Election Myths, Traps, Truths and Lessons

The presidential election was two weeks ago, and the country’s liberals are already deep into the blame phase. Though we don’t yet have accurate data about how various demographic groups voted, and won’t for months, we’ve entered a preliminary round of explanations and recriminations — a menu of lessons to learn about and adjustments to make to the ideology, worldview and strategy of liberals, which, if history is any guide, will both prove hugely influential and probably, in big ways, wrong. Before those premature post-mortems get fully baked into conventional wisdom, though, I wanted to flag a handful of observations about the race and how it’s already being interpreted — some caveats, some counterpoints, some context that may help us understand the meaning of a big messy election in a big messy country, at least until we get the actually-reliable voter data.

OK, maybe more than a handful.

1. This was not a landslide.

In the end, it seems, Donald Trump’s margin in the national popular vote will be about 1.6 percentage points — the narrowest victory since razor-thin 2000. His margin in the three crucial swing states of the upper Midwest will be about 232,000 votes — a bigger win there than in 2016, but slightly smaller than Joe Biden secured in his famously narrow 2020 win in those same states. It looks unlikely that Trump even won a majority of votes.

The election did mark a decisive shift: a broad, uniform move to the right, down to the county level, that carried a Republican to a popular vote win for the first time in 20 years. But this was not a wipeout even like the one in 2008 (let alone 1932, 1972 or 1984). And if recent history is any guide — control of the presidency has now flipped in three consecutive cycles — it may not be an enduring majority, either.

It was an undeniably consequential victory, given the Trumpist transformation of state power it promises. But is it of a scale that demands a national epistemological break, yielding a new set of stories about the country and its direction, the nature of expertise and the course of social history? We’re about to see.

2. Perhaps we should talk less about “polarization” than “parity.”

The 2024 election was the fourth consecutive contest in which the popular-vote margin was less than five percentage points; the last stretch like this ended in 1896. As recently as the 1990s, Democrats had maintained continuous control of the House of Representatives for four decades; since 2008, control has flipped back and forth three times.

As Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin wrote in a report for the American Enterprise Institute titled “Politics Without Winners” in October, “the American party system is in an unusual extended deadlock,” in which “close elections and narrow majorities dominate electoral politics more than at any other point in American history.” You might choose to see this as maddening, or healthy, or perhaps both.