For the 48.3% of Americans (or 75,017,613 Americans) who voted for Kamala Harris, the night of November 5th, 2024 was a major disappointment. Leading up to the election, pollsters had predicted a very close election, with most anticipating a narrow Kamala Harris victory. However, President-elect Donald Trump ended up winning 312 electoral votes, including every swing state. This was the largest Republican presidential victory in the 21st century. 

Following the results of the election, Democratic pundits have been excessively worrying about where Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) went wrong. Since  November 5th, pundits and commentators have frequently appeared on networks and social media, explaining their ideas as to why Harris lost the election. 

I have heard many takes explaining the Democratic Party’s loss, and I believe most of these explanations do not truly take into account the circumstances of this election. I have heard that Harris was destined to lose the election and that she was a “terrible” candidate. I have heard claims of the Democratic Party being doomed and how they will never win an election again. 

Unfortunately, I have seen people make misleading claims about marginalized communities that not only fail to account for why the Democratic Party actually lost, but also harm those communities in the process. An example I have frequently heard is that the Democrats focused too much on transgender issues, despite Harris hardly mentioning trans rights throughout her campaign. 

To properly understand why the Democrats lost in 2024, we can look at exit polls taken from the election; they provide Americans with valuable data representing the issues the electorate prioritized this election, along with income status, age, race, gender identity, and views on all the candidates. 

Some of the exit polling data has not been surprising. For example, one of the biggest issues that 32% of Americans cited in this election was the economy. 81% of Americans who cited the economy as their most important issue voted for Trump. In addition, 68% of American voters believed the economy was in not good/poor condition, compared to just 32% who believed the economy was in good/excellent condition; the former voted for Trump by a margin of 70%-28%. 

Additionally, President Trump managed to attain coalitions the Republican Party previously struggled to win over, including Latino and Hispanic voters, Asian voters, young voters, and voters making less than $50,000 annually. In fact, Trump managed to win the majority of Latino male voters (54%), a feat considered unfeasible just four years ago. 

During this election, the Democratic Party lost significant support from groups who have in great parts voted for the Democrats, including people of color, low-income voters, union voters, suburban voters, and rural voters.

I interviewed Steven Romalewski, an urban mapper at the CUNY Center for Urban Research. Romalewski has been involved in many impactful projects, especially the “Redistricting and You” project, which helps New Yorkers navigate through the redistricting process and how it affects them. Following each presidential election, on his election atlas, he creates maps showing how voters in each New York City neighborhood voted. In the 2024 election, New York City saw a notable shift towards the Republican Party, a trend observed in other major cities around the country; however, New York City was notable for the magnitude it shifted towards Republicans, with Trump winning nearly 30% of the vote in the city. 

“Although Trump did increase the number of votes he received between 2020 and 2024, the loss in votes on the Democratic side was much greater,” Romalewski said. This is accurate as Harris lost much more votes in New York City compared to the number of votes gained by Trump; this indicates that many Democratic voters were unenthusiastic about voting for Harris as opposed to a sudden surge of popularity of Trump. 

“If you talk about it in terms of winning or losing the New York City vote, he lost the vote; he only got 30% or 31% the vote. … He increased it a little bit from 2020 to 2024 but he still lost citywide. His vote gains were helpful but not enough to win a majority of votes in New York City,” Romalewski explained. 

The reason that I specifically focused on election results in New York City is because it served as a microcosm of voter sentiment across the country. New York City consists of large populations of the groups of voters I have discussed: working and middle class voters, voters of color, union voters, and more. Other big cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dearborn, Philadelphia, Miami, Jacksonville, Dallas, Houston, and many more, observed similar trends towards the Republican Party, driven primarily by voters of color and working class voters. In these big cities, the trend towards Republicans was driven more by a loss of Democratic support as opposed to a surge of Republican support. 

“I think the more interesting and notable story is that there was such a drop off in Democratic votes towards people voting on the Democratic line,” said Romalewski. “We developed a map that we developed on a website called New York City Election Atlas.” 

“You can see that in areas if you look at the mapped patterns in 2020. Areas such as southeast Queens and central Harlem and northern Bronx and much of central Brooklyn are very strong areas of Democratic support. The darkest blue shading on the map means that 92% or more of the voters in that election district voted for the Democratic candidate. In 2020 that was Joe Biden. Those areas tend to be areas that vote heavily for the Democratic candidate,” said Romalewski.

“When you look at the map in 2024, there’s still a lot of blue in those areas, but it’s a lot less blue. The mapped percentages don’t tell you anything about the total number of votes. [The 2024 election reveals] both things: the total number of votes and the share of votes for the Democratic candidates in those areas dropped in those areas. It was a phenomenon across the city but especially in those traditionally democratic neighborhoods,” said Romalewski.

Across the country, neighborhoods which have traditionally been Democratic strongholds usually contain large immigrant populations. In this election, the Democrats lost the largest amount of votes from these neighborhoods, which contributed to Harris’ loss. 

If the Democrats want to win these groups in future elections, they must run on a platform appealing to these specific voters. Democratic presidents have successfully done so in the past. With proper messaging, policies, and rhetoric, they can accomplish this again. 

Messaging

I believe the biggest obstacle for the Democratic Party is their inability to properly message their platform to voters. On face value, it seems as if the vast majority of Americans align more with the Democratic Party platform than the Republican Party platform. For example, 69% of Americans support same sex marriage being legal, 94% support interracial marriage being legal, 57% believe the government should ensure healthcare, 71% support unions, 56% support stricter gun control laws, 66% support abortion being legal in most or all cases, 64% support protecting transgender individuals from discrimination, and 68% believe immigration helps the country more than it harms it. 

All of these positions are held by primarily Democrats, yet they struggled to win even 50% of the vote. While Americans vote based on a wide variety of issues, I believe one reason for this discrepancy is simply because many Americans are unaware of the Democratic Party platform. This allows for Republicans to set misleading narratives on what the Democrats actually stand for. 

I interviewed Professor Allan Lichtman of American University to ask about his thoughts on the Democratic Party’s loss in the 2024 election and what the party should have done to win. Professor Lichtman is famous for his creation of the 13 Keys to the White House, a binary (true/false) model which uses governing metrics to predict the victor of the upcoming presidential election. The 13 Keys to the White House has been historically accurate, correctly predicting 9 out of the 11 presidential elections since 1984 (and the model’s accuracy extends all the way back to the election of 1860). 

Despite the keys’ overall impressive accuracy, it wrongly predicted a Kamala Harris victory in the 2024 presidential election. Following the results, Lichtman announced that he would assess where the Keys went wrong this election. Lichtman has attributed the Democrats’ loss to many factors, particularly their lack of coherent messaging and inability to combat Republican disinformation. 

“First of all, the Democrats torpedoed themselves, and my hands are clean on this, because I was the biggest critic at the time. What the Democrats were doing was that they were openly and viciously trashing their elected president and elected party nominee,” said Lichtman, referring to influential members of the Democratic Party urgently convincing former president Biden to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance. “I had never seen that before, and I’ve studied politics from the founding to the present. I was extremely critical of that. I thought that, you know, Biden should stay in and that would preserve two of my keys, incumbency and contest.” 

While I don’t believe that Biden would have won if he stayed in the race, Lichtman raises an important question on whether Democrats “trashing” their own candidate may have unintentionally hurt them in the long run. While the Republican Party almost unanimously rallied behind Donald Trump despite all his scandals and controversies, the Democratic Party failed to build a united coalition around Biden. This resulted in little enthusiasm for the Democratic Party during this election cycle, despite the brief surge in enthusiasm around Harris immediately after Biden dropped out of the race. 

Professor Lichtman criticized the Democratic Party for not selling their accomplishments to voters, resulting in a major disconnect between the state of the country and perception of the state of the country.

“You know, people thinking inflation was going up when it went down by two thirds or more, or that jobs were being lost when there was record job creation, or that unemployment was reaching new heights, when it was actually near full employment, shows the impact of disinformation on the economy. Right after the election, even though nothing had changed in the economy, there was a drastic shift in people’s views more positively about the economy. It wasn’t just the economy. People thought that undocumented immigrants were these blood thirsty killers out to get you, when, in fact, the. undocumented immigrants are the most law abiding segment of our population committing crimes at less than half of that of native born citizens, and there’s good reason for that. They don’t want to get involved in the criminal justice system. There was disinformation about soaring crime when in fact crime is declining,” said Lichtman. 

Despite a declining inflation, crime, and migration rates, voters did not share the same sentiments, as shown by the fact that most voters shared pessimistic views regarding the economy and crime. This can be attributed to the Democratic Party not fully understanding the struggles faced by everyday Americans, especially in working class communities; thus, it should not come as a surprise that working class voters shifted towards the Republican Party during this election cycle. Republicans ran their platform on lowering inflation along with cracking down on immigration and crime; their messaging resonated especially with the working class impacted most by the post-COVID inflation and immigration surge. 

“One, the Democrats have been absolutely horrible at messaging. They have yet to develop a simple, compelling message that brings home what they’re doing for ordinary people and what they’ve done. People think Biden has done nothing, but in fact, Biden has more domestic accomplishments than any president in the U.S. since the 1960s: the CHIPS bill, the stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill, the inflation and climate change bill, and the gun control bill. I can go on and on, but nobody knows anything about this, because the Democrats are so horrible at messaging, and they need to tune up their messages,” Lichtman explains. 

When asked how the Democrats can better reach voters, Lichtman said, “They are wasting their money. I think they spend something a billion dollars, I’m not sure, but a lot of money on ads that nobody pays attention to and nobody listens to. So instead, they should be developing sources of communication that the Republicans have dominated and that people actually listen to instead of wasting their money on political ads.”

President  Trump and the Republican Party have successfully leveraged social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms to spread their message. For example, Trump appeared on Adin Ross’ YouTube channel (who currently has over 4.5 million subscribers from mostly young men) for a video. He also appeared in an interview with Elon Musk on X, which received over 95 million views. The week before the election, he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is one of the most viewed podcasts in America, with over 14 million listeners on Spotify alone. All of these influencers are especially popular among young voters, specifically young men, a group which Harris struggled to win over. Meanwhile, Democratic officials, including Harris herself, relied primarily on legacy media such as CNN, whose viewership has been declining, especially among young Americans. 

“[The mainstream media was] missing in action. You know, they spent 20 times more time on meaningless polls than they did in straightening out the disinformation and bringing home the significance of this election. And now they all seem to be caving into Trump as well,” Lichtman argues. 

In addition, Lichtman criticized the Democratic Party’s inability to combat right-wing disinformation. “Republicans have no principles. They’ll just try to win it because Democrats have no spine. They have no courage. And the long-term factor you put your finger on was disinformation. I’m not blaming the voters. Voters aren’t fact-checkers. People are susceptible to the Big Lie. It’s worked time and time again in history. And, as you say, my system is premised on the idea of a rational, pragmatic electorate making a decision based upon how well the White House Party has done [governed]; governments can’t do that if there is this unprecedented blitz of disinformation. As I said, we’ve had disinformation before, but never to this degree. You know, stocks with Fox News goes through other conservative broadcast outlets, goes through podcasters with tens of millions of followers, and then, of course, for the first time, we have the richest man in the world who’s worth more than $300 billion– Elon Musk is worth more than the GDP of most countries of the world, putting his thumb so heavily on the election, it’s been reported that his disinformation was viewed not by millions, but by millions, billions of people.” 

The Democratic Party faced an uphill battle this election cycle. Voters were unhappy with inflation and the rising cost of living. There has been a crisis at the southern border and cities across the country have struggled to address the surge of migrants. Former President Biden and the Democratic Party at large have struggled to address voters’ concerns regarding these issues. Republicans have successfully managed to turn these grievances into electoral victory by blaming Democrats for inflation and the immigration crisis. They managed to use populist rhetoric, disinformation, and social media to connect with voters who had never voted for Republican candidates in the past. The Democrats must learn how to reach voters across the country and better spread their platform to show voters they are addressing the very issues they care most about. Contrary to what some pundits might claim, the Democratic Party is not doomed. They have faced much bigger losses in the past and managed to organize themselves and win future elections. They can do so again.

Contrary to what some pundits might claim, the Democratic Party is not doomed. They have faced much bigger losses in the past and managed to organize themselves and win future elections. They can do so again.