After every election there’s an attempt to map a neat little narrative onto what just happened. Most of those narratives are fictions, crafted to reflect the political media’s own intuitions. I tend to find it more helpful to look at which pre-existing narratives completely fell apart – and when there’s a result this dramatic, a lot of them do. I’m still digesting the facts, but here are some of my initial thoughts.
The culture wars are a media fiction
Two years ago, when Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Jonathan Chait wrote this in New York Magazine:
The seeds of Harris’s failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. …Candidate after candidate bowed to demands of progressive groups to endorse unpopular stances favored by the left. This self-destructive process was shaped by a culture of moral absolutism on the left, in which any compromise at all is seen as tantamount to an endorsement of bigotry, genocide, and ecological collapse.
Political scientist and pundit Ruy Teixeira wrote in The Free Press that Democrats were “out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural issues.” Maureen Dowd said that Democrats “alienated half the country” by “embrac[ing] a worldview of political correctness, condescension and cancellation.” Mainstream outlets were writing about the purported “vibe shift” – a term for the feeling that the culture had suddenly lurched rightward.
Many Democrats echoed this sentiment. Everyone from James Carville to Senators Mark Warner and Bernie Sanders said that “wokeness” was part of the reason that Democrats struggled in 2024.
These narratives were always flimsy, but now they’ve unraveled completely. Republicans relentlessly targeted James Talarico for his past statements on gender issues (Talarico once said that “God is nonbinary” – a statement miles more woke than anything uttered by Kamala Harris) and it didn’t work, even in Texas. The party that ostensibly alienated average Americans with its wokeness somehow turned around and won the largest midterm landslide in generations. What we were told was a tectonic cultural shift vanished. Full narrative collapse.
There was no great realignment
Maybe the most prevalent narrative emerging from 2024 was the idea that we were seeing a major demographic realignment. Trump had made huge inroads among young and minority voters. He won a majority of Latino men.
This led to much speculation that we were witnessing the collapse of the traditional Democratic base. Nate Cohn wrote a piece in the Times titled “How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message,” where he argued that the rise of Donald Trump “may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it.” He continued:
This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party’s appeal. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats.
While the damage was mostly concealed by Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the backlash to his norm-shattering presidency drew the Democratic Party even further from its traditional roots. The extent of that damage is now clear.
Republicans latched onto these narratives, claiming that Trump had built a lasting multiracial coalition. Trump himself called it a “historic realignment.” You can see now that this is mostly just fanciful storytelling. Young and Latino voters shifted 30 points toward Democrats this year, landing further left than they were before Trump’s election. Young men specifically, targeted heavily by the Trump campaign in 2024, swung hard in the other direction this year. Whatever happened in 2024, it wasn’t the beginning of a great realignment toward the Republican Party.
Money doesn’t matter as much as you think
One area where there’s a big gap between what the public thinks and what the research shows is that political spending in general, and political ad spending in particular, doesn’t seem to matter that much. The best evidence is that it moves the needle a small amount in certain narrow circumstances. See, e,g., here, here, and here. In close elections, big spending might be enough to swing the outcome. But in a situation where the margins are big, it’s likely that even large amounts of spending isn’t doing much.
The best piece of evidence here might be what just happened. Elon Musk spent just south of $500 million trying to get Republicans elected. He dumped $168 million into super PACs supporting Ken Paxton alone, with estimates of his total contribution to Paxton’s effort as high as $212 million – nearly 40% of the total spending in the race. You’d think that level of spending would move the needle, but it’s not clear that it did. Talarico won by 12 points – nearly double the margin of the Democrats’ win in the governor’s race, and roughly in line with how Democrats did nationally. It’s possible that Musk’s money was actually counterproductive, as it gave Talarico a clear line of attack in the closing weeks of the campaign. We saw similar trends in the primaries, where Haley Stevens outspent Abdul El-Sayed to no avail.
A couple of years ago it was the conventional wisdom that Elon Musk was one of the most powerful men in politics. He had purchased Twitter, turned it into a propaganda machine, and used his money to catapult Donald Trump into the White House. Wired wrote that 2024 was “the year Elon Musk took over politics.” But now things look a little different. Musk has seen half a billion dollars dissolve into nothing against a nationwide blue wave, and X looks less like an effective propaganda tool and more like a feckless echo chamber.
Maybe we’re in perpetual thermostasis
If you asked me to describe what is going on, my best theory is that we’re in an era of perpetual thermostasis. The thermostatic theory of politics says essentially that public opinion tends to shift against the party in power. Part of this is probably because of perceived policy overreach, and part of it is because people tend to blame their problems on the party in power and vote for change. Hence the fact that the President’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections.
We are in an era of notable public pessimism. Consumer sentiment is at record lows. Optimism about the future is at record lows. Trust in government is at record lows. Trump has made all of these things worse, but the trends predate him. No matter what you think is driving the trends, it’s possible that in the near to medium term future the party in power will face significant electoral backlash. That’s how you get two earthquake elections in opposite directions back to back.
The lesson for Democrats – one which this administration has arguably already taken to heart – is that they should act like their power is fleeting rather than moderate in the hopes of holding onto it.
Pundits love a clean little story. The fact that the dramatic readings of the 2024 outcome mostly unraveled hasn’t stopped anyone. Ezra Klein’s latest is titled “The Bell Tolls for Trumpism.” I doubt that, but who knows. The only guarantee is that the takes keep coming.
