Reflections on the recent election

These are my quick thoughts. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, so feel free to add your perspectives in comments.

1. The outcome

In 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote and lost in the electoral college. In 2020 the vote shifted to the Democrats. In 2024 there was a swing back to the Donald Trump, who this time won the popular as well as the electoral vote. The voting patterns of the states didn’t move much relative to each other, and there was a comparable swing in congressional races, which makes sense given partisan polarization. As with Biden in 2020, Trump’s victory in 2024 was unambiguous but a narrow win compared to the twentieth-century norm. Recent elections have been fought on narrow battlegrounds.

What happened this time? The first answer from political science is the economy. More specifically, dissatisfaction with the economy. More generally, dissatisfaction manifesting itself in anti-incumbent feeling. Ever since Rosenstone’s 1983 book, we’ve thought that party, not candidate or campaign, is what matters most in presidential elections, and recent elections do not contradict that view. We’ll never know what would’ve happened had Biden stayed on as the Democratic nominee, but the ultimate election outcome might have been similar—with the difference that the loss could’ve been easily pinned on him, whereas now there is no such easy answer. In that way, this election is similar to 2008, in which the incumbent party took its best shot and lost. The Republican party could’ve reacted to 2008 by moving to the center, but they didn’t. It’s not clear what will happen with the Democratic party going forward. Democratic officeholders and voters seem to be pretty uniformly anti-Republican and anti-Trump, however the many endorsements of Harris from Republicans, most notably from former Trump appointees, would seem to create the opportunity for an anti-Trump coalition with moderate policy positions. I guess this could be the ideal outcome for conservative Republicans who’ve supported Trump, if they could move the opposition toward the center so as to mitigate policy swings following expected in-party losses in upcoming off-year elections.

All the above is about the national and state-level votes. There also have been much noted changes in the parties’ bases of demographic support, something that doesn’t typically come up in models of election outcomes. There seem to have been big changes in the breakdowns of vote by education and sex during the past few elections. It’s never completely clear to me how this would be expected to affect parties’ positioning—in electoral terms, their goal is to get more votes, not votes of any particular demographic groups—but it reflects changes in public opinion.

2. Polls and forecasts

There’s not much to say here. The polls had a level of nonsampling error that was comparable to that in the three previous elections—in 2012, Republicans did better in the polls than in the election; in 2016, 2020, and 2024, polling error was in the Democrats’ direction. The most natural explanation of the error is differential nonresponse—Democrats being more likely than Republicans to answer the polls in these recent elections, to an extent beyond any demographic adjustment. This did not happen in recent off-year elections, so maybe this can be attributed to Trump attracting occasional voters who would not otherwise turn out to vote.

Another factor is voter enthusiasm. The Harris campaign in 2024 was active, with many large rallies and a general sense of active participation. Enthusiasm is good for voter turnout but maybe even better for survey response: after all, something like 60% of people vote, and survey response rates are much much lower. This is related to differential nonresponse. It’s not clear how to best adjust for this in a survey, and it’s possible that likely-voter screening could be counterproductive, if enthusiastic voters are already being sampled.

The forecasts did what they were designed to do: they aggregated economic and polling information, did not overreact to individual polls, and allowed for a potentially large nonsampling errors, leading to wide uncertainty intervals. The only systematic way to do much better with this information would be to include a prior belief in the direction, not just the possible magnitude, of the polling errors. In retrospect there are reasons to have done so; on the other hand, pollsters were aware of the bias from before and were trying to adjust for it, so there was a concern about overcorrection. To put it another way: the polls were in aggregate off in 2024 as they were in 2020 and 2016 (although not in 2018 and 2022); the errors in 2024 had affected the forecasts less, partly because forecasters built the scale of possible polling errors into their models, and partly because the polls, along with the historically-based models, were pointing toward something close to an electoral college tie, so the forecasts happened to produce something close to even odds.

3. Looking forward

Politics isn’t just about elections. With the Republicans in something approaching complete control of the U.S. government (the executive branch, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives), much of national politics will depend on debates within the Republican party. What are their priorities? How will they resolve intra-party struggles. I assume that all factions of the party can agree on certain tax and spending cuts. Beyond that, I’m not sure.

The closest analogy in recent American politics is the Democratic sweep of Congress and the presidency in 2006-2008, where the limiting factor on policy initiatives were the moderates in the Senate. But back then the Democrats only controlled two of the three branches of government. Then as now, the majority of Supreme Court judges were Republicans, and that constrained the executive and legislative branches’ room to maneuver. The last time there was full single-party control of the federal government was in the 1930s-40s, when the limiting factor was the influence of conservative southern Democrats, and in the mid-1960s, when the Democratic party was so dominant that the United States was sometimes characterized as having a “one-and-half-party system,” similar to that of Japan and other countries that have democratic elections but with a single dominant party that sets the tone, and where much of the politics involves non-ideological struggles between factions of the major party.

The Democrats are not a minor party, though. They consistently win close to or more than half the national vote, they represent nearly half of Congress, and control many states. So their decisions matter too—partly from the now-looming threat of a Democratic resurgence in 2026 and 2028 and partly because, depending on what is on offer from the Republicans, they can attempt to unite in obstruction or attempt cross-party compromise.

I’m offering neither predictions or prescriptions for any factions of either party here. I’m just trying to emphasize that politics isn’t just about elections. The results of elections create the conditions for further politics, aspects of bargaining and decision making on which I have no particular expertise.