Tipsheet

Lib Outlet Reviewed What Led to Kamala Harris' Defeat, and Found Something Interesting About Trump

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  March 19, 2025 7:00 AM

There are some hard truths in a recent autopsy done by Blue Rose Research, helmed by liberal data scientist David Shor. He found some trends interesting, some worrying, and others vindicating. Shor has long advocated for Democrats to avoid seeing immigration as the silver bullet to electoral success. In 2024, it was one of the party’s most significant vulnerabilities. While we might not agree with Shor on everything, like his take on Donald Trump’s falling approval and growing anger toward the work Elon Musk and the Department of Education are doing, his other bullet points paint a brutal picture for Democrats and how they go about winning elections. Shor spoke to Vox about these findings.

Trump has transformed the GOP and the country, like it or not. A lot of Democratic assumptions have been grounded in dust since 2016. The first is that if more people vote, the better Democrats do. It’s flipped. Increased levels of voter participation now favor Republicans. An interesting part of Shor’s deep dive indirectly related to Trump’s popularity, which we all know is low-balled by the media and polling firms. If every registered voter were dragged to the polls, he would’ve won the popular vote by five points. 

Other bits include how the politically disengaged now favor the GOP by 10-15 points; it was the same margin not so long ago but for Democrats, how immigrant voters’ support for Democrats has totally collapsed, and how Gen Z being more conservative might not be all that shocking (via Vox) [bold text indicates Vox asking questions]: 

The most important thing is that we saw incredible polarization on political engagement itself. There’s a bunch of different ways to measure this: There’s how many elections you vote in, or how important politics is to your identity. There’s how closely you follow the news. But across all of these, there’s a consistent story: 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. 

[…] 

Most people have to balance their reaction to objective facts in the economy with their preexisting ideological beliefs. A strongly Democratic voter isn’t going to switch to Trump just because they’re upset about high prices. So, it isn’t too surprising that the people with the weakest political loyalties would be the most responsive to changes in economic conditions. 

And people who are politically disengaged — like every other subgroup of people this election — overwhelmingly listed the cost of living as the thing they were the most concerned about. 

But it can’t just be inflation. Politically disengaged voters went from being a roughly neutral group in 2020 to favoring the Republicans by about 15 points in 2024. But during the Obama era, this was a solidly Democratic group, favoring us by between 10 and 15 points. So there’s also this long-term trend that goes beyond inflation or social media. Our coalition has been transitioning from working-class people to college-educated people. 

To move beyond the why, this shift in the partisanship of politically disengaged voters has a really important implication: For most of the last 15 years, we’ve really lived in this world where the mantra was “If everybody votes, we win.” But we’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.

If I understand you correctly, you’re suggesting that Democrats cannot rebuild a national majority merely by juicing higher turnout, since registered voters as a whole were more pro-Trump in 2024 than those who actually showed up at the polls.

Nevertheless, many progressives have attributed Harris’s loss to depressed turnout among Democratic voters specifically. They point to the fact that, between 2020 and 2024, the Democratic presidential nominee’s vote total fell by significantly more than Trump’s tally increased. And they also note that, according to AP VoteCast, only 4 percent of Biden 2020 voters backed Trump last year — while a roughly equal percentage of Trump 2020 voters switched to Kamala. So, in their telling, if defections roughly canceled out while a large number of voters went from supporting Biden to staying home, then clearly the problem was inadequate Democratic turnout. So if Harris had focused more on energizing the progressive base, she might have won. What do you think is wrong with that narrative? 

Well, the problem with the AP VoteCast data is that it was released the day after the election. There was just a lot of information that they didn’t have at the time. At this point, voter file data has been released for enough states to account for an overwhelming majority of the 2024 vote. And what’s really cool about having that data is that you can really decompose what fraction of the change in vote share was people changing their mind versus changes in who voted. 

And when you do that, you see that roughly 30 percent of the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024 was changes in who voted — changes in turnout. But the other 70 percent was people changing their mind. And that’s in line with the breakdown we’ve seen for most elections in the past 30 years. 

The reality is that these things always tend to move in the same direction — parties that lose ground with swing voters tend to simultaneously see worse turnout. And for a simple reason. There were a lot of Democratic voters who were angry at their party last year. And they were mostly moderate and conservative Democrats angry about the cost of living and other issues. And even though they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Republican, a lot of them stayed home. But basically, their complaints were very similar to those of Biden voters who flipped to Trump.

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. 

[…] 

So what other groups did Democrats lose ground with, beyond those who pay little attention to politics and TikTok enthusiasts? 

If you look at predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, whether they’re white or Hispanic or Asian or African, you really see these absolutely massive shifts against Democrats. Trump won Corona in Queens. Immigrants go from a D+27 group in 2020 to a potentially R+1 group in 2024. 

I’m not sure why that happened. I think we’re still waiting for data to come back. But I’d guess it’s the same stories about the cost of living and cultural issues and ideological polarization.

On the kiddos becoming more Republican, Shor says that’s generational: boomers were left-wing, Gen X was more conservative, and the current crop of younger voters had Gen X parents. 

“‘How Democratic were your parents growing up?’ zoomers are something like 7 percent more likely to say they had Republican parents than millennials are,” said Shor. 

Recommended

Anti-Musk Agitators Could Get Their Soros Bucks Back Mia Cathell
Another DOGE Standoff Just Turned Into a Lawsuit Madeline Leesman

While Shor sees how education benefits Democrats, noting that working-class votes who admit to reading a book in the last year are more likely to vote Democratic than voters in this demographic who say otherwise, he did note how the college-educated urbanite face of the party is all-around unlikeable, warning that the more these sorts of people lead the charge on certain cultural fights, the more likely voter is to turn against Democrats. 

It's a lengthy piece/interview with elliptical language at some parts, but it doesn’t deviate from what Shor has been saying: that Democrats should focus on issues where there is solid cross-party appeal. Also, framing such matters in a non-condescending, snobby way, which this current Democratic Party is allergic to. That massaging of the communications cannot be discussed right now because the Left has no message. Yet, even then, the GOP has been able to gain ground on some areas of public policy where Democrats were, for lack of a better term, the only game in town: 

…in the wake of inflation, voters went from favoring Republicans by about 5 points on the economy to favoring them by 15 or 16. And after Dobbs, voters started trusting the Democrats much more on abortion. Education used to be the Democrats’ strongest issue. But our standing on that collapsed during Covid, and now it’s basically even. So, what people care about and trust us on really is responsive to concrete events that happen in the world. That isn’t 100 percent of the story. There are a lot of other things going on. But what we do and what we say does matter. 

To directly answer your original question — about how much of this is changing what our positions are versus messaging — I think the exact details of that vary from issue to issue. But I think that we have to approach this from the position that we are in a deep trust hole. The people that we’re trying to persuade have very different values than we do and have a very different perception of reality. And a lot of these people are very poorly informed and literally do not consume the sources of information that we broadcast to.

And so, there has to be some combination of messaging and outreach and changes in how we approach these platforms, and also probably some substantive changes that address what voters see as an error. 

We’re lucky that Shor, a self-described leftist, was ignored by Democrats because his roadmap isn’t insane. He knows where the issues are most of the time, but the fact that he’s not an ‘ANTIFA, throw Molotov cocktails’ type of lefty, he’s on the outside looking in.

The point Shor makes, though lengthy, is that ‘woke’ is a way to go broke, financially and politically. Overall, the theme here is that we’re a diverse nation, our system rewards that geographic diversity, and right now, the Republicans are running the table. As some have said, there are many ways to skin the electoral cat to get to 270. The GOP knows a better way to do that, but Democrats could turn things around, but not with Jasmine Crockett, AOC, and Tim Walz leading the charge. Let’s hope Democrats keep the same lineup forever. 

Last Note: I forgot to add that Shor also found that while white voting tendencies concerning polarization haven't changed since the Clinton era, nonwhite voters who identify as conservative or moderate are starting to replicate their white counterparts in elections. 

It's not really about race anymore, which will kill a lot of Democrat narrative manufacturing. It's about class, education, and ideology, three areas where Democrats don't have the best footing with voters.