The Monday morning quarterbacking, the recriminations, the endless “what ifs” have been traded for the prognostications that preceded a presidential race analysts and pundits by and large agreed could end with Republican or Democrat victory.
“The swing states tend to all go in the same direction,” said Mark Mellman, CEO of the Mellman Group, a Democratic polling firm. “Those undecided voters tend to fall disproportionately in the same direction, so the ultimate outcome is really irrelevant. But the 50-50 division, the 50-50 leverage is exactly what we had in this race.”
Former President Donald Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris, winning the electoral college 312 to 226, the popular vote, all seven swing states, and Trump’s Republican Party also captured control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
Mellman was speaking on a panel, “Winners, Losers and Surprises: Breaking Down the 2024 Elections,” a Mastering the Room podcast sponsored by the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM), which is housed in the George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies (CPS). Casey Burgat, a GSPM associate professor and director of the legislative affairs master’s program, moderated the panel. Mellman and Burgat were joined by Whit Ayres, president of North Star Opinion Research, a national opinion and public affairs research firm for Republican political clients.
CPS Dean Liesl Riddle introduced the panel as respected voices in American politics who brought decades of experience in polling, political strategy and campaign insights into a conversation that was recorded in Jack Morton Auditorium on Tuesday evening, a week after the elections. “[The conversation] will dive into key aspects of the election, including polling accuracy, voter sentiment…and explore the election results and what they mean for governing in 2025 and beyond," Riddle said in opening remarks.
Though speaking from opposite sides of the political spectrum, both panelists generally agreed that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election should not have come as a surprise.
“Amazing to think that as close as this election was, there is no presidential election, no administration that has ever won re-election with a job approval of 40 percent or less in the history of polling,” Ayres said. “Kamala Harris was essentially running for the second term of Joe Biden. She could not disentangle herself from a very unpopular incumbent.”
Mellman explained the results were also predictable based on a Yale economist’s model that relied on certain economic indicators—the GNP, the GDP, inflation and the unemployment rate—to determine Harris would get about 48% of the vote. (Harris received 48.1% of the popular vote.)
“All along the question was, what was going to be more important to voters, the fundamentals (of the economy) or Donald Trump’s manifold failures and failings,” he said. “We know the answer now. It’s the fundamentals.”
Burgat asked why there were split tickets in some states where voters opted for the Democrat running for the Senate but delivered the state to Trump. “People don’t ascribe the same failures of the current administration to everybody in the Senate,” Ayres said.
“In 2019, gas prices were about $1 a gallon cheaper on average than they are now, and $100 worth of groceries are $125 today. Inflation has moderated a lot, but it is not going backwards. And you are never going to get that $125 worth of groceries for $100 again. Now for a lot of people, it doesn’t matter that much. People for whom inflation was not a hardship voted 77% for Kamala Harris.”
Mellman said the Democratic campaign could have pointed more often to Biden administration successes such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the Build Back Better law, the reduced cost of insulin and to the move to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs—all things that voters would have liked but probably didn’t know about.
“The economic message was not as clearly articulated as it could be,” he said. “People were suffering as a result of inflation, and you didn’t get the sense there was a recognition on the part of the campaign that people were suffering and legitimately suffering.”
But he doubts it would have made a difference. Ayres concurred and gave Harris credit for “a fairly remarkable job.”
“She was thrown into an incredible pressure cooker at the very last minute,” he said. “She had a great rollout, she had a great convention, and she owned the debate. This loss is more on Joe Biden than it is on Kamala Harris.”
What if Biden had stepped down earlier? What if there had been an open convention? What if the Democrats had had a more empathetic message? The hypotheticals are endless. One thing was certain.
“Donald Trump is such a unique candidate. The rules that apply to everybody else just don’t apply to Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “He seems to have a magnetic hold on his supporters.”
The two panelists slightly disagreed on what lies ahead, with the GOP controlling the White House and Congress. “[Trump] has a mandate to govern,” Mellman said, “not to deport immigrants.”
Ayres added that the mass deportation that Trump promised during the campaign, “a population the size of the state of Georgia, would be particularly impossible.”
And if Trump acts as if he does have a mandate, Mellman added, “He will trip over the American people who are not interested in all the policies he’s advocating.”
But Democrats, Ayres threw in, have “a real issue with culture that tends to be driven by white liberals,” insisting on pronouns, paying for sex change operations for prisoners and allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports—points, he said, that helped Trump create a multiethnic coalition Democrats had carried since the administrations of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.