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DATA SUGGEST R’S WIN STREAK MAY BE SHORT  
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Michael A. Cohen
December 2, 2024
MSNBC
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_ Trump's margin of victory, 1.6 points, was the fifth-smallest in
the last 100 years. As much as the MAGA world wants to portray this as
a landslide, it wasn’t. And as the last few election cycles tell us,
political power in America can be fleeting. _

,

 

Let’s be clear: The 2024 election
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a bad outcome for the Democratic Party
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They lost the White House and the Senate and missed a golden
opportunity to win control of the House of Representatives. 

The Democrats’ defeat
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led to a host of postmortems and renting on what went wrong and what
the party needs to do differently going forward
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But a deep dive inside the numbers suggests that while the election
results were bad for Democrats, they aren’t quite as awful as they
seem. 

For starters, it’s important to remember that Democrats were
fighting an uphill battle this year. Around the globe, in 2024, every
single incumbent party in a developed democracy lost vote share
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know the last time that happened? Never. 

_A deep dive inside the numbers suggests that while the election
results were bad for Democrats, they aren’t quite as awful as they
seem._

Moreover, while President-elect Donald Trump emerged victorious, his
margin of victory, 1.6 points, was the fifth-smallest in the last 100
years [[link removed]]. As
much as the MAGA world wants to portray his victory as a landslide, it
wasn’t. Of course, whether a candidate wins by one vote or several
million, they still get to be president.

And it’s hard for Democrats to take much solace when one considers
that four years ago, President Joe Biden won by 4.5 percentage points
(51.3% to 46.8%) and Vice President Kamala Harris lost this year by
1.6 points — that’s a more than 6-point swing. While 4.2 million
fewer people 
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to the polls this year than in 2020, Harris received 6.8 million fewer
votes than Biden, while Trump upped his total by 2.8 million.

But in swing states, the story is a bit different. In four of them,
Harris received more votes than Biden did in 2020 (the only other
state where she pulled off that feat, oddly, was ruby-red Utah).
Overall, she lost the seven major swing states by 3.5 points — more
than 2.5 points better than the national average.

That means she overperformed in the states where voters saw the Harris
campaign the closest. It wasn’t enough to win the election, but
Harris’ campaign efforts were more effective than the final result
would suggest. 

Running at a time of strong anti-incumbency with a deeply unpopular
incumbent president creates an incredibly difficult path to victory
— and Harris paid the price.

Ironically, what also worked against Harris was Trump's presence on
the presidential ticket. The conventional wisdom before the election
was that Trump, because of his felony conviction, sexual abuse defeat
in civil court, his behavior on Jan. 6 and his overall toxicity, was a
liability for Republicans. But the opposite seems to have been true. 

One of the more fascinating data points in this election is that
Harris got more votes than Democratic Senate candidates in Nevada,
Michigan and Pennsylvania — and just 5,000 fewer votes than the
Democrats’ candidate in Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Yet,
Democrats won three of these Senate races — while Harris lost all
four states to Trump.

A decisive number of Trump supporters were only interested in voting
for the top of the ticket.

So what happened? Downballot GOP candidates received decidedly fewer
votes than Trump. In Michigan, Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers
got 117,000 fewer votes than Trump — and lost to the Democrat, Rep.
Elissa Slotkin
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In Nevada, around 70,000 Trump voters failed to cast a ballot for
Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown; the same goes for 54,000 voters
in Wisconsin who voted for Trump and not GOP Senate candidate Eric
Hovde — who both lost. In Pennsylvania, 143,000 Trump voters
didn’t vote for GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick, though he
narrowly won his race. 

While it’s certainly possible that a different GOP presidential
candidate would have done better than Trump, the data from these four
states suggests that a decisive number of Trump supporters were only
interested in voting for the top of the ticket.

Perhaps these are the occasional voters the Trump campaign had said
they were relying on to win back the White House. However, the
disparity between Trump and GOP Senate candidates speaks to a clear
voting pattern since 2016: Trump’s coattails don’t necessarily
extend to the rest of the Republican Party. We saw this play out in
2018, when Republicans lost 40 seats in the House, and in 2022, when
the GOP won back the House but lost Senate seats and badly
underperformed. Even in 2020, Democrats won two Senate seats in
Georgia weeks after the general election when Trump wasn’t on the
ballot. 

Indeed, even though Democrats lost four Senate seats and control of
the chamber, considering the 6-point shift in national voting and
Trump’s victory, they did better than expected. 

Of the four seats Democrats lost, three were in more solidly red
states (Ohio, West Virginia and Montana). Their candidates prevailed
in four states that Trump won, and the only Senate candidate to lose
in a lean blue state was Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, who lost by a
quarter of a point, or approximately 16,000 votes. 

In the House, Democrats picked up one seat and flipped a half dozen
seats in New York and California, even as millions of Democratic
voters in these two states who had voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home
this year (approximately 40% of the drop-off from Biden to Harris came
in New York and California). 

Going forward, the ubiquity of the occasional Trump voter should
concern Republicans. Can they hold the White House — and their
advantages in the House and Senate — if Trump is not on the ticket
(and constitutionally, he cannot run for president again)?  

Of course, that is a problem for another day for Republicans. They now
control a governing trifecta, both houses of Congress and the White
House (not to mention their stranglehold over the Supreme Court). But
if the last few election cycles tell us anything, political power in
America is fleeting. After all, in 2008, Democrats won a governing
trifecta … and by 2016, the GOP controlled Congress and the White
House. Four years later, the tables were completely turned, and
Democrats won back a trifecta … only to lose it to Republicans four
years later. 

Quite simply, it might not be long before the election postmortems are
being written about the GOP.

_Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for MSNBC and a senior fellow and
co-director of the Afghanistan Assumptions Project at the Center for
Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He writes
the political newsletter Truth and Consequences
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has been a columnist at The Boston Globe, The Guardian and Foreign
Policy, and he is the author of three books, the most recent being
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and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That
Matters to Americans.”_

MSNBC [[link removed]] is a cable news channel that broadcasts
news and liberal political commentary. It is owned by NBCUniversal, a
subsidiary of Comcast, and is headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in
Manhattan, New York City. 

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