>Democrats have spent months debating how and why they lost the 2024 election. But the full picture of what happened on Election Day is only now coming into view.
>The most authoritative election analyses draw on a variety of different data sources, including large sample polling, precinct-level returns, and voter file data that shows definitively who did and did not vote. And those last figures became available only recently.
>The Democratic firm Blue Rose Research recently synthesized such data into a unified account of Kamala Harris’s defeat. (Blue Rose Research did ad testing for Future Forward, the largest PAC supporting Harris, which had disputes on strategy with the campaign itself.) Its analysis will command a lot of attention. Few pollsters boast a larger data set than Blue Rose — the company conducted 26 million voter interviews in 2024. And the firm’s leader, David Shor, might be the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party.
>I spoke with Shor about his autopsy of the Harris campaign. We discussed the problems with the popular theory that Democrats lost because of low turnout; why zoomers are more right-wing than millennials; how TikTok makes voters more Republican; where Donald Trump’s administration is most vulnerable; what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters; and whether artificial intelligence is poised to turbo-charge America’s culture wars, among other things. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
>**Before we get into why Democrats lost the 2024 election, let’s talk about how they lost it: Which voting blocs shifted the furthest right over the past four years?**
>The most important thing is that we saw incredible polarization on political engagement itself. There’s a bunch of different ways to measure this: There’s how many elections you vote in, or how important politics is to your identity. There’s how closely you follow the news. But across all of these, there’s a consistent story: The most engaged people swung toward Democrats between 2020 and 2024, despite the fact that Democrats did worse overall.
>Meanwhile, people who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.
>And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.
battywombat21 on
>The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse.
🫠
Currymvp2 on
Hopefully, this ends the myth that “turnout cost the election for Dems”. I totally get why and sympathize with people who want to believe that, but it’s not the reality. The unfortunate reality is that people moronically wanted Trump. He gained votes/support among *nearly* every group (of course to varying degrees to be clear and it was clearly more significant for men) besides LGBT and black women if you look at the data. He won on “persuasion” more than turnout. The turnout percentage remained the same or increased in six of the seven Biden 2020 Trump 2024 states; it only decreased in Arizona.
qbp123 on
A lot of words to confirm what most of us already know – a shit ton of voters (“the median voter” as we often call them), are unengaged rubes who get their views from social media which has unsurprisingly pushed people towards Republicans.
Longjumping_Gain_807 on
!ping DEMS
Can’t ping politician specific groups outside the DT
South-Ad7071 on
Dems suck at advertisement. They should’ve just called trump sex pest and made fun of him the entire time.
It will never win them the debate or convince engaged voters, but it would’ve made fucktons of TikTok clips and that’s what wins the election.
Key_Environment8179 on
> Politically disengaged voters went from being a roughly neutral group in 2020 to favoring the Republicans by about 15 points in 2024. But during the Obama era, this was a solidly Democratic group, favoring us by between 10 and 15 points.
The massive dem push to turn out poor, working-class voters starting in the early 2010s backfired spectacularly
launchcode_1234 on
With 80% of Americans identifying as conservative or moderate, the Democrats should not move to the left on policy. However, I think something they can learn from left wing populists like Bernie, is how to communicate in a non-elite, straight forward manner.
admiraltarkin on
Before I open this article it better devote 70%+ of the commentary to the global inflation surge that booted every incumbent party in the world that year
Toeknee99 on
David Shor? Ignore
paynetrain7 on
In 2024 I was managing a state rep race in NEPA. My guy ended up winning but Casey and Cartwright lost and we did a postmortem in December.
One of the things that was a key take away is our polling had both Casey and Cartwright in the lead above the margin of error. But undecideds were very republican and if you made the likely voter screen slightly more permissive the new people that would vote were straight ticket republicans.
One of the big conclusions we found was that essentially we turned out every democrat possible. Which makes sense seeing all of the money and door knocks and attention was in this region. Since turnout can’t help us anymore we have to care more about persuasion which Dems are not that good at.
BigBigBunga on
>Platform based on change
>Incumbent
polpetteping on
I listened to David Shor’s talk with Ezra Klein earlier – one of the more interesting and confusing things was these median voters seem to want moderates but also thought Trump was more moderate than Kamala, and are basically cherry picking what they actually want moderation on (be moderate on the economy, but far right immigration policy is cool, etc.)
To me, this is kinda the core of the debate people on the left have been having between whether the party should lean into its moderates or become distinct from republicans. In a way it can be both, there are some things like healthcare Democrats can be much more left and passionate for and make gains.
Jimmy_McNulty2025 on
“Inflation.” There, I wrote the article for you.
wildgunman on
I mean, she’s also like, a bad politician who couldn’t even make it to Iowa in 2020.
I don’t know why we need to bring TikTok into this.
whatupmygliplops on
Both sides of the political spectrum have been pushing for equally bad things. They both want censorship not free speech. They both want “race” to be the defining trait of someone’s place in society and what society “owes” that person. They both refuse to stand up to Putin (While Trumps stance on Ukraine is disastrous, Biden was just trickling support, barely keeping Ukraine from collapse, but never giving them enough to win). Neither party was working towards universal healthcare. etc etc etc
If I care about free speech, want to end all racism, and want to help Ukraine crush Russia – there is no political party for me to vote for.
16 Comments
Total Stancilite Victory
>Democrats have spent months debating how and why they lost the 2024 election. But the full picture of what happened on Election Day is only now coming into view.
>The most authoritative election analyses draw on a variety of different data sources, including large sample polling, precinct-level returns, and voter file data that shows definitively who did and did not vote. And those last figures became available only recently.
>The Democratic firm Blue Rose Research recently synthesized such data into a unified account of Kamala Harris’s defeat. (Blue Rose Research did ad testing for Future Forward, the largest PAC supporting Harris, which had disputes on strategy with the campaign itself.) Its analysis will command a lot of attention. Few pollsters boast a larger data set than Blue Rose — the company conducted 26 million voter interviews in 2024. And the firm’s leader, David Shor, might be the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party.
>I spoke with Shor about his autopsy of the Harris campaign. We discussed the problems with the popular theory that Democrats lost because of low turnout; why zoomers are more right-wing than millennials; how TikTok makes voters more Republican; where Donald Trump’s administration is most vulnerable; what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters; and whether artificial intelligence is poised to turbo-charge America’s culture wars, among other things. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
>**Before we get into why Democrats lost the 2024 election, let’s talk about how they lost it: Which voting blocs shifted the furthest right over the past four years?**
>The most important thing is that we saw incredible polarization on political engagement itself. There’s a bunch of different ways to measure this: There’s how many elections you vote in, or how important politics is to your identity. There’s how closely you follow the news. But across all of these, there’s a consistent story: The most engaged people swung toward Democrats between 2020 and 2024, despite the fact that Democrats did worse overall.
>Meanwhile, people who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.
>And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.
>The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse.
🫠
Hopefully, this ends the myth that “turnout cost the election for Dems”. I totally get why and sympathize with people who want to believe that, but it’s not the reality. The unfortunate reality is that people moronically wanted Trump. He gained votes/support among *nearly* every group (of course to varying degrees to be clear and it was clearly more significant for men) besides LGBT and black women if you look at the data. He won on “persuasion” more than turnout. The turnout percentage remained the same or increased in six of the seven Biden 2020 Trump 2024 states; it only decreased in Arizona.
A lot of words to confirm what most of us already know – a shit ton of voters (“the median voter” as we often call them), are unengaged rubes who get their views from social media which has unsurprisingly pushed people towards Republicans.
!ping DEMS
Can’t ping politician specific groups outside the DT
Dems suck at advertisement. They should’ve just called trump sex pest and made fun of him the entire time.
It will never win them the debate or convince engaged voters, but it would’ve made fucktons of TikTok clips and that’s what wins the election.
> Politically disengaged voters went from being a roughly neutral group in 2020 to favoring the Republicans by about 15 points in 2024. But during the Obama era, this was a solidly Democratic group, favoring us by between 10 and 15 points.
The massive dem push to turn out poor, working-class voters starting in the early 2010s backfired spectacularly
With 80% of Americans identifying as conservative or moderate, the Democrats should not move to the left on policy. However, I think something they can learn from left wing populists like Bernie, is how to communicate in a non-elite, straight forward manner.
Before I open this article it better devote 70%+ of the commentary to the global inflation surge that booted every incumbent party in the world that year
David Shor? Ignore
In 2024 I was managing a state rep race in NEPA. My guy ended up winning but Casey and Cartwright lost and we did a postmortem in December.
One of the things that was a key take away is our polling had both Casey and Cartwright in the lead above the margin of error. But undecideds were very republican and if you made the likely voter screen slightly more permissive the new people that would vote were straight ticket republicans.
One of the big conclusions we found was that essentially we turned out every democrat possible. Which makes sense seeing all of the money and door knocks and attention was in this region. Since turnout can’t help us anymore we have to care more about persuasion which Dems are not that good at.
>Platform based on change
>Incumbent
I listened to David Shor’s talk with Ezra Klein earlier – one of the more interesting and confusing things was these median voters seem to want moderates but also thought Trump was more moderate than Kamala, and are basically cherry picking what they actually want moderation on (be moderate on the economy, but far right immigration policy is cool, etc.)
To me, this is kinda the core of the debate people on the left have been having between whether the party should lean into its moderates or become distinct from republicans. In a way it can be both, there are some things like healthcare Democrats can be much more left and passionate for and make gains.
“Inflation.” There, I wrote the article for you.
I mean, she’s also like, a bad politician who couldn’t even make it to Iowa in 2020.
I don’t know why we need to bring TikTok into this.
Both sides of the political spectrum have been pushing for equally bad things. They both want censorship not free speech. They both want “race” to be the defining trait of someone’s place in society and what society “owes” that person. They both refuse to stand up to Putin (While Trumps stance on Ukraine is disastrous, Biden was just trickling support, barely keeping Ukraine from collapse, but never giving them enough to win). Neither party was working towards universal healthcare. etc etc etc
If I care about free speech, want to end all racism, and want to help Ukraine crush Russia – there is no political party for me to vote for.