With rare exceptions, Kamala Harris lost support across demographic groups compared to Joe Biden. In this guest column, Mike Maierle — who spent a career as a transportation and neighborhood planner and public transit manager and who delights in wonky analysis spiced with the occasional wry aside — does a fascinating deep dive into the numbers. Full disclosure: Michael and I have been friends since high school where we worked on the school paper, the Thomas More Utopian.
By Michael J. Maierle
In 2020 Biden defeated Trump by 4.5% of the popular vote. In this election, 3.0% percent of voters preferred Trump over Harris. That is a 7.5%-point swing. Maybe not a huge number, but in politics, like sports, winner takes all. Harris scored one less touchdown than Biden and lost the game.
This is my post-game analysis based on numbers from this fascinating article on CNN’s website.
The data compares how Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris did in percentage terms relative to Trump. I’m not going to worry about a change in a percentage or two or even three. These are poling data after all.
Let’s start with women. Dems have had an advantage with women generally over Trump, but Harris’s advantage declined substantially from 13% for Clinton and 15% for Biden to just 8%. You can’t blame men for that outcome, although I’m sure some will try. Harris lost white women by roughly the same percentage as Clinton and Biden, about 10%. And Dems, including Harris, have been losing white women with no college degree to Trump consistently by a huge 27% despite running two women candidates. The only group Harris added support vis-à-vis Trump was white women with a college degree, adding 7% points over Biden to a solid 16% advantage.
The big declines for Harris among women were among Latine voters. Clinton had a 44% advantage over Trump, Biden slightly less at 39% and Harris only half of Clinton’s advantage at 22%. That is a huge drop.
Dems have enjoyed overwhelming support among black women voters, and Harris, at 84%, did 3% better than Biden but 6% points less than Clinton.
Let’s turn to men. Harris lost the male vote to Trump by 5% more than Biden, losing to Trump by 13%. Which male groups accounted for this?
She did poorer than Biden among white men. Biden managed to win the election despite losing men by 8% compared to Trump, but that was an improvement over Clinton at 11%. Harris lost by 13%. A small percentage decline compared to Biden, but applied to a huge voting sector. Results among white men with college degrees were unchanged from Biden. Trump’s huge advantage with white men without a college degree is trending somewhat downward (40% favoring Trump over Harris) compared to Clinton (48%) and Biden 42%).
The biggest news is that Dems’ advantage over Trump with Latine men declined from a 31% advantage for Clinton to 23% for Biden, to a 12% loss to Trump for Harris. This swing of 43 points was the biggest news of the election. I haven’t heard an explanation. Maybe it was her crack about some Hispanics eating cats and dogs. No, wait, that was the other guy.
The trend for black men was in the same direction, but not as dramatic: a loss of 13% over the eight years, but still a huge advantage for Harris of 56%.
Dems have been rapidly losing their advantage over Trump when it comes to voters of color with college degrees. The trend was a 50% advantage for Clinton, 43% for Biden, and 33% for Harris. That is a huge 17% point decline in two elections. The trend isn’t much different for voters of color without college degrees: 56% to 46% to 30% for a total of 16%. Dems need a good explanation for this one, too.
I’m not going to say much about the other demographics. Harris failed to captivate young voters, losing 13% from Biden, who is what, 120 years old at this point? He had cool sunglasses. Despite the decline, she still beat Trump here by 11%. And 9% fewer 45-64 year-olds voted for Harris than Biden, which accounts for almost all of Trump’s winning votes!
Thirty-percent of rural voters stampeded away from Harris, doubling Trump’s margin of victory over Biden. Six-percent less suburban voters slinked away compared to Biden, turning this category into a 4% loss for Harris. Urban areas were level compared to Biden, down 5% from Clinton, although still a win at 21% over Trump.
If you only talk to urban people, we won’t judge you for feeling that Harris was doing great. A margin of 21% feels pretty solid.
So, can we speculate about what changed between Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024 to account for all these, sometimes dramatic, changes?
We know that non-college educated persons have shifted to voting Republican in large numbers for some time. If they’re going to win, Dems need a brand, a platform, a candidate, and most importantly a track record that can attract non-college educated persons.
Well, that was easy! What do non-college educated persons want? I’m sure focus groups could figure that out. I’m just gonna say, what the heck, maybe bread and butter issues, including eggs: jobs, good wages, security, a place you can afford. They’re probably not going to start tech firms. Foreign trade (especially the huge trade deficit with China) and huge migration probably didn’t help most of these variables.
Some voters heard the “They’re eating the dogs” speech and voted for that guy despite of, or maybe because of, it even if they were Hispanic. Many immigrants aspire to thinking of themselves as mainstream, middle class Americans. They’re not the ones eating dogs. No offence.
My other theory is that Trump was more entertaining. No one is going to stay up to watch late night comedians make jokes about Harris. That Kamala sketch on SNL the Saturday before the election was pretty lame unless you were already a fan of hers. What would the late-night bros joke about without Trump? Could people really be that shallow? Yes. Studies show the more exposed you are to something, the more acceptable it becomes. This is hardly an original idea: A New York Times op ed writer wrote: “…there was a reason he launched into those bits over and over, and it wasn’t because he was cognitively impaired. It was because people found it funny.”
I wish the Dems the best of luck. I’m basically a Democrat because I favor policies that benefit the non-college educated people in the neighborhood I grew up in. I’m also in the urban college educated tribe. My mutual funds seem to do about the same no matter who is in charge. I thought Biden did some great things. Harris was supposed to articulate those things.
But the fact is that when everyone else in the economy is doing better, you’re doing worse by comparison. Too bad those manufacturing workers didn’t become anesthesiologists.
The Dems might figure something out. Why they haven’t for eight years is beyond me.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
I think it’s because the Dems are too mired in ethical constraints and the truth. Maybe they need to upgrade their disinformation game. I wonder how much social media played a role in the results. Seems to be amping up every year, so it’s hard to imagine that isn’t a factor, which I’m not hearing anything about.
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“I think it’s because the Dems are too mired in ethical constraints and the truth.”
The deeply viscid irony through which you had to slog to type that! Ethical constraints like:
*Biden’s sharp as a tack!
*Inflation’s transitory!
*Bidenomics is WORKING!
*The border is SECURE; ad infinitum ad nauseum.
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I think you’re conflating normal political posturing with outright lies. No Democrat said votes were being stolen and called into question our election system. No Democrat said migrants were eating dogs and cats. There are encyclopedias full of Trump’s lies. And, Democrats really believed inflationary was transitory and it pretty much was. It has come down steadily and is now near target — though not on some key items and that may have cost them the election. Bidenomics did work by most measures — unemployment, real wages, the stock market. The claim that the border was secure came after it was — their problem was that the border was, in fact, too porous for three years. The one where you might have a point is about Biden himself. He was not up to the job anymore, but that’s a highly subjective judgement. This kind of decline doesn’t go in a straight line. Anyway, you can’t compare these kinds of normal political posturing with the outright lies that Trump tells and that Republicans echo.
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Never discussed business with Hunter
Corn Pop
That time he spent time in jail with Nelson Mandela
His son dying of cancer, then in Iraq, then in Afghanistan
Finishing first in his class at law school
Getting a scholarship to law school
That he went to a historically black university
That he worked as a truck driver
Visiting the Tree of Lie Synagogue and talking with them
The time his house burned down with his wife in it
About discussions with Merkel, Mitterand, after their deaths
About his discussion with Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri on his way home to visit his sick mother (but Negri had been dead for a year and his mother for 5 years when he said it took place).
That his grandfather died six days before Biden was born and in the same hospital. In fact, that grandfather died in a different hospital a year earlier, the other grandfather died in the same hospital, but when he was 14.
He said he saw the Pittsburgh bridge collapse.
He said his uncle was eaten by cannibals. I had to read the story because the headline read “Biden Claims His Uncle Was Eaten By Cannibals Twice” and I had to see if he said it twice or claimed his uncle was eaten twice.
He spoke with the inventor of insulin.
He was raised in a Puerto Rican community.
That he served as liason to Golda Meir during the Six-Day War. (Levi Eshkol was prime minister and Biden was in law school).
He said his first job offer was from Boise Cascade.
He was arrested at a civil rights march.
He was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1965 (the year he graduated from the U. of Delaware, a historically black university).
Oil refinery pollution gave him cancer.
He was a full professor at the U. of Penn.
His great grandfather was a coal miner (he wasn’t).
He awarded his Uncle Frank a Purple Heart as VP (Frank died in 1999 and never received a Purple Heart).
He hit a ball 368 feet in his first Congressional baseball game (he was 0-2).
His grandfather was an ‘All-American Football Player’ at Santa Clara University.
He almost was an NFL walk-on and he could have made it in the pros.
He was shot at overseas.
When a woman asked him to remove a dead dog from the street, he claimed to have left it on her front doorstep.
He was a coal miner from a coal mining family.
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I guess I missed something. Did Hunter Biden ever serve in office?
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the wrong candidate, at the wrong time, picked by the wrong people.
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“Did Hunter Biden ever serve in office?“
A dodge, but a fair point, Dave.
However, despite never serving in office and having less-than-no experience in such matters, the Prodigal Son (whose knavish body of work was the stuff of legend) was “installed” as a Trusted Advisor , attending WH meetings, listening in on phone calls, etc., with his father.
The timing (shortly after Biden’s disqualifying (IMO) June 27th debacle), is suspect to say the very least, leading cynics to speculate that it was a thinly veiled effort to preserve a meal ticket which made the Promised Land seem like panhandling.
Who could blame him; he was facing a future where his every…um…financial endeavor would endure well-deserved, eagle-eyed scrutiny, and the artist thing was losing traction.
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Do you really want to get into the people the president associates with?!? Biden said he would not pardon his son. In a real testament to his integrity. We will not see such integrity from Trump…..who is planning to pardon and already had pardoned some doozies…..also, Trump’s son and son-in-law’s relationship with the Russian government is very, very troubling. Let’s hold his kids up for scrutiny, shall we?
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Please; integrity and Biden should NEVER collide in the same sentence.
He also swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America…how’d THAT work out?
or THAT…or THAT…or THAT…sheesh, my fingers are getting tired.
Pardons? I wouldn’t be surprised if both Biden and his crack-head son get pardoned by President-Elect Donald J. Trump; those wouldn’t be, to borrow a word, doozies, they’d be the right thing to do…right…?
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Don’t feed the trolls. Conservative trolls: “Other people lie too, so don’t criticize Trump’s lies.” “Other people have nepo-kids, don’t critique Trump’s nepo-kids.”
Trolls like Gotch do not engage in the facts of any matter, but instead redirect the spotlight to democrats. It’s an established propaganda technique. There is no critique of republicans that a troll can’t dig up some example of a democrat doing something similar. They see it as a type of get-out-of-jail-free card and that it absolves republicans of any accountability at all. Flooding the zone like this online is the technique used to avoid being cornered into acknowledging any negative trait of a party member.
Trolls like Gotch do not say things like “I don’t think people should…” because it puts them on record with a position/stance – the goal is trolling, not policy discussion. Engaging in policy discussion with a troll is their version of entertainment – they will not have this type of conversation in good faith.
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I disagree with Cornelius, but I wouldn’t classify him as a troll. He presents another point of view. Misguided, as it is.
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“Let’s hold his kids up for scrutiny, shall we?”
Absolutely! “Not Even The Appearance Of Impropriety” should be sacrosanct.
Won’t be too hard keeping tabs on them, though, there’ll be neither 51 Intelligence Agents running interference nor ~90% of the media serving as a backstop.
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“Don’t feed the trolls.”
Rollie…buddy…the everLUVin’ irony you display, and bandwidth you waste, trying to OTHER me is not only nonproductive, but troubling.
Glass half full? At least you didn’t call me a racist…this time, leastways.
“I disagree with Cornelius, but I wouldn’t classify him as a troll.”
Dave; this I find comforting, back-handed delivery notwithstanding.
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This is what I’m talking about:
newyorkermag
Following Kamala Harris’s loss, Democrats began their favored ritual of falling out of love with their candidate. But what if the problem wasn’t the person, or even the policy? The Democrats made “a crucial messaging error, one that probably (as the line goes) lost them the election,” Nathan Heller writes. “They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one might call the ambience of information.”
For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. But detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely. “Big, sloppy notions do,” Heller notes. “It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.”
It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. “This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong,” Heller writes. “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts.”
Nathan Heller
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