How much did the presidential campaigns matter in 2024?

Going into this year’s election, Democratic optimism was based on several apparently solid factors:

(1) The Harris campaign spent a lot more money, both on advertising and staffing, than the Trump campaign.

(2) Harris had by all accounts a far more impressive get out the vote operation than Trump.

(3) Harris got all sorts of high profile celebrity endorsements; Trump was stuck with Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock.

(4) Harris was almost universally adjudged to have done vastly better than Trump in their one presidential debate.

(5) Trump’s campaign ended with a week of what seemed like a fiasco of bad publicity, culminated by a neo-Nazi-style rally at Madison Square Garden that produced very widespread condemnation in the mass media. More generally, there was nothing in 2024 resembling the EMAILZ nonsense of 2016: the legacy media did not, in my opinion, treat Harris unfairly to any significant extent, and it actually did a fairly decent job of covering Trump’s comprehensive horribleness, despite disgraceful incidents like the plutocrat owners of the WAPO and the LA Times refusing to allow their editorial boards to endorse Harris.

Nevertheless, Trump improved his performance by six percentage points over 2020. Harris ended up with six and half million fewer votes than Biden.

All this would seem to argue for a fairly strong null hypothesis in regard to how much the presidential campaigns per se actually end up mattering to the final result in 2024.

The only countervailing evidence I can find to this is that Harris did far more poorly, relative to Biden in 2020, in the big non-competitive blue states (New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois) than she did in the swing states, which at least suggests that the furious campaigning in the latter made some difference against the national trend, although obviously not enough. On the other hand there were many deep red states in which Harris’s decline relative to Biden wasn’t any worse — and in some cases wasn’t even as bad — as her overall decline at the national level (6%), despite the Harris campaign putting no resources into those state races. Strikingly, Harris did worse than Biden did in all 50 states. You can compare 2024 to 2020 state level results here.

I’m certainly open to the possibility that presidential campaigns are, under contemporary political and cultural conditions, becoming significantly less effective than they were in the past. 2024’s results would at least suggest that may be the case. (How much all or any of this applies to non-presidential campaigns is a separate question).