The 2024 presidential election completely upended many people’s expectations. After Democrats booted Joe Biden from the top of their ticket to put Kamala Harris in place, she lost all seven of the major battleground states.
And now, as Republicans plan to drag Democrats’ “political dead bodies through the streets and burn them,” and Democrats deal with a reckoning, a few trends have emerged that continue to baffle some onlookers.
Here are five major shocks of the 2024 presidential election — and why they might have happened.
Donald Trump’s return
There’s no other way to describe this. The fact that a president who was at one point seen as persona non grata in Washington after the January 6 riot came back in full force to win a landslide election is nothing short of astonishing. It’s a comeback for the ages.
It happened despite the fact that Trump’s rantings and ravings became more outrageous as he continued down the campaign trail, peddling lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and making bizarre gestures at his rallies.
In the end, Trump won because of dissatisfaction with the economy. And unlike 2016, when he lost the popular vote, he comes to Washington with a clear mandate.
The Dobbs effect petered out (though not everywhere)
In 2022, Democrats got a serendipitous surprise when what should have been an apocalyptic midterm election turned out better than expected after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision mobilized angry women and their political allies.
Democrats continued that streak in 2023 when they won governor’s races in Kentucky, enshrined abortion rights in Republican states like Ohio and flipped Virginia’s legislature. They went all-in on abortion rights this election too, specifically focusing on horror stories of women dying from pregnancy complications or women having to flee red states for healthcare.
It didn’t pan out the way they wanted. In Florida, a constitutional amendment failed to earn the requisite 60 percent of the vote after Governor Ron DeSantis vehemently opposed it (even though 57 percent voted for it). In Nebraska, a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights failed, while one to prohibit abortion after the first trimester succeeded.
Elsewhere, abortion provisions did pass, including in Republican states like Missouri and in purple states like Arizona, despite the fact Trump would win.
Democrats had to work harder than expected in red state races
Democrats entered the election fully expecting they might lose the Senate. They were on defense in three states Trump had won twice: Ohio, West Virginia and Montana. But while flipping West Virginia was all but guaranteed, Jon Tester’s loss in Montana and Sherrod Brown’s loss in Ohio are no less bruising.
But perhaps just as surprising was just how hard Democrats had to work to win in red states. In North Carolina, Democrats easily disposed of Mark Robinson to elect Josh Stein as governor. Democrats would also win the superintendent, attorney general and secretary of state races, despite the fact Trump won the state.
It would not be so simple in other states. In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin, for whom Republicans struggled to find a credible challenger before settling on Eric Hovde, only narrowly won re-election in a state that voted for Trump. And it’s not because Baldwin is some crossover juggernaut: It’s just that fewer people voted in the Senate race.
The same can be said about Elissa Slotkin’s victory in Michigan. Fewer people voted in that race, too. If Democrats can take any comfort, it might be that Trump has a unique appeal other Republicans simply do not have.
Democratic collapse in blue areas
Democrats didn’t just lose the battlegrounds they hoped to flip. On net, they actually did better in some swing states than they did in blue states.
Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, flagged that the swing toward Trump in the seven battleground states was about 3.1 percentage points, but the swing everywhere else was about 6.7 points. Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman, pointed out on X/Twitter that, in a Trump +6 national swing, Wisconsin Democrats kept it to about a relatively modest +1.5 percent swing.
New York is one pertinent example of the Democratic blue area collapse. In 2020, a little more than 60 percent of New Yorkers voted for Joe Biden and a little under 38 percent voted for Trump. This time, Trump won about 44 percent of the vote in the Empire State.
This repeated itself in Massachusetts and elsewhere. In Wayne County, Michigan, the solidly Democratic county that includes Detroit, 68.32 percent of voters broke for Joe Biden in 2020. But in 2024, only 62.48 percent voted for Harris.
This is a stunning failure on behalf of the Democratic Party. The problem wasn’t their battleground or turnout operation. That looks like it did the job. The problem was the Democratic brand — their own voters don’t seem to like it.
Democratic House hopes hang by a thread
Winning back the House was supposed the easiest part of Election Night for Democrats. That turned out not to be the case.
Control of the lower chamber hangs by a thread at the time of writing. In Pennsylvania, all three battleground races broke for Republicans, including two Democratic-held House seats. In Michigan, Elissa Slotkin’s open House seat went to a Republican. Hopes of flipping Iowa’s 3rd district went up in smoke.
If Democrats are to have any hope of winning the House, they will need to bank on races in the West, particularly in Oregon, California and Arizona.
