Here is the text of my presentation to the International Democracy Union in Washington DC, launching ‘Eyes Wide Open’, my research report on the 2024 presidential election.
I think we can all agree that the 2024 election was one of the most absorbing contests of our lifetime. In the month before the election we held a total of 29 focus groups with voters from all kinds of backgrounds in all seven critical states. I also conducted a poll of 20,000 Americans as they prepared to vote.
Today I’d like to talk about why things turned out as they did, and a few of the political implications that might apply in our home countries around the world.
To begin with, I want to reflect on some of the notable details of the result. These figures are taken from the broadcasters’ exit polls, which some of you may have seen but it’s worth thinking about the story they tell – and how they confound some of the narratives we often hear about Donald Trump and his supporters.
For example, while the Democrats made gains among the oldest voters, forcing a tie among those aged 65 or over, Trump did better among all other age groups than in 2016 or 2020. Despite her supposed appeal to a younger audience, Kamala Harris did less well among the youngest voters than both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
We see a similar story when it comes to the gender gap. While Trump solidified his lead among men, the popular narrative was that women would back Harris in unprecedented numbers – whether in reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or because they would rather vote for a woman than the supposedly boorish and misogynistic Trump. But again, Trump performed better among women – and Harris performed worse – than in either of the two previous elections.
Perhaps most significant of all is the way the votes broke down by race. The Democrats actually did better among white voters this year than in 2020 or in 2016. But their gains were more than offset by their losses among minorities. Trump won a quarter of black men – something that would have seemed unthinkable for a Republican presidential candidate a decade ago – as well as a majority of Hispanic men. And the Democrat margin among Hispanic women was half what it was under Hillary Clinton.
We see again the divide by education, with Trump winning by 20 points among those who had not been to college, and Harris winning by even more among postgraduates.
Looking at the vote by income is also instructive. Harris won by a small margin among those whose household income was below $25,000 a year, and by a rather bigger margin among households earning over $100,000. Everyone in between was more likely to vote for Trump.
The real key to Trump’s success was not the groups among whom he managed to “win bigly”, as he would no doubt put it. It was in picking up votes in unexpected places across the board. To highlight a few more arresting points from the various exit polls: he won more than 1 in 5 voters who describe their gender as non-binary; nearly 4 in 10 non-white men; 41% of moderate voters; 43% of voters who immigrated to the US; 44% of voters in union households; and nearly half of both Gen Z and Millennials.
All of this is a useful corrective to the idea that “demography is destiny” – that as western societies became more socially and ethnically diverse, the harder life would be for centre-right parties. Or at least, if demography is destiny, the destination is perhaps not where the left complacently assumed.
You might also be amused or horrified to see that Trump won 15% of those who say he lacks the moral character to be president, and around 1 in 5 of those who think he can’t be trusted or worry that his views are too extreme. Obviously, they thought other things – his capabilities, the issues at stake or the quality of his opponent – mattered more.
We can also see that the issue of reproductive rights did not work as well for the Harris campaign as many had expected. Three in ten of those who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases ended up voting for Trump. Crucially, Trump won more pro-choice voters than Harris won pro-life voters.
As we know, all of this adds up to a convincing electoral college victory for Donald Trump. Though the reasons for his appeal and the failings of the Harris campaign have quickly become received wisdom, the result was on a scale that few commentators were brave enough to predict in advance. There were reasons to believe Harris could win, not least her huge financial advantage combined with the expectation that she would turn out vast numbers in big cities in the key states like Detroit and Philadelphia. And of course, many of the polls pointed to a race that was too close to call.
As in previous elections, one lesson of 2024 is that we should pay less attention to the headline figures and focus instead on the wider picture of what is really going on, as my research has always tried to do.
One such clue lies in what actually matters to voters. In our poll we asked people what issues they thought were the most important facing the country, and who would do a better job on each of the things they chose. As we can see, Trump had a clear lead on the three things people were most likely to mention – inflation and the cost of living, the economy and jobs, and – especially – immigration and border control. They also trusted him more on crime, tax and national security.
The three most prominent issues on which Harris had a substantial lead – abortion, healthcare and climate change – were less likely to be among the top priorities for voters as a whole.
Another revealing way of looking at people’s priorities is to ask what they fear. When we asked in our poll how afraid people were that various things might happen, several things were notable.
One was the differences between groups. For those who ended up voting for Trump, top of the list was immigration policy letting dangerous people into America, followed by the country being drawn into a war. For Democrats, the biggest fear was the possibility of environmental disasters affecting life in the US. While white voters most worried about the country being drawn into war, Hispanic voters were more worried about not being able to afford to live in the way they had hoped and expected, and African Americans feared a friend or family member being badly treated by the police or the criminal justice system.
Another notable finding was that on many of the scenarios we asked about, younger people, minorities and those who hadn’t been to college were more fearful than older people, white voters and graduates. In general, the less secure people felt, the more they worried – especially when it came to things like crime or threats to their livelihood and basic living standards.
And with the notable exceptions of environmental disasters and unfair treatment from the police, Trump voters were more fearful than Harris voters.
Some would no doubt see this as another manifestation of Republican nastiness, with voters driven by atavistic fears rather than hope and optimism. Another way of looking at it would be that they did not trust Democrats to look out for their country or their family at the most basic level.
More generally, I found that 6 in 10 Americans thought the country was heading in the wrong direction, with only a quarter saying the US was on the right track. Tellingly, fewer than half of those who voted for Biden in 2020 thought things were heading the right way.
We see a similar story when we ask the famous ‘Ronald Reagan question’ – are you better off than you were four years ago? Fewer than a quarter of Americans, including only just over 1 in 3 of those who voted for Biden, said the answer was Yes. Nearly half of all voters said they were worse off than in 2020, including two thirds of those who ended up voting for Donald Trump.
Not surprisingly, in a separate question, more than 6 in 10 voters – including half of those who backed Biden four years ago – said the US needed radical change. Fewer than 3 in 10 felt that even if there were problems, the country needed to stay on its current course.
Faced with these circumstances, Kamala Harris campaigned on a message of… well, you tell me. I was playing pretty close attention but I’m still none the wiser.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. She did have a message of sorts, which can be summed up as: “I’m not Donald Trump.” She put this in various ways, including the slogan “We won’t go back”. She talked about Trump at every opportunity, as though voters had not already had 8 years to form an opinion about him.
To uncommitted voters, her attacks on Trump sounded increasingly overblown. We found in our research that those who were tempted to vote for Trump simply didn’t believe he was a threat to democracy, or at least no more of a threat than the party that tried to have him locked up and removed from the ballot. Describing him as a “fascist” was never likely to win over anyone who wasn’t already in the Harris column, and in any case, most people were more interested in things that felt closer to home, like the economy, jobs and the effects of uncontrolled immigration. To be fair, President Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage” probably wasn’t in the Democrats’ campaign grid, but it put the cherry on the cake.
For a very large number of voters, the fact that Harris was not Trump was all they needed to know. Having faced the dilemma of whether or not to vote for the diminished Joe Biden, many felt huge relief, even euphoria, at seeing a Democrat candidate who was energetic, engaged, and at least comparatively young.
But the Harris strategy of not being Donald Trump had another consequence, which was that it left open the question of who she was and what she stood for. One reading of this is that it was a deliberate policy of strategic ambiguity – that by not defining herself too clearly, she would allow people to project their hopes onto her without putting anyone off. Those who wanted a change from the Biden administration could see her as something different, while those who wanted continuity could reassure themselves that she had been there all along.
However, another upshot was that many were left wondering which was the real Kamala Harris – the tough California prosecutor, the liberal Senator, or deputy to the career moderate Joe Biden.
As we heard again and again in our focus groups, her changes of position on things like fracking left people wondering where she really stood, as did her seeming reluctance to answer questions on her policies and intentions. Many felt her instincts were more liberal than Biden’s – as demonstrated by her previous support for state-funded sex-change surgery for prisoners. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” as the effective Republican ad neatly put it.
But her inability in one notorious interview to think of anything she might have done differently over the last four years suggested to those unhappy with Biden that America would be in for more of the same – “She’s saying ‘turn the page’, but it’s the same book”, as one Pennsylvania voter told us.
This ambiguity over policy led to questions about who Harris was more generally. Many were unpersuaded by her talk of growing up in an ordinary middle-class household, and often said she seemed to pander to whichever audience she was facing, even seeming to change her accent for different locations.
These concerns about authenticity were particularly acute among some of the African American voters we spoke to. Some felt she was patronising black people or resented what they felt to be the message that as a woman of colour she was entitled to their support. Her string of celebrity endorsements often had the curious effect of distancing her from, rather than helping connect her to, her target audience. “You’re taking rich people and putting them on a platform and telling them to tell us how to vote,” as one voter in North Carolina noted.
These concerns about Harris often led voters to reflect on how she came to be the nominee in the first place. Though this is anecdotal, I think more people were wondering this at the end of the campaign than at the beginning. People often complained that she had emerged at the last minute without their say-so. This undermined trust in the Democratic party, which until a few weeks earlier had insisted Joe Biden was perfectly capable of a second term. It also painted a picture of a party where decisions are made behind the scenes by a shady cabal.
Many observed that Harris seemed scripted, or had what a woman in Philadelphia called “this puppeteered vibe”. They worried who would really call the shots in a Harris White House.
Strangely enough, this was not a question people asked about Donald Trump. For many of the voters we spoke to, his presidency felt better in retrospect than it did at the time. These people still had reservations: some worried about racial tension, or the effect of tariffs, or simply what one called the “pony show” of another Trump term.
Though a few thought he had mellowed recently, none thought his flaws had disappeared. But he was a known quantity, for both good and bad, and he had a track record to compare with the last four years. Despite the Harris slogan of ‘Don’t Go Back’, to go back was exactly what many voters did want – to a time when business was good, life was affordable, and the government was not trying to push the country in a cultural direction that they were deeply uncomfortable with.
So once again, voters were faced with a trade-off: given the situation they and the country were in, and given the alternative of Kamala Harris and the Democrats, were they prepared to put Donald Trump back in the White House despite his faults?
To sum up why enough voters decided that the answer was Yes, I can’t put it better than the woman in Charlotte, North Carolina who told us: “Everything can’t be unicorns and rainbows. We don’t want World War Three. We don’t want our borders down. We want the economy to be better, we want jobs. I don’t want my groceries to go up 60% again. When he was in office, none of that happened and gas was down. People just see he’s mean and she’s nice. But that’s not who you want to run a country”.
What, then, are the political implications of November’s result for the rest of us? Perhaps the most urgent lessons are for our dear colleagues on the Left – though in fact these apply across the board. The Democrats’ defeat is a foretaste of what happens when you take people for granted, seem oblivious to their concerns, adopt positions on social and cultural issues that are wildly outside the mainstream, or tell struggling voters that the economy is doing better than they think and that it’s unacceptable to complain about things like mass migration. Democrats and their allies might finally start to wonder whether their opponents’ voters are driven by something other than bigotry or ignorance, and ask themselves what it is about the modern left that puts so many people off.
On our side of the fence, one reading is that we are looking at the future of the centre-right. For all the talk of his divisiveness, Donald Trump put together a remarkable coalition that transcended identity politics, appealing to the idea of national greatness, an economy that works for more people, and looking for bold solutions to deep-seated problems, even if they upset liberal sensibilities.
At the same time, as a Brit, I can’t help but think of another time a charismatic centre-right leader won a convincing mandate, and it didn’t end well. These parallels are never exact, but there are similarities. Both Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s victories were powered by big personalities and unusual circumstances. Both involved extravagant but rather unspecific promises, leading to high and possibly contradictory expectations. For example, will Trump’s tougher stance on the terms of international trade, and the possibility of hefty tariffs, come up against the need to keep prices down for American consumers? And in the US, just as in the UK, the sheer breadth of the Trump coalition may bring its own conflicts and tensions, comprising as it does a new multi-ethnic working class alongside more traditional Republican voters.
As the British Conservatives learned to their cost, whether this realignment in party support proves to be permanent will depend on delivery. Though Trump’s opponents like to talk about a cult of personality, his voters have hired him to do a job. They want lower prices, more jobs, higher wages, secure borders, less immigration, fewer wars, better government and lower taxes. Since they’ve thrown in both houses of Congress to help, excuses for failure will be hard to come by. I’m sure we all look forward to seeing how things unfold.
