After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories.David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, which does an enormous amount of surveying of the electorate. A few weeks ago, Shor was walking me through a deck he made of key charts and numbers that explain the election results. And I thought this would be good to do in public. Because this is information that doesn’t just help explain what went wrong for Democrats in 2024. It’s a set of hard truths they need to keep in mind to mount a comeback in 2026 and 2028.This episode is also a bit of an experiment. It works great in audio. But on YouTube, you can actually see the slides. So if you’re up for a video podcast, this is a good one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/@EzraKleinShowThis episode contains strong language.Mentioned:Blue Rose Research slide deck"Donald Trump is the perfect 'moderate'" by Ezra KleinBook Recommendations:The Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlozman and Sam RosenfeldThe Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John R. ZallerThe Victory Lab by Sasha IssenbergThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Why did Democrats lose the 2024 election?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. I've been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And I'll say that in the 20-some years I've been covering politics, I have never heard them so confused. Confused about who they are, aside from the opposition to Donald Trump, but confused also about how and why they lost.
How could they have possibly lost this election to this person? But also, how is the Democratic Party weakening so much among groups whose strength, whose support it once took for granted? They're losing working class voters. They're seeing their margins among non-white voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party.
And so I think it's important as this conversation begins to roll forward that it is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024. Someone whose analysis on this have come to respect over the years is David Shore. David Shore is the head of data science at Blue Earth Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm.
It does a huge amount of political surveying and interpretation of data and testing of messaging. He works with campaigns and progressive groups. And so he has a sort of perspective from the inside there. But also over the years, I think he's just a very skilled interpreter of data. It's a very different skill, I should say.
And over years where he's been making some of these arguments, he's gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for American democracy. And frankly, not just American democracy, but other countries, too.
And so when I saw Shore recently and he began walking me through some of his slides, some of the ways he was interpreting the 2024 election and trying to help people see what had happened, my first thought was this would be worth doing in public rather than this being a thing that Democrats are debating in back rooms with each other. What if we did this in public?
Shor was kind enough to come on the show and present this for us. And so this episode is a bit of an experiment. He's walking me through this presentation, and I am interrogating it. It is worth watching if you can. This works in audio. You can listen to it. We describe these charts and graphs and tables.
But in video, which you can see if you go to YouTube and search Ezra Klein Show and go to our channel, it has a different flavor. You can follow along visually, and I think it's worth trying to do so if you can. But I found this really, really helpful and it helped ground some of my thinking in the data. I don't necessarily have every conclusion David does, but I think it is a good place to begin.
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Chapter 2: Who is David Shor and what is Blue Rose Research?
And there's then a lot that can follow from having this conversation. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com. David Shore, welcome to the show. Excited to be here. So what do you do and why should I trust the data you're about to show us here?
Chapter 3: How has voter turnout impacted recent elections?
I'm glad you asked. I'm the co-founder of a research firm called Blue Rose Research. We did 26 million interviews last year. We have a team of about 45 people, machine learning engineers, software engineers from companies like Google. And we've done a lot of work to try to figure out what actually happened last year.
A lot of liberals I know feel really burnt by survey data. There's a sense that nobody picks up the phone. How are you surveying these older people if you're doing it online? Putting aside the fact that you conducted a lot of surveys, why are you confident those surveys reflect reality?
The fundamental problem with survey research is just that people who answer surveys are really weird. There's kind of two ways that you can try to fix that. One is that you could try to get a normal representative set of people. That's just impossible in today's day and age. And the other is that you can just try to collect a lot of information and
So that you can, you know, adjust for how weird they are. You know, the reason I feel fairly confident about this is just, you know, in our work, every time we make any change, you know, to any part of our system, you know, we go back and back test and see how it affects accuracy across, you know, every other election that we've ever surveyed.
We can't be fully confident about any particular thing that we say. A lot of the data isn't back yet. But I think that there's enough data to tell a coherent story. And there's the 26 million survey respondents of 8 million unique people. There's precinct and county-level election results. We're also going to try to tie together all of the external data that other people have done.
And what I'll say about this election is that our forecasts this cycle were very accurate. Our overall error was about a third of a percent nationally. And I think that most of the things that we thought would happen did bear out. And, you know, just I do want to spend a second to answer, you know, something that you had asked a second ago, which is just like, why look at survey data?
But I think that, you know, super politically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process. And I think that the only point other than election day when regular people get a say is in polls. So I take that point.
I always think it is good to remind people me and everybody who listens to the show that they are weird. And if their intuitions about politics were shared, politics would not look the way it does at all. If the voting population were Ezra Kleinjoe listeners and people they know, then elections end up very differently. So I take your point on survey data. So where do we begin?
All right. So first, you know, I'm just going to start with this slide over here that just looks at support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 by race and ideology. In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. And in 2024, Democrats got 58% of Hispanic moderates. That's only about 7% more than the 52% that they got of white moderates.
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Chapter 4: What trends are observed among Hispanic and Asian voters?
The thing I find most surprising here is you look at white voters, liberal, moderate, and conservative. and at least in this data from 2016 to 2024, there is a 0% swing in any of them. Because there are all these things that if you go back to the debates we're having about Donald Trump then, It is the return and resurgence of a coalition trying to protect white power in this country.
And I wrote things about this. I think there's good reason to believe that. Even if that was part of the intention then, that does not appear in the results. Democrats lose modest amount of support among black voters in those years. They lose a huge amount of support among Hispanic voters and a kind of significant amount among Asian voters overall. Why do you think that is?
I think that a lot of political analysis in America has been, you know, really centered around viewing everything through a very America-centric lens. Because there's this story in American politics. Like, if you want to understand 20th century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964. And then... Driven by the Civil Rights Act.
Yeah, driven by the Civil Rights Act. And that carried forward. It took a really long time, you know, for that to really work its way through down ballot. And so I think it was really tempting for American political scientists and kind of a lot of the, you know, more detail-oriented American political pundits to just kind of see everything.
People who wrote books like Why We're Polarized, for instance. Yeah, exactly. Just to see everything through this transformation. But I think the most important trend politically of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world, at least Western country that has elections, has been the story of education polarization.
Everywhere we've seen highly educated people move to the left and, you know, working class people move to the right. I think a lot of people's analytical error when looking at Trump is that they saw Trump as this kind of reincarnation of, you know, the 1960s of like George Wallace or something, when really I think he was representing this global trend.
The other thing that I find interesting here is the shift in voters who self-describe as conservative. There's no shift in white self-described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024. But Democrats are winning 85 percent of black conservatives in 2016, but only 77 percent in 2024. They're winning 75. 34% of conservative Hispanics in 2016. That falls by half to 17% in 2024.
They're winning 28% of conservative Asians in 2016. That falls to 20% in 2024. So it's always a little bit weird for somebody who is self-described conservative to be voting for Democrats who are quite a liberal party now. But what we're seeing among non-white voters is people voting more their ideology and less their ethnic group.
That's exactly right. And I would just say, I think this shouldn't be that surprising. I think now, you know, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. You know, the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals and moderates and conservatives.
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Chapter 5: How are young voters influencing political outcomes?
Oh, yeah, sorry.
Just that... This is why Democrats can't win. That's exactly right.
I'm the problem. But it's basically just that even the lowest political engagement categories, the lowest education categories, you know, the poorer, the lower socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, now the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn't true four years ago.
So here's something that I've heard from a lot of Democrats and very good election analysts, which seems to be in some tension here. There is an argument that what happened to Democrats between 2020 and 2024 is their voters stayed home. And so what happened here was a shrinking of the electorate that disproportionately sliced off what Democrats for a while were calling the anti-MAGA coalition.
How does that idea that Democrats didn't lose to Trump, they lost to the couch sit with you?
who didn't feel ready to vote for a Republican, but were still mad at the Democratic Party. And so they stayed home in response. And if you just look at the demographics of who these people are, who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they're generally low education. They're fairly politically disengaged.
They're much less likely to watch shows like MSNBC and more likely to watch shows like Fox. And they frankly just look a lot like the voters who trended away from us.
So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump.
Right, exactly. And that does show up. You know, if you look at African Americans, for example, African Americans who didn't vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than the ones that did this cycle.
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Chapter 6: What role did inflation play in the 2024 election?
So this gets to another way that I think the data has proven conventional wisdom from at least 2020 wrong. So 2020, you have an election that Joe Biden wins. He wins by less than the polling says he will win by. And one reason he wins by less than the polling says he'll win by is that Donald Trump does much better with Hispanic and Asian voters than he was expected to.
And I remember seeing pretty strong research afterwards and talking to people who study the Hispanic vote and who are saying, well, in 2020, the pandemic really scrambled what the election was about. So in 2016, the election was about immigration. In 2020, it was about the pandemic. It was about lockdowns. It was about the economy.
And so Hispanic voters who were driven off of Trump by his border talk in 2016 were more likely to vote for him in 2020. But that was weird, right? It was the pandemic in a way moderating Donald Trump's appeal, right? 2024, Trump runs, I would say, to the right of where he was on the border in 2016, right? We're talking mass deportations. We're talking more than a wall.
And Trump does better among immigrant groups than he really ever has before. So the Democratic belief that when the topic turned back to immigration, you would see some of that polarization around Trump return and that he would be harmed in immigrant communities did not occur.
No. Inflation probably played some kind of role here, though, you know, the flip side is if you look in the UK again, it happened the same year. It's just that the incumbent was right-wing instead of left-wing. And, you know, their labor did also, you know, drop with, you know, Black and Asian and Hindu voters increasing.
And so I think that there's some kind of globalized right-wing phenomena that's happening. It's hard to know exactly what, but I agree completely. So now I just move on, you know, to the next slide. Here we have Harris support by single age year, by race and gender.
And one of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18-year-olds, you know, 18-year-old women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.
So I do find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and I think if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it's that young people did not like him. And Republicans are maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors. But if you look at this chart among white men, white men who were 75 years old
Supported Kamala Harris. at a significantly higher rate than white men who are 20 years old. That's exactly right. That's a real shift.
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Chapter 7: What issues do voters trust Democrats and Republicans on?
You know, I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems like I was wrong. You know, the future has a way of surprising us. You know, the flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among old voters, and I'm sure that they'll be happy that they did two years from now in the midterms.
But if we don't do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad. And so now I'm just going to move over to a little less descriptive and just kind of talking about how this happened. So right here I have this slide. This is very simple. This is just showing exit poll favorability for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidate in 2020 and 2024.
And, you know, I think it's just really important to ground any discussion of the election with the simple fact that Donald Trump was just as unpopular on Election Day last year as he was in 2020 and maybe even a little bit more unpopular. But what changed is that Biden had a net favorability rating of plus six and Harris had a net favorability rating of minus six.
So I want to play Mike Donilon, who was chief strategist to Joe Biden, was recently at a forum. And he made an argument that I think you at least could read this chart as backing up, which is that Biden was more popular in 2020 than Harris was in 2024. Maybe the Biden-Harris switch was a mistake. Here's Donilon.
I think folks who had this view believed that, you know, that Biden was going to lose. He didn't have it anymore. He had to get out. That was the best thing for the party. I understand that's their view. You know, I have a view too, right? And my view is, I think it was insane. I think the party lost its mind.
Did the party lose its mind?
And that's why we see this chart. I think the best explanation for why Kamala Harris was unpopular is in this next slide, which is just that... The Biden administration was extremely unpopular for most of its term. You know, they saw their approval fall off a cliff after Afghanistan, and then it dropped further as inflation and immigration and the budget fights all happened in the fall.
And then it never recovered. And so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never tell a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his record.
Yeah, it'd be even harder for Joe Biden to run away from Joe Biden, I guess. Yeah. Looking at this chart, it looks like there is a, by January, a plus 20 net disapproval. Maybe that was a little bit smaller in November, but it had been widening. I mean, you go back to beginning of 2023, it was narrower. People were really pissed at the Biden administration by the time we hit the election. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: How can Democrats address their trust deficit on key issues?
There is an argument you hear from many Democrats. There was no problem here except for inflation. that in fact, if you compare democratic vote outcomes with incumbent parties in many other countries, Democrats did better than incumbent parties in other countries did. So you look at the conservatives in the UK, they had a much worse election result.
You look at what happened to the ruling coalition in France, some ways like Democrats were doing fine. They had a fairly modest drop in support. And it's just a shame for them that inflation happened on their watch.
That if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, inflation would have happened on his watch, completely discrediting him and his administration, and that would have been the end of them. How do you distinguish between – there is a broad structural problem the Democratic Party is facing that needs to think about for 2028, and there's actually no problem here –
Yeah, I mean, I think it's when we measure issues, you know, we measure how important voters find it. And then we just measure, do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue? And what you see here is if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about, cost of living, the economy, taxes and government spending, you know, the deficit, foreign policy, you know, health care.
Other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages, 15 points. on all of the issues that voters care the most about. And so the story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues
but also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn't be trusted with power, that made the election be close. But four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee. And maybe they'll nominate somebody who's just as terrible and just as unlikable. But if we don't get out of this trust deficit, I think that, you know, we'll have a lot of problems.
So this is for people listening along. This is a chart broken into quadrants. That's right. And the top right quadrant is issues that are very important and issues where Democrats are more trusted. And it's an untilled bit of farmland up there. That's right. So there's mental health, which voters don't rate that important, but they do trust Democrats quite a bit more.
They rate it higher than they rate, though, climate change and the environment and abortion, which struck me as surprising. Their one bright spot is really health care. That's kind of it in terms of issues where it is quite important and they have a genuinely noticeable advantage.
Yeah, I think it's just worth saying that four years ago, the number one issue was COVID and healthcare. And those also were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on. And so the strategy was really obvious, you know, just talk a lot about COVID and healthcare. But, you know, this time we had a much harder problem, which was that
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