The post-COVID electorate
By 
This is the one picture that needs to be at the foundation of any discussion of the 2024 election:
For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, via @jburnmurdoch
2024 Democrats are the red dot.
Absolutely critical context to any postmortem. pic.twitter.com/N6a6L0Pou8— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) November 7, 2024
It is needless to say no consolation, but among incumbent parties in countries with a history of competitive multiparty elections since March 2022, the performance of the Democratic Party ranks near the top. I’m pretty dubious about post hoc One Magic Trick criticisms of campaign strategy (especially when the One Magic Trick turns out to be the party turning to the camera and saying they have the exact same ideological views that you do), but it’s particularly difficult here. But in a context in which incumbents are being routed all over the world, to come within 250,000 votes of winning the Electoral College and severely limiting Trump’s coattails is on its face a substantially above replacement level performance.
Of course, there’s another factor here, which is that Trump has many liabilities and ran what was in at least some respects a poor campaign. It’s possible, as some people have said, that a DeSantis or Noem would have won by a much bigger margin. Possible, but I don’t think certain. Trump makes up for a lot of his obvious deficiencies with his unprecedented ability to mobilize sporadic and new voters, especially among young men. The fact that Republican senate candidates — including perhaps the party’s top recruit in Mike Rogers — generally ran behind Trump in the battlegrounds should give pause to assumptions that Trumpism without Trump would be a more potent political force.
None if this to say that the Democratic Party isn’t facing major problems — educational polarization is creating problems for brokerage parties of the moderate left all over the world, and the malapportionment of the Senate makes the problem in the US particularly acute. But 2024 was just going to be a very, very difficult election to win no matter what, and in 2024 so far nobody across the ideological spectrum has been able to crack the “voters hate inflation” code. Good luck to President-Elect Trump and his Make McKinley Great Again tariff program!