Let’s be clear: The 2024 election was a bad outcome for the Democratic Party. They lost the White House and the Senate and missed a golden opportunity to win control of the House of Representatives.
The Democrats’ defeat has led to a host of postmortems and renting on what went wrong and what the party needs to do differently going forward. 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. You 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. 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 went 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. 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. He 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 “Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans.”
MSNBC 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.
