As the dust settles on the 2024 presidential election, now is an excellent time to take a fresh, clear-eyed look at what really happened. Join us as Larry Bartels, political scientist extraordinaire and Co-Director of Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, explains why Trump’s win was not unusual and the roles played by the economy, loyalty to the political parties, and Trump’s unique personality.
Chapter 1: What makes the 2024 election similar to past elections?
Donald Trump is certainly unique, and everyone expected the election to be unusual. But what stands out about the 2024 election is the fact that by the data, it was not an unusual election at all. Donald Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, so nearly 50% of the popular vote. That was comparable within a few percentage points to other Republican presidential candidates over the last 20 years.
Chapter 2: Why did Donald Trump's election results mirror past Republican candidates?
Trump's nearly 50% of the popular vote compares to George W. Bush's 48% and nearly 51% of the popular vote in 2000 and 2004. And it was higher than John McCain's 46% of the popular vote and Mitt Romney's 47%. So despite Donald Trump's unusual and unique character, his results were not much different from other Republican candidates. How could that be? Why wasn't the election more unusual?
Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Larry Bartels.
Chapter 3: Who is Larry Bartels and what is his perspective on elections?
He is chair of public policy and social science at Vanderbilt University and co-director of Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Prior to Vanderbilt, he was a professor at Princeton and founding director of Princeton Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He has received the United States National Medal of Science.
His most recent book is Democracy Erodes from the Top. I'm excited to find out why the election of Donald Trump was not unusual and how important a role character plays in elections. Welcome, Larry, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thanks for having me.
It is my pleasure. So Donald Trump is certainly unique and he's very different from previous U.S. presidents. Was his election an aberration?
Chapter 4: Was Donald Trump's election in 2024 truly an aberration?
No, I don't think so. I think one of my important lessons here is that I think you have to separate the electoral process from the outcome. And Trump is an example in which the outcome of the election is certainly aberrant and hugely consequential. But the electoral process, I think, operated in much the same way that it usually does.
And in particular, in much the same way that it has over the past quarter century or so. We've been basically in a long tie between Democrats and Republicans.
If you think back over the last seven elections, the only one really in which either party got any real separation was the election in 2008 that occurred basically as Wall Street was melting down and the US was sliding into the Great Recession. So in those circumstances, Barack Obama won a fairly comfortable majority.
Basically, every other election that we've had since 2000 has been more or less a tied outcome. The two parties are entrenched and very closely matched. And under those circumstances, I think the best way to think about the result is that it's essentially a coin flip.
Not that it's literally random, but that lots of small circumstances can make the difference between one side or the other winning narrowly.
How do you see the 2024 election compared to previous elections?
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Chapter 5: How did voter turnout in 2024 compare to previous elections?
The impact of partisanship was very strong, as it has been consistently over the last quarter century. Maybe the most surprising thing is that turnout was down by about 3 million in 2024 compared to 2020. So even though people who were watching the election closely had the impression that the stakes were hugely consequential.
There were a fair number of people who had been voting previously and didn't bother to vote for one reason or another in 2024. I should say that for a long time, political scientists bemoaned the fact that turnout in elections was so low. One consequence of this period that we've been in of
closely contested, very partisan elections is that they've mobilized a lot of people to participate in the turnout rate had been going up significantly over the past several elections. But twenty twenty four was at least a pause in that trend.
Can you give some examples of some of the numbers on how the Trump elections compared to other comparable Republican Democratic elections?
Well, the overall results are obviously quite similar. Aside from the 2008 election, every election we've had in this century has been a very close outcome in terms of the popular vote, which specific states swing one way or another has varied some. And so the electoral college outcome has varied. But the overall mood of the country has not shifted substantially in any of these elections.
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Chapter 6: What role does partisanship play in election outcomes?
with maybe the exception of 2008. If you look at the partisan loyalty of people within each of the two parties, it's hard to get exact figures because different surveys have different kinds of vulnerabilities to air and they vary a bit in their numbers. But typically, each party's nominee gets about 90 to 95% of the support of partisans from their party.
The exceptions to that were cases where a nominee got probably in the high 80s, 85 to 90%. And those would be John McCain on the Republican side in 2008, who was running as the economy was melting down under an incumbent Republican president. And Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris on the Democratic side, both running against Donald Trump.
And how did the votes by men for Trump compare to votes by men for previous Republican candidates? Was it very consistent and similar?
Trump did a little better among men and a little worse among women than Republicans typically have. There's been a longstanding gender gap in partisanship and voting behavior. It's, I think, become somewhat strengthened recently, probably mostly as a result of people's responses to Trump's rhetoric.
which has been, I think, more outspokenly pro-male in some sense than previous candidates have been. Again, I think that's a pretty small shift at the margin. The other significant difference probably is with respect to the behavior of people with and without college degrees.
And again, this is a kind of intensified difference recently, but one that has been growing over a significant period of time. It used to be the case that people with college educations were more Republican and people with less formal education were more Democratic. And that difference gradually closed and now has even reversed.
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Chapter 7: How did gender and education influence voting patterns in 2024?
Again, I think Trump's rhetoric and the nature of his appeal has something to do with that. But I think it's mostly a kind of long term response to people's understandings of the parties and what they stand for.
Does party matter more than the individual?
Yes, individual candidates do matter some, and their rhetoric, I think, has some impact on the movement of these specific subgroups within the party's coalitions. But overall, the stability of partisanship and the high levels of support of partisans within each camp for their own parties and nominees seems to be pretty set, regardless of who the candidates are.
Again, I think Trump is about the most dramatic, test case you could have of that proposition. A lot of people were surprised by the result of the 2016 election because he was such an unusual Republican candidate and indeed had tepid support or even opposition from many of the most prominent leaders in the Republican Party.
But in spite of that, he got the overwhelming support of the Republican rank and file.
How do other factors besides party affiliation, factors such as natural disasters or other factors affect elections?
Well, I think the most important systematic factor is the state of the economy. If we look historically, we see that the incumbent party does substantially better when the economy is in good shape and substantially worse when it's in bad shape.
Not that there are large numbers of party loyalists who desert the party under those circumstances, but the people who are weaker partisans are often swayed by their sense of the state of the country to abandon their party temporarily.
Some political scientists have thought about these patterns of economic voting as being a kind of virtue of democracy or a success for democracy because they might hold political leaders accountable for whether things are going well or badly and provide at least some incentives for political leaders to run the country in a way that produces prosperity rather than poverty. And I think
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