Democrats Misread Two Big Issues in This Election

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A couple days ago David Leonhardt had a story about how Democrats overestimated the strength of the abortion issue in a way that ultimately hurt them at the polls. 

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, it was considered almost a given that the issue was going to help them clobber the GOP in future elections. And in 2022 they convinced themselves that was true but in retrospect, the evidence wasn’t really that strong.

Democrats did surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms, just months after Roe’s demise. But there were also reasons to be skeptical.

It was hard to find a single election where abortion seemed decisive. Although it might have helped flip a few House elections, the Democrats who won hadn’t emphasized the issue more than those who had lost. And not a single incumbent Republican governor or senator lost in 2022, despite attempts by Democratic candidates to focus on the issue.

“It is the only thing we’re really talking about,” Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for governor in Ohio, said in her 2022 campaign. “We think it is the issue.” Three weeks later, Whaley lost to Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who had signed abortion restrictions into law, by 25 percentage points.

Despite these warnings signs, Democrats headed into 2024 convinced that abortion was going to bring a feminist blue wave to the polls. They made it their top issue.

Abortion was “by far the most prevalent topic in 2024 Democratic messaging,” Politico reported, “beating out health care, the economy and immigration.” The Harris campaign’s final round of advertisements mentioned abortion more than any other subject, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

The strategy failed. Instead, many voters who support abortion access voted for Donald Trump and other Republicans, including in states with abortion initiatives on the ballot

Not only did abortion not deliver a win for team blue, it may have distracted them from addressing other, more important issues which mattered more. 

And that brings me to another article published today about how Democrats lost on immigration. While Democrats were busy talking and spending money on abortion, they were doing far less to address widespread concerns on immigration.

Immigration was not the top issue on most voters’ minds in the presidential election this year, according to exit polls and pre-election surveys, but it often came in as a close second. Border concerns, driven as much by real challenges as manufactured ones — and wrapped up with voters’ other worries about the economy, housing prices and crime — built up an appetite for Mr. Trump’s staunch isolationist approach. They helped make blue areas less blue and fueled rightward shifts across the country, pollsters and strategists said.

An exit poll conducted by Fox News and The Associated Press showed that about 20 percent of voters said immigration was the single most important issue for their ballot decision, more than the percentage of voters who named abortion as their top issue…

Immigration Hub, a national group that backs progressive immigration policies, reported data from AdImpact, an ad tracking firm, this month that found that Democratic candidates, political action committees and other groups spent only $107 million on campaign ads about immigration from January to October this election cycle. Republicans and other groups spent $573 million on negative messaging about immigrants.

Of course it wasn’t just the political PR battle where the Dems fell short. The real problem was that the Biden Harris administration created the problem themselves and then let it fester for three years. Remember back to all the talk about it being a “challenge” not a “crisis.” It wasn’t until December of 2023, when the border patrol reported the highest number of encounters in a single month in US history, that Biden finally got serious about what was obviously a crisis. The fact that his administration was able to bring the numbers down prior to the election only shows that he could have done it all along. 

Voters were left with the impression that this was a clear case of mismanagement and understandably didn’t find Harris’ last minute tough talk on the issue very convincing. One swing voter in North Carolina put it this way, “if I have to choose between the two extremes, I would choose Trump’s extreme.”

Democrats might have survived overemphasizing the abortion issue if they hadn’t also deemphasized immigration. The combination of both mistakes combined with the fact that Trump was more trusted on the top issue (the economy) meant they were headed for a drubbing.