This will be my first post covering the 2024 Presidential Election. To be upfront, I’m a supporter of Kamala Harris (as you might have inferred from my last post). I don’t, however, plan on using these updates to celebrate or promote her candidacy. Rather, I aim to provide neutral, data-driven analysis about the race, especially geared toward predicting the eventual winner.
I’m not a poll denier. I value political polls as a critical tool in gauging candidate support. However, I’m even more interested in voting results and how they reflect changing voting patterns among various regions and demographic groups. By following these trends, I hope to make better sense of the polls—and even speculate on what the polls may be missing.
To that end, I’ll start by citing the map below, taken from the New York Times 2022 House of Representatives election coverage. Essentially, this map provides a visual representation of where Democrats and Republicans overperformed and underperformed in the 2022 midterm election relative to their performance in the 2020 Presidential Election. Longer red arrows represent bigger GOP shifts; longer blue arrows represent bigger Democratic shifts. (Link to the NYT site here.)
In my opinion, this is among the most useful information possible for looking ahead to 2024, since several major political events occurred between 2020 and 2022. These include the January 6th insurrection, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a historic bump in inflation, and the initiation of prosecutions against Donald Trump. The best way to gauge how these events and others affected voters is to look at the political shifts during that period.
The first thing to highlight about the map is that, as usual for midterm elections, the nonincumbent party (the party not holding the office of the Presidency) got more votes—although in this case, by a weaker margin than many had predicted. Republicans candidates for the House of Representatives votes won more votes overall than Democratic candidates by 2.7%. That represents a 7.2% rightward shift from the 2020 Presidential Election, when Joe Biden won the popular vote over Donald Trump by 4.5%. The reason for most of this rightward shift—again, as usual for midterm elections—was that the nonincumbent party (Republicans) had higher turnout than the incumbent party (Democrats).
Given this 7.2% turnout-related advantage for Republicans compared to 2020, it makes sense that most of the lines on the map are red, indicating a rightward shift in those House districts. However, some red lines are abnormally long, indicating a more severe rightward shift. Meanwhile, some lines are small and difficult to see, indicating that only a small shift occurred from 2020 to 2022—and that, by extension, Democrats overperformed in these districts relative to other parts of the country, since the average change was 7.2% toward Republicans. Finally, some lines are blue, meaning that Democrats actually improved in those districts from 2020, a major overperformance given the national environment.
Using this data, then, we can get to the important questions: Since 2020, where are Republicans getting stronger, and where are Democrats holding their own?
The answer to the first question is made obvious by the map: the strongest Republican gains from 2020-2022 were concentrated in three states: New York, California, and Florida. In particular, they occurred in the large metro areas of New York City and Los Angeles. Some cities in other states also incurred a heavy shift toward Republicans, including Houston, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, although the suburban districts surrounding those cities didn’t also shift strongly rightward, as did those near NYC and LA.
How to make sense of these mysterious findings? To me, the pattern can be explained with the following summary: GOP gains occurred in large, racially diverse media markets that disproportionately emphasized urban crime and violence.
With this framework, the pieces fall into place. New York City and Los Angeles are the two most enormous media markets in the country, if not the world, and during the period of 2020-2022, in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives matter protests of 2020, coverage of heightened crime dominated news coverage in those markets. This doesn’t mean that crime was truly worse in those areas compared to others. In fact, other cities that experienced more serious problems with post-pandemic crime, such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Milwaukee, didn’t shift strongly toward the GOP during that period. Rather, it means that the media coverage was responsible for the political shifts. How else to explain that the two cities with the most powerful media machines saw such large shifts in voting patterns, while other cities with similar demographics and similar crime statistics saw none?
(This doesn’t necessarily explain the strong rightward shift across Florida, but I think most readers can accept that Florida is a unique case given its unusual demographics, highly self-selecting population, and, in 2022, popular Republican governor up for reelection. Still, I wonder whether the close ties of many Florida residents to the NYC area played a role.)
Another giveaway is that, as I mentioned, the districts surrounding New York City and Los Angeles—including, for instance, suburban districts in New Jersey and Connecticut—swung rightward as much as, or more than, the cities themselves. This indicates that the experience of crime was not as influential as the coverage of crime during that period. It makes sense that stories from huge NYC- and LA-based news sources influenced voting patterns over a large radius, even into very low-crime areas, while suburban areas near less powerful media markets didn’t shift strongly toward the GOP. In fact, even cities geographically nearby to NYC and LA, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, didn’t see major rightward voting shifts, even though their post-pandemic increases in crime were equal to or worse than their larger counterparts. The only possible explanation is that voters from those smaller cities formed different perceptions due to their engagement with less sensational media coverage.
To be fair, some cities probably did shift rightward in the context of particularly extreme experiences with violent crime. This can be seen with the long red arrows over Minneapolis and Portland, which notoriously experienced heightened violence and turmoil during the Black Lives Matter protests. These events, although occurring before the 2020 election, surely left a lasting impression on the electorate that likely impacted 2022 voting behavior more than in 2020, since the polarizing Trump was off the ballot. But the GOP-favorable shifts in these cities only prove that crime is the driving factor: why did Portland shift rightward, but not Seattle or Tacoma? Why did Minneapolis veer sharply Republican, but not St. Paul? I can think of only one salient issue that would separate these otherwise highly similar areas: crime.
Few pundits are highlighting crime as a dominant issue in recent voting shifts, as I’ve just done. This may be because it contrasts with polling data, in which voters consistently cite inflation and the economy as their top political issues, with crime typically cited as a much lower concern. I don’t necessary think these poll respondents are lying (although some of them may well be): perhaps inflation is their primary concern, hurting Democrats across the map. But I do posit that, judging by the House results in 2022 (when inflation was far worse than now), inflation is not driving changes in regional political alignment. This makes sense: inflation has occurred everywhere, yet only residents of Long Island watch the New York nightly news. Thus, only the latter could be expected to cause a geographically focused political change that might influence the distribution of votes across the electoral college.
We now arrive at the flip side of the coin: where did Democrats over-perform in 2022 relative to 2020? The easiest way to answer this is to search for the small pockets of blue arrows on the NYT map. These districts, after all, shifted leftward from 2020 to 2022 despite a 7.2% Republican turnout advantage. That’s quite an accomplishment for Democrats in those races.
From the map, we can see that these pockets are concentrated in the northern US, especially in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and, sneakily, Alaska. Identifying the common thread between these regions is a bit more difficult than for those of the GOP-shifting areas, but it can be done: these are overwhelmingly White districts that are economically and culturally northern. By “economically northern,” I mean that, unlike White-dominated areas in other regions of the country, these areas are unlikely to rely on agriculture as their primary industry. And by “culturally northern,” I’m highlighting the various social differences of White voters from these regions compared to those from other regions. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, for one, White voters from these northern states tend not to be descended from members of the Confederacy.
But why would voters from these northern districts be specifically likely to change political preferences toward the Democratic Party? Well, it may suffice to summarize that the factors that have spurred GOP gains elsewhere don’t apply to them. For instance, being so far from the southern border, these voters aren’t likely to be motivated by Trumpian rhetoric on immigration. (In fact, being “culturally northern,” as I designated them, they may be repelled by Trump’s racial dog whistles, which have found welcoming White audiences elsewhere.) And they don’t live near the NYC or LA media markets, so the influence of news coverage regarding crime in those areas doesn’t reach them. The absence of these factors in turn might leave them more receptive to recent Democratic attack lines against Republicans—including regarding abortion rights and the events of January 6th, 2021.
It may still seem suspicious, though, that Democrats’ biggest gains from 2020 to 2022 came in overwhelmingly White areas. Why is Trump’s racial rhetoric only costing his party votes from White people, while the GOP appears to gain votes from the ethnicities of the people their leader most commonly denigrates?
For starters, Democrats already enjoy a huge advantage among Black voters—typically winning 85-90% of that demographic. So relatively few opportunities exist for Democrats to gain support there. But besides this, I can think of a few reasons why the GOP may be making incremental gains among Black voters, even outside of the New York City and Los Angeles areas:
- Black people are disproportionately clustered in New York City and Los Angeles. So even Black voters who don’t live in those metro areas may be getting much of their news, via social media, from Black-run outlets or programs in those areas. This means that the effect of dramatic crime coverage in NYC and LA may influence Black people more broadly across the country (although not to the extent of local Black people), while influencing White people only if they actually live in those regions. (This theory finds potential support in polls finding that GOP gains have come from younger Black voters, since this age group is more likely to rely on social media for news.)
- Democrats’ aggressive rhetoric on polarizing issues like abortion and transgender rights may be costing them Black votes. To be sure, Black people support Democrats’ positions on those issues at higher rates than White people. But even a small percentage of Black people who find these stances intolerable could lead to GOP gains. For instance, 75% of Black people may support re-instituting Roe v. Wade, more than White people, but that’s a smaller percentage than Democrats’ usual support with Black voters—so it could actually lead to defections. Meanwhile, Democrats could make gains with White people simply because this demographic began as less likely to support them.
I’ll cover Hispanic voters in a different post, since few Hispanics reside in the northern districts highlighted here and therefore don’t significantly impact the politics there.
Overall, we’ve arrived at a coherent (albeit oversimplified) look at where party shifts occurred from 2020 to 2022. GOP gains came from major media market areas that covered post-pandemic crime as a dramatic storyline, while Democratic gains came from whiter, less diverse communities that, due to cultural and geographic factors, were relatively uninfluenced by media- and GOP-driven narratives about crime and immigration—potentially leaving them more likely to focus on unpopular GOP positions on abortion and voting rights.
Where does that leave the 2024 Presidential Election? Who’s going to win?
That’s for another post, but consider that three states that can deliver Kamala Harris a victory in the electoral college are Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
–Jim Andersen
You must be logged in to post a comment.