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- [00:00]
Isaac Saul
Gifting is hard, but here's a hint. Give the gift of connection from US Cellular. Not sure what that means. Well, here's a slightly more specific hint. You can choose four free phones and get four lines for $90 a month from US Cellular.
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Mark Marin
Your family wants new phones. So how do we know?
- [00:17]
Isaac Saul
They told us. Yeah, the good news is that compared to wrapping presents, you're great at getting hints.
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Mark Marin
So take the hint and get them four free phones and four lines for.
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Isaac Saul
$90 a month US Cellular built for us.
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Jonathan Fields
Hi, this is Jonathan Fields, host of the Good Life Project, where each week I talk to listeners about investing in their future by increasing their own vitality. But when it comes to those financial goals, whether it be saving for a home renovation, growing your child's college fund, or travel, life can make it difficult to stay the course. By working with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Having the bullet your back helps your whole financial life move with you. So when your plans change, Merill's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.com bullish to Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner and Smith Incorporated. Registered broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member.
- [01:10]
Mark Marin
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- [02:01]
Isaac Saul
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and today we are going to do one last, I guess, postmortem. I'm not sure if that's quite the right word. We're going to talk about the 2024 election, I think, for the last time, for a while, and we're going to share some thoughts about exactly what happened. So the fog of war is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while we are living through it Analyzing something like an election outcome through the fog of war is very difficult to do. Sometimes that can remain difficult not just for weeks, but months, years and even decades. Still, we can give it our best shot. More than a week has now passed since Election Day, and before we fully pivot to focusing on the end of the Biden presidency, the Supreme Court term, the new Congress, Trump's appointees, and the incoming administration, I think it's important to give one potentially final breakdown of the election we just had. I've been thinking for a few days about how best to do that, and what I came up with was a sort of four part podcast. First, how should we accurately describe the results of this election? Second, what was the deciding factor in this election? Third, what auxiliary issues made a difference on the margins? And 4 what pre election narratives should be put to bed. I hope that by going through these four parts I can give our readers a better understanding of what happened and be ready to see what's coming in the near future. Before we begin though, I want to offer one Framing thought Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer why Trump won or what happened to the Democratic Party in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I'm trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That's the goal. Not to give a single definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one. So first, how should we describe the results of this election? On the morning after Election Day, the press generally framed the results as a decisive electoral blowout. For the most part, I think the framing rings true. A week later, Trump won all seven battleground states. Republicans went from a minority in the Senate to winning a three seat majority, and they held the House of Representatives too. Still, I think it is worth contextualizing the scale of the victory at the presidential level. Harris won more votes in total than Biden did in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin combined. Across the blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris lost the election by about 200,000 votes. The 2016 race was decided by Trump winning by about 80,000 votes across those three states. And while Trump is going to win the popular vote this year, he'll do so by a margin smaller than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 or Joe Biden did in 2020. Biden won it by about 7 million votes. Clint Biden won it by about 7 million Votes. Clinton won it by about 3 million. And Trump looks on pace to win by a little more than 2 million. Electorally, Trump beat Hillary Clinton with 306 Electoral College votes in 2016. Biden then beat Trump with 306 Electoral College votes in 2020, and Trump beat Harris with 312 Electoral College votes in 2024. For some recent context, President Barack Obama won 332 Electoral College votes in 2012 and 365 in 2008. President George W. Bush won with 286 Electoral College votes in 2004 and 271 in 2000. So in the last quarter century, Trump achieved a better margin than any president except Obama's two electoral victories. But his win was roughly on par with his victory in 2016 and Biden's victory in 2020. And of course, it should be noted that Trump will become the first Republican since Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. So Trump won. He won decisively. He didn't achieve a historic blowout, but he and the Republican Party have definitively taken the federal levers of power in the United States. So that brings us to part two. What was the deciding factor? It was the economy. In 2022, we wrote a newsletter titled It's Abortion Stupid to explain Democrats success in breaking the red wave in that year's midterms. I stand by a lot of what I wrote then, but it's very obvious to me that 2024 was not a referendum on abortion. Abortion rights groups were able to win a slew of ballot initiatives, even in red states, but Kamala Harris was not able to make abortion the issue that defined the election. Instead, for a lot of swing voters, the primary issue was the economy. We can debate the actual amount of control the chief executive has over the economy, but there's no doubt government policy has some impact. And naturally, what we can't debate is that voters hold incumbent governments accountable for how their lives are going. The Biden Harris administration presided over years of painful inflation, and many voters blame their policies for it. A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn't feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth, traditional metrics for measuring economic success, as proof that bionomics was working. But these macro numbers don't soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats and very few pundits seem to have grasped this. That being said, one writer, Annie Lowry from the Atlantic made the point better than I could, so I'm just going to steal a big chunk of her writing from her piece. The Cost of Living Crisis explains everything. Here. I'm going to read a few paragraphs of what she said. Quote to be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do. But the headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing, something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier. During the Biden Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre Covid peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30% of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness. Government transfers buoyed families early in the Biden administration, but they contributed to inflation, and much of the money went away in the second half of Biden's term. The food stamp boost, the extended child tax credit, the big unemployment insurance payments each expired, and the White House never passed the permanent care economy measures it had considered. Interest rates were a problem, too. The mortgage rate more than doubled during the Biden Harris years, making credit card balances, car payments and homes unaffordable. A family purchasing a $400,000 apartment with 20% down would pay roughly $2,500 a month today versus $1,800 three years ago. Indeed, the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small ticket common purchases such as fast food and groceries highlighted how bad that country's longstanding large ticket sticky costs like health care, childcare and housing had gotten. The cost of living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign and one where incumbent Democrats messaging felt false and weak. End quote. And that really is just it. This is why I thought Trump would win. This is why I think he did win far too many persuadable voters had genuine gripes with how things were going, and far too few Democrats were able to speak to those gripes. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [11:13]
Jonathan Fields
Hi, this is Jonathan Fields, host of the Good Life Project, where each week I talk to listeners about investing in their future by increasing their own vitality. But when it comes to those financial goals, whether it be saving for a home renovation, growing your child's college fund, or travel, life can make it difficult to stay the course. By working with a dedicated Merill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Having the bullet your back helps your whole financial life move with you. So when your plans change, Merill's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merill, a Bank of America company what would you like the power to do? Investing Involves Risk Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith Incorporated Registered Broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member SIPC this episode is.
- [11:55]
Mark Marin
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- [12:24]
Isaac Saul
All right, that brings us to part three. What else contributed to set the table here? I'm sharing a chart from the Democratic Polling group Blueprint in today's newsletter, which I think paints a clear picture of what mattered and what didn't. Since you guys can't see this chart, you're listening to me. I'll just explain a few of the things that I think are really important. The polling strategy group asked voters their reason for not choosing Kamala Harris, and they broke them down into all voters, swing voters, black voters, swing voters who chose Trump and Latino voters. The top three issues among these voters were that inflation was too high under the Biden Harris administration, too many immigrants illegally cross the border under the Biden Harris administration, and Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class, especially among swing voters. Black voters, swing voters who chose Trump and Latino voters. These issues, inflation, immigration, and the sense that Kamala Harris focused more on cultural issues like trans issues rather than helping the middle class were very much deciding factors in how people decided not to vote for Kamala Harris. These are all good things to keep in mind when thinking about why Democrats lost, but they also don't tell the full story. So I've tried to identify five major factors that I believe were key to Trump's win. Number one was the demographic realignment. First, Trump continued to eat into Democrats share of non white voters. Here's a fact to consider. Kamala Harris did better with white voters than Joe Biden did, but worse with non white voters. Not only that, but the group that has shifted most toward Democrats since Trump broke onto the scene in 2016 is white men. Democrats lost because everyone except for white voters moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle. How's that for a narrative buster? Also, Trump outperformed his previous numbers with younger voters and low income voters. This performance was a continuation of the success Trump had in 2020, success many people doubted would be replicated this time around. Instead, it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance, even in a loss, was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base of support. If you want to understand this trend better, I highly recommend reading Moussa Al Gharbi, listening to Patrick Graffini on Ezra Klein's recent podcast, or reading Rafini' book Party of the People, which he published after the 2020 election. My second auxiliary factor is that being an incumbent was really hard this year. I spoke a bit about this immediately after the election, but the sum total of the evidence here is just staggering. John Byrne Murdoch wrote for the Financial Times that the incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the Parl Gov Global Research Project and held national elections in 2024 were giving a kicking voters. This is the first time this has happened in almost 120 years of records. To put that a little more simply, every single One of the 10 major countries that had elections in 2024 saw the incumbent party get defeated or lose voters. In this global environment, Harris actually fared a lot better than other incumbents. That I'm sure is due in part to America's more robust post pandemic economic recovery relative to most other countries. Harris was also running against a historically divisive candidate and with a highly polarized electorate preventing the challenging party from blowing out the incumbent, you could use this framing to make the case that she ran the best campaign possible. Interestingly, the data collected globally about the weakness of incumbents doesn't just point to inflation and cost of living crises happening across the globe. It also points to social upheaval, which is a fancy way of saying immigration. And which brings me to my third auxiliary reason why Democrats lost There is an Immigration Crisis Illegal border crossings hit an all time high in 2022, with 2.2 million people coming into the U.S. these numbers are staggering, and the migrants, unlike in years past, did not come primarily from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Instead, they were coming from all across the world Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and as far away as Europe, Africa and Asia. Unlike past spikes in migration, the recent surges did more than just impact border towns or the southwestern United States. Some Republican governors bused migrants to major US Cities, others went willingly on their own. But the sum total was that the migration crisis reached as far as New York City, Denver and Chicago, straining city budgets, creating social tensions and dividing Democrats. As the chart from blueprint shows, the issue resonated with every kind of voter, from swing voters to black voters to Latino voters. And of course, this issue is deeply tied to Trump's core political brand. And the fact that the Biden Harris administration struggled to get illegal immigration under control played directly into his hands. Even before serving as Biden's vice president, Harris came with years of baggage on the issue during her 2020 run for president, her promise to dismantle the US Immigrations and Custom enforcement and decriminalize illegal border crossings featured prominently in Republican attack ads. The administration's inability to get the border under control in the first three years would become an albatross around the neck of whomever Democrats ran as their candidate. Biden wanted major immigration reform, so rather than taking executive action, he worked hard to pressure Congress on a sweeping bill. Trump countered by pressuring Republicans into rejecting it and then Biden took executive action. On the one hand, this was a good thing because his actions have been pretty effective, but on the other hand by by taking those actions unilaterally live in practice.
- [18:32]
John Law
Hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest Friday edition. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com to sign up for a newsletter subscription or you can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for our Premium Podcast membership which will unlock this complete episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. We are working on trying to get together a bundled membership package where you're able to sign up for both the newsletter and the podcast. In the meantime, if you sign up for a newsletter subscription and you'd like to receive the podcast subscription as well, or vice versa. We will offer you a 33% discount to sign up for the other this is the best we can do in the short term while we work on a long term bundling solution. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. Isaac and Ari will be here for the Sunday podcast and I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend y'all. Peace.
- [19:50]
Isaac Saul
Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Law. The script is edited by our Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey, Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social Media Manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and if you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to retangle.com and check out our website.
- [20:43]
Merrill Advisor
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- [21:27]
Mark Marin
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- [21:58]
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