Fasten Your Seatbelts, Its Going to Be a Bumpy Four Years!

For the past three weeks, political pundits have pored over data in an effort to understand what happened with the 2024 presidential election.  As Democrats lick their wounds and regroup, Republicans are celebrating this unusual win.  For the first time in 20 years a Republican candidate has won the popular vote, and prior to 2004 when George Bush beat John Kerry, we go back to 1988 when George HW Bush won against Michael Dukakis. So what happened? One of the most surprising trends was that minority voters, and particularly men, edged toward Trump as 3/10 African American men under 45 voted Republican; this is twice the percentage as in 2020.  Latinos, a Democratic stronghold, shifted Republican and the 34% gap that benefitted Biden in the 2020 election was reduced to only 14% in 2024. The only demographic where Trump did not make inroads was college educated white women. 

What were the driving concerns for voters? The answer is that the economy weighed heavily  as did immigration and while reproductive freedom was important for women, it didn’t lead to the turnout that Harris needed. In fact, there were multiple factors at play, but here are a few important facts that shaped the outcome.

Supersize me!  The first defining theme of the 2024 election is the role of the billionaire class in shaping the outcome and the future of public policy in the US.  Since our founding, business has held a privileged position with government.  But the super-rich have become the driving force, the “new DNA of our elections” as one commentator noted.  This was manifest in their capacity to shape the narrative about what was at stake in this election through disinformation campaigns that made a strong and recovering economy look feeble and painted immigrants as crime and disease-ridden multitudes overrunning the nation. 

Billionaires contributed nearly $2 billion to the 2024 election, fully 60% more than what they contributed in 2020. Elon Musk, most prominent among the 150 billionaires who sought to purchase a government favorable to his  interests, contributed $132 million and aggressively promoted Trump on his platform X.  Musk actually held $1 million dollar daily giveaways in battleground states for registered voters.  The bulk of these contributions went to Trump who received three times as much as did Harris (Americans for Tax Fairness).  But the influence of the super-rich reaches beyond campaign contributions.  Consider that right wing billionaire Peter Thiel who funded JD Vance’s 2022 campaign for Senate lobbied Trump to put him on the Republican ticket.  Currently, Musk is central to the new administration and is now sitting in on Trump’s calls to foreign leaders, so we can assume that his influence will be substantial.

While Trump has claimed a landslide victory, this was a very close race with lower turnout than in 2020 election, particularly among Democrats.  The final tally was 76.8 million for Trump/74.3 million for Harris, giving Trump a win by 2.5 million votes, or 1.5 points over Harris.  In fact, Trump’s 2024 win was nearly 5 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020 (81.2 million) and only 2 million more votes than he received in 2020 when he lost.  This demonstrates that Trump’s base has not grown substantially.  It has consistently remained white, non-college educated voters that predominate in the South and Midwest and he didn’t show much expansion beyond this group. 

His campaign strategy targeted the inconsistent and first-time voter and while he made some inroads with minorities, white college educated voters backed Harris in 2024, a shift from 2016 when they leaned toward Trump and college educated women backed Harris by 15 points, a higher percentage than Biden or Hillary Clinton earned from this demographic. 

A particularly concerning demographic that shifted the results of this election is the voting behavior of those under 30. Young people stayed home in larger numbers than in the past.  Only 42% of people between 18-29 voted in this election, which is a drop from 2020 when 52% of this cohort voted.  According to the Center for Inflation and Recession at Tufts, this was 14% of all the votes in 2024, compared with 17% of votes in 2020.  So young people could have handed this election to Harris, as they tend to lean liberal.  Possible reasons include the genocide occurring in Gaza that Harris did not effectively separate herself from. 

Moreover, several university campuses shut down political protests over Gaza this past fall and the loss of First Amendment rights was a sore point with young voters.  Additionally, key cities in Michigan and other battle ground states with large communities of Arab Americans either voted Republican or stayed home.  In an election this close, the loss of votes from these cohorts shifted the outcome.  

In sum, we have to consider whether the aggressive misinformation campaigns shaped the final outcome. By all accounts, the US economy is emerging strong from COVID. The Wall Street Journal noted that the next president inherits ‘an economy that is putting its peers to shame, outrunning every other major developed economy not to mention is own historical growth rate’ (10/31).  Moreover, economists attribute the strong economies in high immigrant states to the labor pool of immigrants.  These two issues were Republican talking points in the campaign and in social media.  

We can say that voters turn out in high numbers when they are voting the opposing party out of office, which they did.  And we may find that they turn around and vote Democrat in the mid-term election.  But here is the most concerning issue.  What this administration has made evident is their intention to centralize executive power in the presidency, reduce government drastically, and reduce freedoms. 

This election is part of a larger trend of right wing, populist governments fueled by a politics of grievance sweeping Europe and Latin America.  One of the first efforts of these regimes is to close down dissent, which begins by manipulating the public narrative to delegitimate populations the state opposes.  It is a strategy that played to great effect in this election.  These may be dark days for constitutional governance and democracy.  We are headed into uncharted waters that stand to impact not only the US, both the international order.

Dr. Jennifer Alexander is a world-renowned authority in public administration and nonprofit governance, currently serving as an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the College for Health, Community, and Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from Virginia Tech and is widely recognized for her expertise in public administration theory, administrative responsibility, and nonprofit governance. Dr. Alexander founded the Center for Nonprofit Policy and Practice at Cleveland State University and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Nacional de Colombia. A recipient of prestigious honors, including the Outstanding Article of the Year award from Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and the Presidential Citation of Merit from the American Society for Public Administration, her groundbreaking research and extensive publications have shaped the field of nonprofit policy and public administration globally.

Dr. Jennifer Alexander Professional website

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