Needless to say, the election did not go the way that many had hoped.  But it’s important to take a clear look at the numbers.  It is always hard to tell for sure, and it varies from state-to-state, but it looks like in the swing states, the issue is more voters who were willing to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 were not willing to vote for Kamala Harris.  How much of that is based on inflation and myopic hindsight (thinking the Trump years were better than they actually were) and how much on other factors is unclear.

Looking at the individual states, in Georgia, there were 243,000 additional votes this year.  In Michigan, it looks like something on the order of 71,000 more votes were cast this year than in 2020.  In Nevada, there were about 28,000 more votes this year.  In North Carolina, there were about 177,000 more votes this year.  In Pennsylvania, there were about 5,000 additional votes.  In Wisconsin, there were about 86,000 additional votes.  While we do not have the final numbers from Arizona, the reports seem to suggest that the final count will end up with around the same number of votes.  Even if we end up with fewer votes, it looks like it will be within 100,000 of the 2020 totals.  In short, in the swing states, while almost certainly some people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024, they were more than replaced by additional voters.  Admittedly, within the states, we had some shortfall in the areas where we are strongest, the loss is not entirely due to Democrats not voting.

But people who are saying that the Democrats need major changes are missing the story of this election.  There is a lot of economic pain in the country even though, at the general level, the economy is in decent shape.  Since the Republicans do not have a sound economic plan, we are likely to see several elections in which the White House keeps flipping back and forth.

Moving to the Senate, right now, there are 43 states in which the same party won the White House in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  After this week’s results, 85 of those 86 seats are in the hands of the party that won the presidential election in those states.  The one exception is Senator Collins’s seat in Maine, but if Senator Collins does not run in 2026, the Democrats would probably pick up that seat.  The problem for Democrats is that gives the Republicans a base of 48 seats to 38.  That means that we need to win 13 of the 14 seats in swing states.

With several house seats on the West Coast still outstanding, a good chunk of the seats that flipped this cycle were in states that did redistricting after court decisions with the Republicans picking up three seats in North Carolina and the Democrats picking up a total of five seats from Alabama, Louisiana, and New York.  While a total of eleven seats have flipped so far, there are several other seats that could still flip.  But the odds are that close to or more than half of the changes in this election will be due to redistricting.  While there is still a chance that Democrats could narrowly win the House, a seat of the pants look at the remaining 17-20 districts which have not yet been called (depending on which media source you use), is that it is likely to be at most a two-seat swing in either direction.  In other words, we are probably looking at a narrow Republican majority which will flip to Democrats in 2026.

There are some lessons for Democrats from this year’s election, but most of the media diagnosis will be the wrong lessons to draw.  We do need to find a way to talk to working class voters who do not pay attention to politics.  Too often, Democrats seem to be talking about issues other than economics and not enough about how we are going to help people find good jobs.  That failure allows Republicans to swoop in with ideas that we know are bonkers that have failed repeatedly.  But something beats nothing.  The reality is that both parties are currently composed of coalitions that are not viable in the long term.  On the Republican side, it is impossible to have a party that appeals to both the wealthiest and the poorest.  On the Democratic side, it is highly unlikely to work in the long-term being the party of minorities and the upper middle class.  The interests of the component parts of the parties are just too divergent to hold. together.