Featured
The Biden administration, and by extension the Harris campaign, fell short of providing a vision for working-class Americans, says Jeremy Paul, of the Northeastern University School of Law.
Donald Trump, persevering through a tumultuous campaign that nearly took his life, was victorious in what was ultimately a decisive win for the former president in a contest many had dubbed “a coin flip.”
The Associated Press called the election in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Republicans also managed to flip the U.S. Senate, while the House remains in contention — and could be for weeks.
With at least 292 electoral votes, Trump secured victories in all of the swing states, with the exception of Nevada and Arizona, which have yet to be called. Victories there could propel his electoral vote total to 312. Only 270 is needed to secure the presidency.
From President Joe Biden’s exit from the race in July to Vice President Kamala Harris’ surprise debut at the top of the Democratic ticket to two assassination attempts on Trump, the 2024 election was nothing short of unusual. Now, the conversation shifts to what the next four years may have in store.
The story of the 2024 election was one of the economy, democracy and immigration, according to exit polling data. The Biden administration, and by extension the Harris campaign, fell short of providing a vision for working-class Americans still reeling from the effects of the pandemic economy, says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.
“Harris had a very, very short time to build a constituency,” Paul says, “and she did an amazing job putting together a campaign, but she never really cracked beyond her base. That is, she didn’t really build a strong connection to the voters that she needed.”
The election also saw abortion rights on the ballot in several states. Many of those measures passed, but others failed in states such as Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. Notably, abortion rights measures passed in states that Trump carried, such as Montana and Missouri.
“Although abortion has not generally been the Democratic Party’s top issue, its importance has been increasing,” says Martha Johnson, an associate professor of government at Northeastern University. “And, according to the New York Times, in August it had surpassed the economy as the main issue for women under 45 in the seven battleground states.”
Gender was also a notable feature of this election cycle, as was the case in 2016, when former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton narrowly lost to Trump. Johnson says academics, the media and others will revisit the question of whether the United States will ever elect a woman to the Oval Office.
Research suggests that voters must see women as more qualified than men if women are to win at the polls, Johnson says. The default image of the U.S. president is male, and the office itself is associated with stereotypically masculine traits, such as assertiveness or strength, she says.
“Although Harris’s career path suggests she possesses these traits in spades, her gender may have led voters to discount them or even to evaluate them negatively because they go against common expectations of how a woman is supposed to behave,” she says.
Trump ran as a former president, winning the Republican primary this year, while Harris ran as a stand-in for Biden, untested by the primary process, with little time to build a campaign. Add to that the fact that vice presidential candidates have historically had a hard time connecting with voters, Paul says, and Harris’ candidacy was beleaguered from the start.
“Given that Trump has already served as president and that voters were not very familiar with Harris until a few months ago, it is hard to imagine Harris being perceived by swing voters as more qualified to serve as president despite her previous experience in public office,” Johnson says.
“Harris was in this extremely strange position of, on the one hand, representing the continuation of a previous administration, and on the other hand, being an agent of change,” Paul says. “At every turn, that put Harris in a double-bind: is she defending Biden, or should she have said that both parties are out of touch?”
Paul says Harris “ultimately leaned toward the latter,” and, therefore, “did not devote a lot of energy to defending Biden’s record.”
There was simply not enough runway for Harris’ campaign to gather the needed momentum to tell the kinds of the stories that would sway voters, Paul says. And one of those stories, according to Paul, is Biden’s handling of the pandemic economy (or so-called “Bidenomics”), which includes efforts to combat inflation and infrastructure investments.
But Americans by and large disapproved of the job he had done, which Paul sees as a critical lapse in political storytelling.
“The Democrats never tried to tell that story in a way that made Biden seem more like a successful steward of the economy, and that turned out to be a catastrophic failure,” Paul says.