Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election — the Democratic Party lost it.
So argues Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO and author of the highly influential Substack, Weekend Reading.
Podhorzer's recently published newsletter on how Trump "won" — he insists on those quotation marks — garnered lots of attention among Democratic insiders. In it, he explains that America didn't "shift rightward" in 2024 but "couchward." American voters' "basic values or priorities" did not become more conservative. Democrats lost merely because turnout among "anti-MAGA" voters collapsed.
Podhorzer does not pair his diagnosis of the Democrats' woes with any detailed prescription for remedying them. But he suggests that the party does not need to "move right": Its task isn't to win over swing voters who sympathize with the Republican message on immigration, crime, inflation, or any other issue. Rather, it is to mobilize young, disaffected anti-Trump voters by alerting them to the dangers of Republican rule and addressing their desire for "systemic change."
The demobilization of such voters in 2024 had two primary causes, in Podhorzer's account: First, the media, the Biden administration, and Democrats in Congress all failed to convey the "existential dangers" that a second Trump administration posed. And second, "justifiable disaffection and anger" with a "billionaire-captured system" left many anti-MAGA voters too cynical to bother with the electoral process.
Some aspects of Podhorzer's analysis are both correct and salutary. He is right to insist that the 2024 election did not reveal a broad mandate for the conservative movement's agenda. Trump's national margin was exceptionally narrow and Republicans just barely managed to eke out a House majority.
This said, I think Podhorzer's big-picture take is wrong. Democrats' problem in 2024 was not merely that it failed to mobilize cynical, anti-Trump voters. The party also lost the arguments over inflation, immigration, and crime to the Republican Party. Trump did not convert a supermajority of Americans to conservatism. But he did convince a critical slice of voters that he was the better option on at least some of the issues that they cared about most.
There are (at least) three problems with Podhorzer's analysis:
1) Voters who backed Biden in 2020 — and then stayed home in 2024 — are not necessarily resolutely anti-Trump.
Podhorzer's argument assumes that Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 could not have done so out of sympathy for any of Trump's messages. But there's little basis for that assumption. Low-propensity voters are less ideological than reliable ones, and voters often choose to sit out elections because they are conflicted, agreeing with some of what each party has to say. There's reason to think that this dynamic drove part of the Democrats' turnout problem in 2024: Both polling and geographical voting patterns indicate that low-propensity voters became more Republican-leaning during the Biden era.
2) Young, first-time voters turned against the Democratic Party.
The electorate's youngest voters appear to have been far more right-wing in 2024 than in 2020. This is not a problem that can be attributed to mobilization. Republicans seem to have simply had greater success in appealing to first-time voters last year than they have for a long time.
3) In the Biden era, American voters did become more conservative in some of their values and priorities.
Contrary to Podhorzer's suggestion, there is considerable evidence that voters grew more right-wing in their attitudes toward immigration and criminal justice and more likely to prioritize those issues. Meanwhile, the electorate also grew more confident in the GOP's economic judgement.
Given these realities, if Democrats accept Podhorzer's thesis — and conclude that they do not need to win over Republican-curious voters, but can win solely by mobilizing staunch anti-Trumpers desperate for "systemic change" — they will likely have a more difficult time winning White House in 2028.
Perhaps more importantly, unless Democrats manage to win over some Trump voters, they will have little hope of winning back Senate control. It is worth remembering that Joe Biden's 2020 coalition only delivered a bare majority in Congress' upper chamber — and that majority hinged on the fluke that was Joe Manchin. Thus, to regain the power to pass legislation and appoint judges without Republican permission, Democrats must not only mobilize their coalition, but broaden it.
If you're losing voters to "the couch," you're probably losing arguments to the other party.
The foundation of Podhorzer's analysis is one incontrovertible fact: The Democratic Party's presidential vote tally fell by far more between 2020 and 2024 than the GOP's increased. Kamala Harris received 6.26 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020, while Trump improved on his own tally from four years ago by just 3 million.
When interpreting this drop in Democratic turnout, Podhorzer puts enormous weight on one survey question from AP VoteCast (which is like an exit poll, but more reliable). Each election, VoteCast asks Americans whether they voted primarily "for" their candidate or "against" the other one. Between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Americans who said they were voting "against" Trump declined considerably. In raw vote terms, the survey implies that 41 million Americans cast a ballot primarily "against Trump" in 2020, while just 26 million did so in 2024.
From these data points, Podhorzer concludes that 1) Democrats didn't lose because the American electorate moved right, but rather because their party's turnout collapsed and 2) that turnout collapse was driven more or less entirely by the demobilization of resolutely anti-Trump voters.
But Podhorzer's interpretation of this data is dubious. The fact that more voters said they were casting a ballot "against Trump" in 2020 than in 2024 does not necessarily mean that disaffected "anti-Trump" voters sat out the latter election en masse.
For one thing, VoteCast's question forces Democrats to choose between saying they are primarily "for" their party's nominee or "against Trump." Thus, a Democratic voter who wasn't that inspired by Biden in 2020 — but was excited to elect the first Black woman president last year — might have told pollsters she was primarily "anti-Trump" in 2020 but mainly "pro-Harris" in 2024. In Podhorzer's framing, such a person would count as a "missing anti-MAGA voter," since they contributed to the "anti-Trump" total in 2020 but not in 2024. But this hypothetical Democratic voter didn't go anywhere, they just became more passionate about the Democratic nominee.
And Podhorzer's own data suggests that a lot of Democratic voters fall into this exact bucket. According to the figures he presents from VoteCast, only 25 percent of all voters in 2020 said they were primarily "pro-Biden." Four years later, 32 percent said they were mainly "pro-Harris." Thus, part of the decline in the "primarily anti-Trump" vote is attributable to an increase in Democrats' enthusiasm for their party's standard-bearer.
More critically, just because a given voter cast a ballot "against Trump" in 2020 does not mean that they still strongly opposed him in 2024. And this seems like an especially unsafe assumption to make about a voter who chose to sit out the latter election.
To be clear, it is surely true that many "Biden 2020, Living Room Couch 2024" voters were staunchly anti-Trump. But it's likely that some within this bloc chose to abstain last year because they had grown more sympathetic to aspects of Trump's message.
As I've previously noted, the forces that lead a party's voters to switch sides — and the forces that lead them to drop out of the electorate — are often largely the same.
According to a study by the Ohio State University political scientist Jon Green, Obama voters who exhibited high levels of sexism — or agreed with Trump on immigration, gun control, climate change, or another major issue — were more likely than other Obama voters to defect to the GOP in 2016. That isn't terribly surprising. More interesting, however, is that these very same qualities made an Obama voter more likely to sit out the 2016 election. Thus, Trump's advocacy for conservative culture war positions, and exploitation of sexist resentment against Hillary Clinton, simultaneously won over some Democratic voters while demobilizing others.
Green's basic finding — that when voters feel more torn about the choice facing them in an election, they become less likely to turn out — is buttressed by a larger body of political science research. The distinction between persuasion and mobilization is therefore a flawed one: Attempts to persuade swing voters — through direct mail or television ads — often have the effect of demobilizing the other party's base, likely by increasing its ambivalence.
All this provides us with theoretical reasons to suspect that many "missing anti-MAGA" voters became more sympathetic to Republican messaging between 2020 and 2024. And empirical data reinforces this impression.
Polling in 2024 consistently showed Trump gaining ground with disengaged, low-propensity Democratic voters. In May, the New York Times/Siena poll showed Biden (then, the presumptive Democratic nominee) winning only 75 percent of Democratic voters who had sat out the 2022 midterms, even as he won virtually all high-turnout Democrats.
Meanwhile, last year's election results showed that Democrats gained vote-share in neighborhoods that had high turnout rates in 2022 and 2020, but lost ground in neighborhoods that have chronically low turnout rates. Combined with the available polling, this seems indicative of a broad shift toward Trump among constituencies with a low propensity to vote and a history of supporting Democrats.
The most intuitive explanation for this shift is inflation. Low propensity voters tend to be less partisan than reliable voters (and so, more likely to evaluate incumbents on the basis of economic conditions) and less affluent (and so, more likely to resent rapid changes in consumer prices). And a YouGov poll of "disengaged voters" from July 2024 found that "prices and inflation" were their top concern, and that they had more negative views of both the economy and Biden than engaged voters did.
Read the full story on Vox.com.
