Ron Brownstein
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Ron Brownstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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No, non-college white women. Non-college. Non-college white women who supported legal abortion but were negative on the economy. they voted two to one for Trump. Even the college white women who supported legal abortion and were negative on the economy only narrowly voted for Harris. And all of this explains what I kind of view as a critical variable, which is that if you look at 2022,
and you look at candidates like Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Tony Evers, Raphael Warnock, Katie Hobbs, Mark Kelly, they all won a significantly higher share of voters who were pro-choice in their state than Harris did two years later. I mean, Harris just, the abortion issue did not move as many people as it did two years earlier because too many of them
We're unhappy with the economy and we're not willing to look past it in the presidential race in the way they were in a governor or Senate race. And to me, you know, we can talk about the structural change and you can't deny there's some of that happening with nonwhite men in particular.
But the core thing that happened was that economic discontent overwhelmed both the Democrats best issues and overwhelmed the doubts about Trump, which are still there.
You know, it turned out that, I don't know, what was the period of the highest inflation? The summer of 21 till the fall of 22? Like, it turned out that was the decisive period of this election. And that 2022, as I wrote, kind of gave Democrats a misleading signal.
Because, you know, as you wrote, I wrote, everybody wrote, it was Democrats in 22 won an unprecedentedly high share of voters who were discontented with Biden and discontented with the economy.
Not this time.
That's definitely part of the story. I mean, I think one big part of the story is that voters view the president as the repository of economic policy, and we're not as willing to look past their economic discontent in picking a president as they were a governor or senator. So I think that's part of it. But I agree.
And your day-to-day life. You know, look, I mean, before we get to your second point, maybe this does get to your second point. I mean, all year, right, Democratic pollsters and people working in kind of progressive groups would say that every time they did a focus group with –
black, Latino, or even in some cases, Asian American men, they would say you could not get through an hour and a half without hearing what one described to me as the nightmare phrase. And the nightmare phrase in this focus group was, yeah, he's a pig. He's a racist. He's a misogynist. He says and does things that I don't respect.
But if I'm being honest, I had more money in my pocket at the end of the week when he was president. Right. So that is the universe of voters who, as you say, were more likely to participate in many ways, white ones and non-white ones in the midterm, in the presidential election than in the midterm. And there is definitely a problem Democrats face in that.
Many of these surge voters are now, as you point out, not listening to us today, not tuning in even to Fox or Newsmax. I mean, they're people who are largely avoiding political content and political news. But as I say, they are expert in their own lives.
And to say that these were voters who drifted toward Trump because they didn't know all the wonderful things Biden has done, which I think I've heard at times, not from you, but from some Democrats, that's not right. I think what was clear, not only for these surge voters, but for a lot of traditional voters, more regular voters, is that Biden's failures eclipsed his successes for them.
And the way they interpreted the Biden economy was inflation.
You know, Biden had real successes economically that were precisely targeted toward the groups that really delivered the election to Trump. I mean, as I've written going all the way back to 2021, he had a very different theory of the case than Obama or Clinton. Obama or Clinton, both were more in the camp of what you earn depends on what you learn and figuring out how to get more people
You know, advanced education that would theoretically equip them for better paying jobs that would open up as we expand trade and lower barriers around the world, even if that costs some, as it turned out, many blue collar jobs in the US.
Biden was very different from day one in that he basically emphasized from the beginning that he wanted to create work that could support a middle-class life for people without a college degree. Tim, every time he went to one of those plant openings, the Intel plant in Ohio or the
the other semiconductor plant in Arizona or one of the EV plants, he talked about how many blue collar jobs he was creating. And in fact, according to the White House, they created 1.6 million jobs in manufacturing and construction. I mean, that is a serious record, over a trillion dollars in private investment linked to his big economic bills. And yet, 1.6 million jobs.
Okay, how many non-college jobs workers and voters were there, maybe 90 million. Right. So for the vast majority of them, what was their experience of the economy? It wasn't the stock market going up because most of them don't have stock. They were probably employed when when Biden got into office. They may have benefited from bidding on blue collar labor that bid up their wages.
But what was their main experience? It was a gas and groceries cost too much. So like focusing on the idea that these were low information voters, definitely true, but to me kind of obscures the larger point. As I say, they are expert in their own lives and they were not feeling that they got what they expected or desired out of the Biden presidency.
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