Picking up where he left off in the Big 10 column in our Weekend Edition, Editor JEFF D’ALESSIO asked a second set of University of Illinois political-science professors: What was your most surprising, revealing or fascinating takeaway from 2024 presidential race? ALICIA URIBE-McGUIRE “I find it surprising that Kamala Harris received lower shares of the vote in Florida, Missouri and Montana than Joe Biden in 2020 despite abortion initiatives receiving greater than 50 percent of the vote in all three states. (The Florida initiative did not surpass the threshold of 60 percent for passage). “Typically, when these types of initiatives are on the ballot during presidential election years, they influence either turnout for those who care about the issue or the factors that voters consider.
“Given the majority vote for abortion in all three states, I would have expected a slightly better performance of Harris in each state.” SCOTT ALTHAUS “What I find most remarkable in the presidential election results is how uniform and widespread the small shifts in Republican support seem to have been in 2024 relative to 2020 vote totals. “Instead of being concentrated primarily in battleground states where the campaigns were focusing their attention, most counties across the nation are reporting at least a small increase in the share of the presidential vote that went to Trump compared to how those counties voted four years ago.
“Because the popular vote is still being counted, we don’t yet know if this shift is coming from an increased turnout among Republican supporters, a decreased turnout among Democratic supporters or a change of mind among people who used to support Democrats but now support Republicans. It may end up being a combination of all three. “There is no simple answer to explain what happened on Election Day, and there is no single factor that can account for President-Elect Trump’s remarkable victory.
“But given the widespread shift in support that we see in county-level returns, it seems likely that one of the important factors will turn out to be the inflationary pressures that were so broadly experienced across the country during the Biden Administration.” ALEKS KSIAZKIEWICZ “What I find most interesting about this election cycle is the prospect that it is a realigning election. Realignment is an important concept in political science.
Realigning elections are seen as watershed moments that reshaped the parties’ bases in long-lasting ways, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s win in 1932 or Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980. “After 2016, there was a fair bit of speculation among political scientists about whether (Donald) Trump’s election would bring about such a realignment. That may have been premature, given his loss in 2020.
Trump’s win this year is in line with global trends towards populism and anti-incumbency in the wake of inflation after the pandemic. “But given the inroads that Republicans have made this year with traditional Democratic constituencies in particular, such as African American and Latino men, I do wonder whether the 2024 election may be seen as a realigning election in retrospect. To know for sure, we’ll have to see whether these shifts are temporary or signal changes in the parties’ bases into future elections.
“At the same time, what I find most worrisome about this election cycle is the potential for deterioration in America’s democratic institutions. Forbearance, where leaders show moderation in their approach to politics and don’t push every conflict to the limits of their constitutional power, has been shown to be an important feature of stable democratic systems. “I think it’s fair to say forbearance hasn’t been a defining feature of Trump’s playbook.
For instance, Trump played a key role in the political violence that occurred on January 6, 2021; he referred to the media as ‘the enemy camp’ in his victory speech Wednesday morning; and his legal team has successfully broadened the scope of presidential criminal immunity in arguments before the Supreme Court. “Although Trump has distanced himself from some of the more extreme elements of Project 2025, I do worry that his promoting a winner-take-all, good-and-evil perspective on politics opens the door to changing the rules of political competition in the direction of illiberal democracy, where individual rights and the rule of law are undermined even if elections are still held. “See, for example, Hungary and Turkey.
” GISELA SIN “First, the extent to which Trump was able to get into/break down the (Barack) Obama coalition, especially his gains among young people, between the ages of 18 and 29, and Latinos. “Second, the fact that the movement toward the Republican Party did not go down the ballot. The party that wins the White House usually tends to also win seats in the House.
That has not happened in this case, where the two parties will still be very close. “Many races are not defined yet, but the only changes are the three seats Democrats flipped in New York, and the three Republicans flipped in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Other than that, the seat distribution seems to be very stable, even with the big shift in the presidential elections.
” DON CASLER “I was surprised that the election did not end up being a particularly close call, at least in terms of electoral votes — we’ll see where the final state-level margins come in and how the popular vote shakes out in the coming days and weeks. “I say that not only as someone who is professionally and personally concerned with the state of democracy in this country, but also as someone who closely monitored the polls over the last six-plus months. “Perhaps those of us who analyze politics for a living have become too accustomed to close elections, but virtually every polling average compiled by major news outlets and other elections junkies estimated that the race was a statistical dead heat as it came down to the wire.
“In conjunction with other data points that emerged over the final week of the campaign — such as the Selzer poll from Iowa that had Harris up by three points and a raft of early-voting data suggesting that women were turning out in larger numbers than men — these dynamics suggested to me that Harris had a path to victory, however narrow. “Given these pieces of information, more than a few prominent elections analysts wondered on social media if the race could actually be as close as the polls indicated, or if perhaps many pollsters and analysts were hedging their bets, or maybe even censoring results that were too obviously pro-Harris for fear of being wrong yet again. “Based on what we knew going into Election Day, my best guess was that she would scrape together exactly 270 EVs by winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin while losing Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina; I figured that Nevada was more of a toss-up.
“Do Harris’ losses in all seven swing states suggest that the polls were wrong? Not necessarily, though there remain real concerns about whether pollsters can adequately reach Trump supporters through their mix of new and traditional sampling methods. It’s too soon to say much about the final margins in Arizona or Nevada, but if we eyeball the other swing states, Trump’s statewide margins all appear to be within the typical margin of error of 3 to 4 percentage points. “To their credit, many analysts also observed that the race was only a typical polling miss away from ending up with a comfortable victory for one candidate or the other, and I’d say that point of view has been vindicated.
“But still, why didn’t more analysts see this coming? Perhaps because the answer was so obvious as to seem unremarkable — to borrow James Carville’s indelible phrase, it’s the economy, stupid. “Despite a strong and broad economic recovery from the shock of the pandemic, many Americans are struggling with the persistent effects of inflation. Whereas ‘economic anxiety’ might have been code for a variety of cultural grievances in 2016, and Trump certainly didn’t shy away from similar arguments in 2024, this time I think it is easier to say that a lot of voters were motivated by blind retrospection, and specifically a sense that the Biden/Harris administration was unsympathetic to their difficulties with affording basic necessities.
“In that way, the surprising thing about the result is the enduring relevance of a fairly simple model for thinking about voting behavior: what have you done for me lately?”.
Politics
Town Hall | UI political scientists' top takeaways from the race for the White House
"Do Harris’ losses in all seven swing states suggest that the polls were wrong? Not necessarily, though there remain real concerns about whether pollsters can adequately reach Trump supporters through their mix of new and traditional sampling methods."