How did pollsters perform at this year’s American presidential election? Unlike in the first two contests involving Donald Trump, they didn’t disgrace themselves. They understated his support, but only by a bit. On election eve the aggregates of the final surveys had Kamala Harris in front by around one percentage point nationally, and a virtual dead heat across the swing states. With the count now almost complete, Nate Silver estimates that the national Republican vote is 49.8 per cent and the Democrat 48.3. Trump won all the identified “battleground” states easily, but not by huge amounts.
Assuming a uniform swing (Aussie pendulum–style), an extra point for Harris at Trump’s expense would have flipped his three most marginal states and the overall result. In other words, Harris would have become president with a vote of 49.3 to Trump’s 48.8. The Electoral College architecture still favoured Trump, but only by 0.5 per cent compared with 3.8 in 2020 and 2.9 in 2016.
Trump easily won the college, 312 to 226. But that too was at the modest end of historical outcomes. So you could call the whole thing reasonably close, but not nail-bitingly so.
As is routine after a loss, every element of Harris’s campaign is being judged a disaster. The six-point turnaround from 2020 (a 4.5 per cent Democrat lead to a 1.5 per cent Republican one) is replicated to varying degrees across most cohorts, providing endless points of data to punctuate just how bad it all was for the Harris campaign.
But that’s just the way numbers work: the parts must add up to the whole. It’s really only the big divergences from the national movement that are worthy of note.
Six points is also roughly (with lots of caveats involving turnout and a changed electoral list over four years) the proportion of Joe Biden 2020 voters that shifted (net) to Trump in 2024. From exit polls, ethnicity was the site of serious action: White voters overall swung only a little or not at all but a big 10–15 per cent of non-White Biden supporters made the switch to Trump. And a subset of them, Latino males, did it in spectacular fashion: around a third moved to the Republican, so that most of them (about 55 per cent) voted for Trump.
There also seems to have been an outsized shift to the Republican among young males overall.
You would have heard that this is the first time since 2004 that a Republican presidential candidate won the national (aka “popular”) vote. This statistic is naturally being put on the “not only did Harris lose, but…” pile, but why that matters is not clear. It also facilitates lots of “worst result among cohort X in twenty years” sub-narratives.
Given the similar national results (George W. Bush won by 2.4 per cent), 2004 versus 2024 does do one thing: it provides a respectable framework for examining the demographics of electoral changes over that time.
This Roper Center 2004 data, where breakdowns are available, along with 2024 exit polls (such as NBC, CNN and ABC), do suggest meaningful, if not dramatic, movements among the abovementioned demographics.
For the first time — again from the exit polls — it does seem that the wealthier the elector the more likely they were to vote Democrat. Shifts in that direction have been detected for decades among centre-left major parties across the democratic world. Australia’s Labor is no different, although the relationship doesn’t yet seem to have actually inverted. But that does seem to have been the case for UK Labour this year.
The fact that parties whose roles and self-images are wrapped around protecting the less well-off are no longer the choice of low-income voters is certainly noteworthy. But then, these institutions are relics of earlier eras and, with their ever-declining overall support, seem to be on the way out. Labour versus capital is a creaking paradigm. Should UK Labour fret about the composition of its electoral success or should it get on with trying to govern for all Brits in an equitable and economically and environmentally sustainable way?
Across the Atlantic, the disaster for the Harris campaign was not in losing this or that voting “bloc” but in losing the contest overall. Had she got that extra percentage point the analyses would all be about the Republicans’ existential crisis, and how they are losing the White vote.
I’m not understating the importance of this result. Unlike 2016, it can’t be written off as a fluke. America is an exception to the long-term pattern of shrinking support for major parties, but those parties have been pulled to the extremes. Well, the Republicans certainly have, while the Democrats are caught between a “pragmatic” leadership and an increasingly radical support base. (Harris ran a middle-of-the-road campaign; most of her much-disseminated expressions of “wokeness” were from her 2019–20 attempt to win the primaries.)
Donald Trump is also a special case, with his norm-busting behaviour and unique personality, communication talents and at times utterly gross behaviour. And he is still a threat to American democracy. That slogan wasn’t fake news: his past behaviour, his consistent rhetoric, the eco-system inhabited by his apparent confidants and, most recently, his string of mooted appointments all attest to that fact. If he is still compos mentis in 2028 and wants to run again, it is not unimaginable that the Supreme Court would assist him overcome the pesky 22nd amendment. Or it might facilitate the elevation of a chosen successor.
Are there implications for next year’s Australian election? The majority of money going to online betting markets believes so, with the Coalition for the first time seen as more likely than not to form government. Nine papers’ Resolve poll has respondents saying the same. Of course, the wider context is several months of opinion polls (including the most-watched Newspoll) showing the Coalition just ahead in estimated two-party voting intentions. Mostly because of those polls, political commentators have been delivering non-stop damning critiques of Anthony Albanese’s performance.
Internationally, governments have done badly in elections this year. The cost of living bites savagely in this country as everywhere. But that other overriding element of Trump’s win, “illegal immigration,” doesn’t exist here. It was also a proxy for immigration per se, which over here always plays into community grievance, especially in the current housing crisis.
Peter Dutton is unlikely to attempt to emulate Trump’s overt, outrageous behaviour any more than his own instincts have already led him to. Australia is not America. Dutton has nothing like the showmanship or persona of his American counterpart. No one apart from Trump has.
On the other hand, the American result is unlikely to encourage the Liberal leader to move towards the political centre. •
