisive than it was four years ago, a decrease that it is less. My conclusion:
Categories for which division did not change significantly:
Gender (Male/female), race (black/white), age (18-45/46+), marital status (married/not married)
Categories for which division decreased:
Ethnicity (Hispanic/Asian/White), Income (under or over $100,000)
Categories for which division increased:
Education (college/not college), Religion (Christian or none), LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender), Gender among Latinos
The biggest change was in the LGBT category. In 2020, the Democrats got 13 percentage points more support from voters who were in that category than from voters who were not. In 2024 they got 41 points more.
Most of the groups I looked at gave a lower percentage of their votes to Democrats in 2024 than in 2020; the exceptions, categories that gave Democrats a larger fraction of their votes in 2024 than in 2020:
LGBT, Religious none, Black women, white women, people with incomes of more than $100,000.
Republicans have in the past been viewed as the party of the rich but that may be changing.
For a Candidate or Against One?
People who say they cast their vote more in support of their chosen candidate than against their opponent split for Trump, a signal of his popularity among his supporters. Those motivated more by opposition were largely in Harris’ camp. Overall, roughly three-quarters of voters said they were mostly voting to support their candidate, not to oppose their rival. (CNN story based on exit polls)
Which answers that question. People voted for or against Trump.
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Nebraska is one of two states that split their electoral votes and Harris got that one. There may be other districts where both Harris and the Republican congressional candidate won; I couldn’t find presidential results by congressional district for this election, possibly because they are not yet all in.
I think the lawfare angle was extremely confounded. My mental model is that it pushed a meaningful but generally small number to be against Trump, but a larger group (while still being fairly small) to vote for Trump. Even more so, Trump partisans were extremely energized to vote for him, far far more than Democrat partisans to vote against him.
I think some of the early narrative could have been worse for Trump, when some of the cases were first starting up. We have since learned some background information and have seen some cases all but fall apart (and for your average voter and even a lot of fairly informed voters the details don't matter so much as the case being dismissed or endlessly delayed). We learned that Biden and Pence both had classified documents as well (but didn't get any legal trouble). The case he actually got convicted for has been tied up in appeals and is extremely weak (I doubt most people could identify what was actually supposed to be a crime there, or would not agree with it being a crime if they knew). The other NYC case is about misrepresenting the value of properties used for collateral on loans that Trump already paid back and nobody complained about. It's hard to see a there there. The Georgia case collapsed publicly due to prosecutorial misconduct (even if the case had merit the prosecutor broke ethics rules pretty bad). Even the documents case itself, which most seemed to agree was the strongest case, got tossed. No matter that it was tossed because of the nature of the prosecutor overseeing the case instead of the merits of the case - people know the government lost.
It all compounds to make it far less damaging to Trump this many months later, while doing absolutely nothing to dissuade his supporters from being aggrieved by the cases being brought in the first place.
The Democrats would have been much better off to pursue fewer and more solid cases, and doing so in ways that looked professional and impartial. This may not have been possible given the cases, except maybe the documents case. Lots of details in these cases were novel, only ever applied to Trump, and there's pretty much no doubt in anyone's mind that any other president who did the same things would never have been prosecuted. Even the Democrats seem to agree with that last line, and justify the difference by how bad Trump is/was. The optics of that simply do not work. We vote for a reason, and it's to let the people decide who leads. Trying to disqualify your opponents always looks bad, whether it's the local school board or US President.
Though I’ve voted for Trump three times, this is the first time I ever did so with relish, actively liking the guy.
Endurance!
He endured the lawfare and he endured what to me was an obvious assassination attempt (not a lone gunmen). For a lot of people the assassination attempt was the moment we started to finally respect Trump and forgive whatever his shortcomings. Many of the Silicon Valley people that flocked to him say the same thing. I’ve yet to speak to someone it a partisan dem hack who thinks it was a lone gunmen.