In the aftermath of the U.S. election this week, there was a sudden spike in online searches for an old political quote: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
That generation-old rallying cry from Bill Clinton’s senior strategist enjoyed renewed notoriety amid attempts to diagnose what just happened in this ground-rattling vote.
In the lead-up to the election, many media stories focused on demographic groups: Latino voters, young men, Black men, suburban college-educated women.
But Donald Trump wound up doing so well, with so many groups, that one aberration in the exit polls now stands out as truly striking: class.
Kamala Harris did well — historically well — with the richest voters: households earning over $100,000 US, who, unlike the rest of the electorate, shifted left.
The problem for her? They barely comprise one-third of the electorate. Trump gained among the rest, surfing to a staggering 20-point improvement among households earning $50,000 US to $100,000 US versus the last election.
It barely seemed to matter that macroeconomic indicators are good: Wages are up, inflation is down, interest rates are coming down, and the U.S. has achieved the elusive soft landing economists dreamed of.
Americans’ view of the economy remains weak. Housing remains historically unaffordable, and until last year people’s purchasing power had been declining or had flattened.
And that’s where economics intersects with demographics.
It so happens that Latinos are disproportionately working class, and, at an average age of 30, entering prime home-buying years in an era of eye-watering prices.
These themes came up repeatedly in conversation with Latino voters, who spoke about the punishing shutdowns during the pandemic, the painful recovery and the sense that the incumbent Democrats were somehow to blame.
That’s why one Latino organizer for the Republican Party confidently predicted Trump would approach or surpass George W. Bush’s party record of 44 per cent of the Latino vote, which may have happened.
“The most important issues in this election are: The economy No. 1, the economy No. 2, the economy No. 3,” said Jimmy Zumba, the organizer, in an interview in Allentown, Pa., before the election.
“Everybody knows the value of money.”
It’s worth acknowledging the risks in hasty election postmortems, as analysis written in the immediate aftermath often ages poorly — exit polls can be unreliable, with the most detailed data months away from being published.
So the plethora of pundit prognostications about how the losing party must adjust often look cringe-inducingly wrong, years later, in hindsight.
But the economy can’t explain everything
Take 2004. The commentariat assumed only a Bush-like, pro-war, tough-talking candidate from the white heartland would return the Democrats to power. Surprise! The solution turned out to be a Black anti-war liberal from Chicago: Barack Obama.
Then, after the 2012 election, Republicans commissioned a big study that concluded they needed a kinder touch and a gentler message on immigration. Oops! They won with Donald Trump.
Also, economics can’t be the only explanation.
It doesn’t explain another dramatic shift: Young men, aged 18 to 29, may have moved a mind-boggling 30 points in Trump’s direction from 2020. (Young women also shifted rightward, albeit to a lesser degree.)
Trump aggressively courted these voters with frequent appearances on podcasts that are male-dominated and usually apolitical, focusing on topics like UFC.
“Let’s be absolutely blunt about it,” former Obama strategist David Axelrod told CNN, citing sexism and racism as factors.
“Anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong.”
Then there were those Trump transgender ads. A pro-Harris group reportedly assessed that the most devastating Trump ad of this election featured her past support for taxpayer-funded gender surgery in prisons.
The ad featured Black men expressing incredulity at the policy, and played frequently during football games. The group estimated that it shifted support to Trump by 2.7 percentage points among those who saw it.
The Middle East likely played a role. Young people were a smaller share of the electorate than 2020; it’s not yet clear how many were protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Democrats also performed historically poorly in Arab communities.
Yet there is compelling evidence of a worldwide economic trend.
Incumbent governments around the world — left, right, centrist — are being turfed by voters in an age of discontent that defies ideological explanations. Harris’s vote loss may fall squarely into the norm.
And it really was her losing votes.
It appears likely Trump won’t win more than the 74 million votes he got in 2020. The problem for Harris: She could finish millions behind Biden’s 2020 score, meaning many of her supporters stayed home.
The question then is: What’s next?
Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said in her concession speech Wednesday that although many people may feel the U.S. is entering into a dark time, they should be encouraged to keep working in the face of setbacks.
‘Straight-up BS’: Dems disagree on diagnosis
This is already triggering internal arguments. Witness the snippy exchange online between Sen. Bernie Sanders and the head of the Democratic National Committee.
The socialist stalwart blamed Democrats for running away from his more attention-grabbing economic promises, like Medicare For All.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders wrote in a statement.
“The American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
This annoyed the head of the DNC, Jaime Harrison, who defended the current administration: He called Biden the most pro-worker president in modern history, having walked a picket line, bailed out a union pension, passed new Buy American rules, and invested hundreds of billions in domestic manufacturing.
Harrison went on: Kamala Harris promised up to $25,000 US for a first home, a Canada-style tax credit for parents, and public coverage of seniors’ home care.
Others noted with irony that Harris, whom the senator appeared to be criticizing, performed better in Sanders’s home state of Vermont than he did.
“This is straight-up BS,” Harrison replied. “There are a lot of post-election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”
Democrats, however, acknowledged a branding problem. Some lamented that voters had no idea what Harris was campaigning on, for which some blamed the media.
Others fumed about strategic missteps.
Democrats had some pocketbook-altering economic plans set to go; they were killed by two senators — now both retiring.
A child-tax credit, daycare funding, and broad reform of drug prices were all in Biden’s original Build Back Better plan; Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin negotiated the package down to a suite of green-energy investments and smaller drug price changes that weren’t easily conveyed on a campaign poster.
“The broader [economic] agenda died because of two senators,” liberal writer Greg Sargent lamented.
Losing the language of the masses
The solution, some Democrats say, involves changing the way they speak. And whom they speak to.
New York Times writer Ezra Klein said that includes showing up in uncomfortable places — like Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, even if they find him distasteful.
He called Obama’s coalition broken, exhausted and in need of finding allies in new places, including that podcast, which gave Trump an audience of 46 million on YouTube alone.
It’s a diagnosis shared by a political demographer famous for once predicting the coming Obama era. Ruy Teixeira in 2004 wrote about the emerging multiracial coalition that would power Democrats to dominance.
He’s now blunt in his revised assessment: Demographics are not destiny. The young and Latino voters expected to propel the party are now leaving.
First, Democrats lost the white working class. Now, they’re hemorrhaging non-white working-class voters, he wrote on his blog.
His proposed solutions: Push ahead with progressive economic policies and remember the left-behind parts of the country, in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt.
But he urged adjustments — more patriotism and less negativity about the U.S.; more optimism about building things, from energy to housing; and slightly different language about race, policing, migration and gender.
“The facts must be faced,” Teixeira wrote. “The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose.”