James Carville’s famous saying, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was a guiding principle for the campaign that propelled Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. It’s the focus that led the little-known Arkansas Governor to deliver an electoral landslide victory over the incumbent Republican president, George H. W. Bush.
Waking up today and reviewing the exit poll data, it feels like somebody in the Harris Campaign HQ should have run that James Carville message on loop across the seven swing states. On the ground here in Bucks County, the campaign was being waged on Women’s Rights, on Preserving Democracy, and on giving down payment money to first time home buyers.
The exit polls, however, show that the economy was the number one concern. 39% of voters, a plurality, stated the economy was the top issue on their minds and only 13% of them felt financially better off than they had under President Trump. 31% of Americans felt that they were falling behind.
You can’t win the White House when nearly a third of Americans feel your party’s policies are leaving them worse off year-over-year. And with Pew Research Center finding in May that 62% of Americans feel inflation is “a very big problem”, your cornerstone economic proposals have to stay well clear of any further inflationary forces. Zillow’s chief economist believed that the proposed $25,000 downpayment assistance would only serve to increase inflationary forces on housing prices and further drive up home prices in the most expensive housing markets.
An area where Democrats expected to favor them heavily, perceived threats to democracy, also ended up ranking high on the list of voters’ concerns. But the impact here likely didn’t favor either party. Most voters (72%) see democracy as threatened, which Democrats presumed would work to bolster a Harris victory. A deeper look shows that from 2021 through to today, both parties believe the other to be a nearly-equal threat to democracy. Marist, in an October 2021 survey, found 42% of respondents felt the Democrats were the more pressing threat to democracy. 41% believed the Republicans to be the greater threat.
In March of 2024, 49% of respondents in the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Civility Poll believed MAGA Republicans were a significant threat to democracy. With a roughly 1:1 ratio of registered Republicans to registered Democrats in the United States, this is a clear sign that the current electorate’s blame for risks to the future of our democracy is still an even divide. This, statistically, doesn’t appear to be an issue that was going to move the needle with independent voters.
Immigration, which has led the national political conversation for years as an umbrella for myriad other social challenges, was a primary concern for 20% of voters and didn’t make it into any of the ground-game scripts or campaign literature that I directly observed in Bucks County. Trump’s message of large-scale deportations seems to have resonated with voters, who trust Republicans over Democrats to secure the border and find back against an immigration crisis.
The Harris campaign in its closing weeks tried to remind voters that Democrats had pushed an incredibly conservative border plan forward, but that Trump spiked it for political gain. It would seem that voters felt the better approach to supporting that plan was not to penalize Trump and give Dems another chance to move it across the finish line, but to instead give Donald Trump the chance to bring his own version of the same bill in front of a Republican-controlled Congress. Democratic messaging on immigration tends to push support for asylum seekers as a humanitarian issue, but ⅔ of voters who consider immigration a top concern want less support for asylum seekers.
Lastly, let’s look very briefly at women’s reproductive health. The Democrats clearly thought that protecting a woman’s right to choose and guaranteeing access to abortion was going to be a winning issue for them in this election. However, exit polling showed that only 11% of voters nationwide felt it was their top concern. In Pennsylvania, it ranked higher at 15%, but still fell behind the economy and the state of the democracy.
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Many Pennsylvania voters may falsely believe that due to a state Supreme Court ruling early this year, abortion access is constitutionally protected in Pennsylvania. We won’t know, without further polling and engagement with voters, if this led Pennsylvania voters to feel secure voting Republican at the top of the ticket, despite national Republican messaging about support for a total federal abortion ban. I wrote here just 12 days ago that Republican Dave Sunday, our presumptive next Attorney General, took the debate position that abortion access was protected in the Commonwealth and that he would never prosecute a woman who underwent the procedure.
Over the coming weeks, a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me are going to dissect these things further. But I think it’s simplest to say that the national party misread the electorate, here, and failed to come up with a strong economic argument early enough to win what appears to have been a presidential race run primarily on the economy.
The only thing that is abundantly clear is that Trump’s win is a definitive rebuke of the direction of the Democratic Party at a national level. In Bucks, our Democratic General Assembly representatives won their re-elections. The county supported our local voices and the direction they’re moving in Harrisburg. The most important thing, now, is to listen to them and their voters to understand where we go from here.
The second most important thing is that we listen to James Carville and remember, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
