After November, practitioners will notice something missing from their lives. No, not the steady ping of calendar reminders. Rather they’ll likely feel the absence of any meaningful post-mortem written by practitioners or party organizations on the 2024 cycle.
Autopsy reports are increasingly the victims of our polarized politics and into the void these analyses leave, enters punditry.
In fact, that distant hum you hear is political pundits working overtime to explain the election outcome with one simple, trendy subgroup. You know the drill. On Election Night, pundits will peruse exit poll data of questionable accuracy and announce that one demographic group, usually with a catchy name, either shifted its vote support or turned out at a higher rate, and this one group explains the entire election.
For example, pundits shorthanded the 1994 election as the result of “angry white men.” In 1996, pundits famously explained the election as “soccer moms” flexing their electoral muscle. In 2004, pundits explained the election by focusing on evangelicals and “NASCAR dads.”
While entertaining, this analysis is reductionist in the extreme, overly simplistic, and misrepresents how pollsters and campaign managers think about elections. But pundits do it because (1) it’s an easy soundbite, (2) it’s simpler than an actual analysis, and (3) if they can make it stick, they will be paid to give speeches about it.
Make no mistake: every analyst who takes this intellectual shortcut knows better. But, they take it because broadcast and short-form journalism isn’t conducive to a deeper analysis. If a pundit only has ten seconds to summarize an election, they simply don’t have the time to explain how the fundamentals of the race shaped the outcome and how marginal changes in turnout and vote support impacted the result.
The same pundits further calculate that if competitors are going to engage in faux analysis that captures the zeitgeist, they have no choice but to engage in this faulty analysis as well. In the end, each election cycle features pundits and pollsters hyping the one voter segment they hope will generate free publicity for their firms. They lock on three to five cross-pressured voting segments early in the election cycle, give them catchy names, and begin referencing them with media over the summer months before the post-Labor Day campaign frenzy.
There are three reasons why this over-used analytical shortcut is simply wrong. First, America’s ethnic, regional, generational, and cultural diversity means that hundreds of small target populations could be constructed, tracked, studied, and marketed as the most decisive voter segment. This is exponentially true with the voter data and computing power that we have today. With 1996 computing technology, the Clinton campaign demonstrated that microtargeting extremely small voter segments can add up to victory. Today, we have vastly stronger computing power and much more detailed consumer and voter data.
Second, in an extremely close election, almost any significant turnout or vote support shifts could prove decisive. If an election with more than 150 million votes cast is decided by several hundred thousand voters in seven swing states, one could logically argue that even minute shifts in one or more niche voter segments were the difference.
This leads to the third problem with this analysis: it’s almost never the shifting of one group but is instead the sum total of many, often offsetting, shifts among cross-pressured voters.
The problem is that election analysis by trendy subgroup has a kernel of truth. If the Harris campaign is victorious, pundits can plausibly argue that it was due to increased female voter support, strong support from Gen Z and Millennials, an increase in support among suburban, college-educated voters, or small crossover support from moderate Republicans.
If the Trump campaign is victorious, pundits can plausibly argue it was due to shifting support among blue-collar men, a generational shift in the voting patterns of Hispanic voters, increased support among non-college-educated men, or Republican inroads among younger black men. All of these are likely to be true on election night.
The real story won’t be one single group, but how all of these shifting vote tendencies add and subtract to the victor’s advantage. For example, if Harris wins, her campaign will have successfully improved its margins with female voters, GenZ and Millenials, while holding down its losses among blue-collar men and Hispanic voters. If Trump wins, his campaign will have successfully increased male and non-college educated support at a level that offsets deterioration among college educated, suburban voters.
The more corrosive part of election explanation as unitary subgroup is that it often plays to pre-existing biases of America’s elite. It enables our chattering class to blame or laud one group or another for the result. This may be strangely comfortable to our elite, but it doesn’t capture the reality and complexity of the American mosaic.
For example, there’s a common misbelief that Americans aren’t internationally sophisticated, are unaware of other cultures, rarely travel abroad, and lack the ability to assess foreign policy issues. But 48 percent of Americans now hold a passport, up from a mere 5 percent in 1990, according to the State Department.
As Election Day approaches, you’ll read and hear pundits jockeying for their one subgroup as the explainer to the election. Some of these, like shifting Hispanic voting patterns, will have a strong element of truth. They may even be critically important voting trends over the next few decades. But remember that the key to the election was never just one group with a catchy name. The math is much more complicated than that.
Robert Moran is a management consult, public opinion expert, and Partner at the Brunswick Group
