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I was sure Kamala Harris<\/strong> was going to win. I was convinced she would have a mandate. But now, a week after Election Day, I can admit I was wrong. Much of my misjudgment came from underestimating Donald Trump<\/strong> and his ability to connect with the electorate and make significant inroads beyond his base. Some of it also came from my own personal wishcasting\u2014my inability to hear things I didn\u2019t want to hear and my staunch refusal to reexamine my own theory of the case. I want to learn from all these mistakes. So, here\u2019s some of what I got wrong in the 2024 election cycle.<\/p>\n Split-ticket voting is real<\/strong><\/p>\n I absolutely did not think split-ticket voting was a real phenomenon in the year of our Lord, 2024. After all, in the post-Trump era of deep partisanship and polarization<\/a>, how could the strategy possibly make sense? Well, just take a look at three battleground states won by Trump and the Democratic senate candidate. Ruben Gallego<\/strong> took<\/a> Arizona with 50% of the vote, sandwiched between Harris (46.7%) and Trump (52.3%); Elissa Slotkin<\/strong> scored<\/a> a Michigan Senate seat with 48.6%, just above<\/a> Harris (48.3%) and below Trump\u2019s (49.7%); and Jacky Rosen<\/strong> defended her seat with 47.9% in Nevada<\/a>, which Trump won<\/a> 50.6% to 47.5%. In other words, it seems<\/a> that<\/a> some<\/a> Trump voters in Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada voted for Democrats down the ballot; others may have left the bottom of the ticket blank, potentially depressing the GOP down-ballot vote. (Not to mention, some voters backed Trump and<\/em> abortion rights.) Taken together, all of this shows that the Trump brand, in these states, at least, appears stronger than the GOP brand.<\/p>\n MAGA is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is MAGA<\/strong><\/p>\n I kept thinking that the Republican Party would come back to normal\u2014that people like Liz Cheney<\/strong> and the rest of the Never Trump cadre would lull Republicans back to the land of Mitt Romney<\/strong> and John McCain. While I wanted that to happen, that ship has now sailed. The MAGA movement has eaten the GOP, and the GOP has gleefully accepted the power that MAGA has delivered them. That said, Trumpism doesn\u2019t necessarily scale. Trump won in 2024, but people who were pretending to be Trump in swing states did not: Kari Lake,<\/strong> for one, has now lost both a gubernatorial and Senate race in Arizona, while Mark Robinson<\/strong> got trounced by nearly 15 points in North Carolina<\/a>\u2019s governor\u2019s race, while Trump carried the state. And don\u2019t forget, Ron DeSantis<\/strong> bombed in the GOP primary doing his best Trump impression.<\/p>\n Trump was able to grow his electorate<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought the Trump campaign\u2019s decision to double down on non-college-educated men would be a mistake. But those voters actually did<\/em> show up in large numbers. In this regard, the former president\u2019s media strategy also really paid off: He went on tons<\/a> of podcasts (everything from Joe Rogan<\/strong>\u2019s to Theo Vonn<\/strong>\u2019s to the Nelk Brothers<\/strong>\u2019), while doing little traditional media down the stretch\u2014a big departure from his constant Fox News drop-ins in 2016. Traditional media, his campaign reasoned, didn\u2019t move the needle; podcasts did. And they trusted that instinct on the basis of a simple slogan: \u201cMax out the men and hold the women.\u201d<\/p>\n MAGA built its own media\u2026and it worked<\/strong><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t quite realize just how siloed Trump\u2019s media-industrial complex really is. MAGA media people speak to Trump\u2019s people;<\/em> they don\u2019t speak to the readers of The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> or The<\/em> Washington Post.<\/em> And they don\u2019t need to, because Trump has enough of a base; he just needs to get them out there to vote. This quote<\/a> from Politico, based on an NBC survey, summed it up nicely: \u201cAmong people who got their news from \u2018newspapers,\u2019 Biden was winning 70-21. Among people who got their news from \u2018YouTube\/Google,\u2019 Trump led 55-39.\u201d The left is worried or uncomfortable with the idea of partisan media. It also doesn\u2019t have<\/a> the same kind of footprint as the right on social media, which amplifies partisan content. So, when voters log on to social media, a lot of them are systematically directed<\/a> to right-wing content.<\/p>\n The normal political rules do not apply to Trump<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s hardcore supporters surely believe he will do a lot of the things he says he will, while others, perhaps because they treat him as a celebrity, apply a different standard in which he\u2019s not necessarily held accountable for the things he says. As Neil Newhouse,<\/strong> a Republican pollster, told<\/a> the Times,<\/em> \u201cPeople think he says things for effect, that he\u2019s blustering, because that\u2019s part of what he does, his shtick. They don\u2019t believe that it\u2019s actually going to happen.\u201d Others seemed to be inexplicably charmed by his moral failings. As one voter told<\/a> The Philadelphia Inquirer:<\/em> \u201cHe\u2019s good and bad. People say he\u2019s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler\u2026But I voted for the man.\u201d<\/p>\n Polling isn\u2019t so broken after all<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought polls were overestimating Trump. But if anything, they were under<\/em>estimating<\/a> Trump (just like they did in 2016<\/a> and 2020<\/a>). Polls predicted a margin-of-error race in which the odds were tantamount to a coin flip. And in many swing states, it was<\/em> a margin-of-error race. As MSNBC<\/a> reported, \u201cIn Michigan, the 538 average had Harris up by 1 and the RCP average had her up by 0.5. The results show Trump, the projected winner, up 1.4.\u201d The numbers also (correctly) suggested that down-ballot Democrats would do better than the top of the ticket. But in the end, the polls still vastly underestimated the overall power Trump has in driving his people to the ballot box\u2014especially when he himself is on the ballot. When Trump is not on the ballot, elections tend to play out very differently.<\/p>\n Inflation could not be explained away<\/strong><\/p>\n By a number of metrics, Joe Biden<\/strong>\u2019s economy has been a success\u2014especially compared<\/a> to other of the world\u2019s richest countries. Unemployment in the US has remained low, while the stock market has roared and inflation cooled<\/a>. Yet Democrats had trouble messaging the administration\u2019s successes, and fundamentally, people saw prices of goods rise and blamed the current administration. It\u2019s also worth noting that worldwide, voters were furious at the status quo. Anti-incumbency headwinds were a real phenomenon everywhere from the UK to Germany. Voters were furious about inflation, COVID, wealth inequities, and immigration. Much of this election was simply an expression of fury at the party in power.<\/p>\n In the end, I just had trouble believing voters wouldn\u2019t find things like January 6 and Trump\u2019s authoritarian language<\/a> disqualifying. I believed voters would care more about abortion and democracy than they did. I underestimated the power of celebrity that Trump still has to overwhelm the rest of the political ecosystem. Look, there are plenty of takes out there already about what the Democrats should\u2019ve done\u2014from relying on different tactics or language\u2014and there will be lots more as the party reckons with its future. But for me, I wanted to take a step back, to find ways to learn from my misplaced assumptions, before moving forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n