To properly diagnose what went wrong, we need to look at the actual number of votes cast.
Why has the democratic turnout decreased?
(Will Newton/Getty)
The road to recovery and treatment must begin with a correct diagnosis. Just as a good doctor runs tests and scrutinizes the results before prescribing a course of treatment, those seeking to revive the Democratic Party need an accurate assessment of what really happened in the 2024 election. Unfortunately, in recent weeks there has been an avalanche of questionable interpretations of the election results.
As battered and battered party leaders search for solutions and explanations, they must contend with politically shallow, culturally ignorant and mathematically incorrect interpretations of election data. These poor results come from many sources, most recently and alarmingly The New York Times and its chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, who holds one of the most prestigious and prominent positions in the political media universe because of his newspaper’s extraordinary influence on public opinion.
In his Dec. 3 newsletter, Cohn argued that it would be a mistake “to conclude … that Harris could have won if (Democrats) had voted in the same numbers as four years ago.” Cohn based his claim on the belief that “millions of Democrats have abandoned their party and stayed home, reluctantly supported Harris or even made the leap to Trump.” He then tried to bolster that position by pointing to election results in Clark County, Nevada, where the Democratic lead has shrunk from 9.3 percent in 2020 to 2.6 percent this year. Citing statistics on declining Democratic voter turnout, Cohn said “two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped on him.”
Cohn’s conclusions are not only mathematically incorrect; they are essentially absurd. For some inexplicable reason, too few people in politics pay attention to the single most important data set: actual votes. By looking, as Cohn does, at changing statistical stocks and turnout percentages by party, you miss the more obvious point of who actually voted. Cohn completely misses the fact that Kamala Harris got almost nothing exactly the same number votes in Clark County like Joe Biden in 2020.
If the Democrats lost a lot of voters to Donald Trump in Clark County, how did Harris get almost the same number of votes there as Biden did four years ago? (Vote counts are not yet final, but in a district of more than 1 million voters, Harris is just 1,665 votes shy of the 2020 tally.) At the very least, she would have had to fill those supposedly lost voters with new Democratic voters, but that inconvenient fact is completely forgotten.
The underlying reality, overlooked by many in the media and politicians, is that in four battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin—Harris exceeded Joe Biden’s speech four years earlier. The most important story of the election is not that Trump has succeeded in flipping the favor of erstwhile Democratic voters; it’s that Republicans have done a better job of mobilizing their previously infrequent voters, while Democrats have wasted too much money on TV and digital ads trying to appeal to Republicans.
Current issue
To properly understand why Republican turnout increased and Democratic turnout ultimately declined, it helps to look at the now centuries-old role that racial resentment and white fear play in American politics. New York Times reporter The Ested Herndon Podcast RunUp addressed this reality when he conducted a post-election focus group. One contestant put it plainly when she said, “People just came from the countryside and came from all over to make sure a black woman didn’t win.”
A similar wave of racial resentment surfaced in Georgia in 2018, when Stacey Abrams came 55,000 votes away from winning the gubernatorial election. Abrams increased Democratic turnout by 68 percent over 2014 numbers, but fell short due to a combination of massive voter suppression (such as removing hundreds of thousands of people from voter rolls) and a historic increase in white voter turnout that occurred in the same year. a time when Georgia was as close as ever to having a black female governor.
One of the reasons that those trying to analyze election results need deep cultural competence is that the electoral power of white racial grievances has long been a staple of American politics. In 1948, Southern leaders outraged by President Harry Truman’s support for civil rights united to form the Dixiecrat Party, whose platform stated unequivocally: “We are in favor of racial segregation.” Twenty years later, staunch segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, used his rallying cry to “segregation now…segregation forever” as a springboard for his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1980, Ronald Reagan started his presidential campaign traveling to a county in Mississippi that was nationally known as the site where three civil rights activists were killed in 1964. The same southern states that bound the Confederacy formed the cornerstone of electoral support for Wallace, Reagan, and now Trump.
Understanding this historical context—the kind of “family history” that a physician takes—illuminates the right way forward. Given the abundant evidence of electoral strength and the endurance of white racial fear, Democrats must do even more to maximize turnout than they have done in the past. Nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and the nation’s deep racial wealth gap means even more resources are needed to help these families overcome the many financial and logistical obstacles that make it difficult to vote. And Democrats must press ahead with a political agenda that will ensure that equal numbers of supporters of equality become enemies of racial and gender justice.
If this election has proven anything, it’s that no amount of money and television ads will change the minds of voters susceptible to Republican politics based on fear and division. The good news is that among those who didn’t vote this year, there are still tens of millions of supporters of justice and equality. And despite what you may have read The New York Timesprioritizing policies and politics that attract, inspire and mobilize these potential voters is the right course of treatment and path back to power for the Democratic Party.
