I could never be a doctor. No offense, but I don’t wanna be around most of y’all when you’re healthy and well. Being at your beck and call when you’re sick, disgusting, and hacking up phlegm has NO appeal whatsoever.
But if I had to be a doctor, I’d prefer to be an autopsy doctor. Talk about a pressure-free job: What’s the worst that could happen? You never have to deliver bad news to a grieving widow! Nobody cares if you have lousy bedside manners! (And best of all, who knows what goodies you might find in your “patient’s” pockets?)
A political autopsy is eerily similar to a medical one — complete with the postmortem graft: The organization conducting the autopsy (almost) always wants more work from the client (cha-ching!), so an awful lot of its “conclusions” will dovetail nicely with the services it's trying to upsell.
And I’m not saying it's doing anything unethical. Sometimes, that’s just how it views the world. Either way, if you hire a firm that specializes in PR to conduct your autopsy, it’ll probably point to PR problems. If it specializes in grassroots activism, it’ll hone in on that. It’s an important caveat to keep in mind, because these “analytical, data-driven autopsies” are often less empirical and more artistic, reflecting the biases (and profit models) of the “physician” more so than the “patient.”
Blue Rose Research, a pro-Democratic firm, was tasked with conducting the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign autopsy. Clearly, they worked hard on it: They interviewed 26 million voters, examined the polling data, and synthesized the results. (During the campaign, Blue Rose Research partnered with Future Forward, Kamala’s largest PAC.)
It’s a fascinating postmortem — and it reveals opportunities, vulnerabilities, and liabilities for both parties.
First, it demonstrates the enduring power of the mainstream media: The Republicans didn’t win in 2024 because we got better media coverage but because fewer people watched the media! Consider:
The most engaged people swung toward Democrats between 2020 and 2024, despite the fact that Democrats did worse overall.
Meanwhile, people who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.
And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative. [emphasis added]
The second major finding is that Republicans now do better when more people vote. Under the prior “conventional wisdom,” the key to a GOP victory was an energized base of conservatives and moderates and a depressed turnout by everyone else. Not so anymore:
The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse. [emphasis added]
Of course, that good, old-fashioned Democratic elitism is a tough nut to crack. This was an odd brag, but an amusing anecdote:
One of my favorite stats on this is something that Nate Cohn put out a couple years ago: Working-class white voters who’ve read a book in the last year are much more Democratic than working-class white voters who haven’t.
The third major finding is the non-white flight from the Democratic Party. MAGA’s 2024 comeback didn’t occur via juicing the turnout among white voters but the mass migration of minorities from the Dems:
If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.
But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.
You know, white people only really started to polarize heavily on ideology in the 1990s. Now, nonwhite voters are starting to polarize on ideology the same way that white voters did.
If you look at African Americans, they did not swing nearly as much. But in our polling, before the Kamala switchover, Black voters were poised to swing 7 to 8 percentage points against us.
As to whether this is inevitable, I would say that to some degree getting 94 percent of any ethnic group is unsustainable. But I think the losses that we’re seeing among nonwhite voters and immigrants is symptomatic of this broader, ideological polarization that Democrats are suffering from. [emphasis added]
It also casts doubt on the Democratic strategy of focusing so strongly on ideology:
Fundamentally, 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative. Roughly 40 percent is moderate, 20 percent is liberal, though it depends exactly how you ask it. Sometimes it’s 25 percent liberal. But the reality is that, to the extent that Democrats try to polarize the electorate on self-described ideology, this is just something that plays into the hands of Republicans. [emphasis added]
Additionally, the Democrats realize they’re losing the young male vote, but they still don’t have a clue how to remedy the problem:
[I]f you look at voters under the age of 25, the gender gap has doubled in size. And if you look at 18-year-olds specifically, 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to vote for Donald Trump than 18-year-old women. And gender polarization seems to be increasing in other countries as well. How it plays out varies from country to country. In Germany, for example, young women voted in very high numbers for Die Linke, the left-wing party there.
A lot of different things could be causing this. But I think that if you look at non-political polling, you can really see evidence that there is wild, cultural change afoot here and basically everywhere else in the online world. In Norway, there’s a poll of high school students where the fraction of young men saying, “gender equality has gone too far” spiked in recent years.
I don’t know necessarily what the answer to that is. [emphasis added]
Here is the key message the Trump administration must heed: The future of MAGA will rise or fall on “cost of living issues.” Things like DOGE, Gaza, Ukraine, Greenland, Canada, and the rest matter on the periphery, but this is politics: You’ve gotta keep the “main thing” the main thing.
In 2020, what people cared about the most was Covid and health care. And those were also the issues that people trusted us on the most. And so the thing we had to do was very straightforward: We just had to talk about Covid and health care. That’s what we did. And we won.
But the situation this time was a lot harder. The issue that voters cared the most about was overwhelmingly the cost of living. I really cannot stress how much people cared about the cost of living. If you ask what’s more important, the cost of living or some other issue picked at random, people picked the cost of living 91 percent of the time. It’s really hard to get 91 percent of people to click on anything in a survey.
After the cost of living, it was the size and scope of the federal government, the budget deficit, immigration, crime, and also health care. And people trusted Republicans on these issues by double-digits — except for health care, where we had a 2-point advantage, which was much lower than our traditional advantage on that issue. [emphasis added]
As for how the Democrats will attack Trump, Blue Rose Research recommends focusing on the economy, Elon Musk, and “oligarch-bashing”:
Trump’s approval rating has dropped since he took office. His ratings on his handling of the economy, which historically was a strong suit for him, have dropped the most, and his handling of cost of living has also gone down by quite a bit. And Elon Musk has become much more unpopular and is now the most unpopular member of his administration by a good deal. Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party — namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs. It’s Paul Ryan-ism on steroids.
I think we have a real opportunity to return to the politics of 2012, in terms of vigorously opposing these very unpopular economic changes that Trump is pushing through. [emphasis added]
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