Six-Chart Sunday (#42) - The 2024 Election
What Happened, Why, What's Next & What to Do About It
This week’s charts come from our brand new 2024 Election Analysis, out this morning. Be forewarned: there’s 47 slides, and they read much better on an iPad or PC screen than smart phone. Also they may pair better with cocktails than caffeine. Six highlights below.
As for Tuesday’s election: Should Democrats blame Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, a global anti-incumbent wave or a national party out of touch with the mainstream? Yes. Did Donald Trump divide, unite, innovate wildly or stick to the same old script? Yes. Were the polls accurate or did they mislead us to expect a photo-finish with weeks of uncertainty? Yes. Nobody knows nothin’.
Link to 47 Slides here. If you spot typos or errors, please email me!
Mis-Underestimated, Again. How many times has Donald Trump been written-off? Access Hollywood, January 6, conviction... Talk about a “comeback kid.” Trump clearly leads a movement & movements are more powerful than money. Critics pointed to alleged appeals to sexism, racism & intolerance, but Trump won by improving with women, voters of color, younger voters & the middle class who wanted change.
We’re Still Divided & Stressed. ~50% of the country voted for someone else in this 11th change election out of 13 this Century. Republicans may have swept Washington, but perceived disorder drove discontent. Voters remain restless — in the U.S. & around the world — and they may vote for change again in two years if the GOP can’t deliver.
It’s Year 5, Not Year 1. Trump 2.0 may rhyme but it won’t repeat. 47 > 45. Trump understands the job & powers of the Presidency. He knows how to pick people & has stronger outside allies this time. Expect a faster & surer-footed start from day one, deferring less to Congress. But note: the world has also changed… it’s no longer at peace, more nationalist & more inflationary.
Washington 2025 Is Biased Towards Action. With action-forcing deadlines, unified one-party control & a huge agenda, Washington is poised to produce high-impact legislation & significant (de)regulatory action in 2025-26.
Activism Ahead? Business leaders will again face pressure to speak out on social & cultural issues (e.g. mass deportation, ending ESG/DEI). But the political climate & stakeholder engagement strategies have evolved. Balancing business imperatives with stakeholder priorities will take tact, as will opposing the Administration on certain issues while remaining at the table on others.
Our Democracy Is Resilient. It was the “Y2K Election”: we expected the worst and made it through fine (either because risks were over-hyped risks or mitigated smartly). Despite the second highest voter turnout in a half century with passions & paranoia running high, there were few reports of voting fraud, domestic violence, impactful foreign interference or reports of voter suppression.
NO VIDEO THIS WEEK
If you make it through all 47 slides, you deserve less taxing TV! Happy Veterans’ Day tomorrow to all who served and their families!
As always, we welcome your forwarding this email and/or our slides to others who might enjoy, encouraging them to subscribe (it’s free)! And thanks for reading.
This column is excellent, and the entire election analysis covers a lot of good material. We remain very divided, but there are opportunities for the incoming Administration to do some good things.
Slide 5 contains some interesting historical bits, some of which I found surprising (e.g. Presidency 1975 being substantially more trusted than SCOTUS 1977 - crosstabs there would be fascinating; I suspect a lot of it has do with SCOTUS' involvement in the tail end of the Civil Rights era, e.g. school desegregation). It might be interesting to indicate on each "institution"'s arrow the value as of the last pre-9/11 Gallup value for each category (don't want to make the slide too busy).
Slide 25 is fascinating and slightly surprising, although I think you should think of the majority not as number of seats majority but as fraction of the total size of the House (which makes the effect even stronger!).
Not a typo/error, but on slide 34 I would say that Trump 1.0 also attempted to govern against DEI (to a greater degree than the degree to which he attempted to bend DoJ, at least until the last year or so), though certainly less intensively than I would expect in 2.0. Also probably a more target-rich environment - from my perspective (I live in CA-47, an interesting Ground Zero for all this) the national level D's median point has climbed down quite notably from Peak Woke since 2022, but Gaza in particular and the ME in general offers great opportunities for wedge splitting the already somewhat fractured D coalition.