Three Georgetown government professors offered insight into the driving forces behind the 2024 election results in a Nov. 6 panel.
The panel, titled “What Just Happened? Analyzing the 2024 Election” and hosted by the government department, consisted of Nadia E. Brown, a professor of government and director of the women’s and gender studies program; Jonathan Ladd, an associate professor of public policy and government; and Michele Swers, a professor of American government. The discussion was moderated by Michael Kazin, a professor of history.
The Republican Party dominated the 2024 elections, taking back control of the presidency and the U.S. Senate and likely holding onto their majority in the House of Representatives. Republican President-elect Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failing to gain support in key swing states.
The election was historic for several reasons: Harris was the first Black and South Asian woman to run for president on a major party ticket, and Trump was the first convicted felon and the second presidential candidate to win non-consecutive terms.
Brown, who researches gender, race and ethnicity politics in the United States, said the historic nature of the Harris campaign has led to increased interest in her work.
“The elephant in the room, the question I’ve been asked most frequently, is: ‘Is the United States ready for a multiethnic, Black woman president?’ And perhaps the answer is no,” Brown said at the event. “It’s still kind of early to tell, but one thing is sure that we do know, given the trends of the exit poll data, that the core group of people that Kamala Harris needed to win did not show up for her last night.”
However, Brown cautioned against singling out specific demographic groups as the reason Harris lost the election, saying it perpetuates long-standing racist narratives.
“Black Americans are caught between being the saviors or the scapegoats of democracy,” Brown said. “I just want us to check how we are tapping into these long and trying tropes of race, racism, in the United States and question: ‘What utility does that give us?’”
Kazin, who studies U.S. history, placed the election in a global context, pointing to the recent rise of right-wing populism in countries like France, Italy and Sweden.
“In general terms, across the Western post-industrial world, people who talk like Trump, generally about migration, about trade and with authoritarian promises are doing pretty well,” Kazin said at the event. “I think that’s important to understand, because as Americans, we often think what happens here only happened here.”
The 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats largely exceeded expectations, took place just months after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Swers, who studies Congress and women in politics, said Democrats may have overestimated the impact that outrage over abortion restrictions would have on voter turnout two years later.
“One of the things that we look at is, well, how much do different issues play with voters? And clearly the economy was at the top,” Swers said at the event. “Abortion was more important to voters than it has been, if you look before Dobbs, right? But probably the peak of the importance of abortion to voters was the 2022 election.”
This election cycle, voters in Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Nevada approved ballot measures protecting access to abortion and also elected Trump. As of Nov. 7, Arizona and Nevada also enshrined abortion access into their state constitutions, though the presidential election has not been called for these states.
Swers said a hurdle for Democrats may have been voters’ willingness to make a distinction between their support for abortion and their support for a candidate as a whole.
“What we also see is that people were happy to also vote in favor of an abortion ballot initiative and still support a Republican candidate, because they separate out ‘this is the way I feel on abortion’ and ‘this is the most important issue to determine my vote for the presidential candidate,’” Swers said.
Ladd, who specializes in public opinion and the media, said pollsters had accurately captured the race’s closeness throughout the election cycle, improving on predictions from 2016 and 2020. According to Ladd, this was accomplished in part by relying more on weighting, a type of data adjustment that ensures a poll’s sample size resembles the actual electorate.
“They did do a very aggressive weighting, weighting up attributes of people that are more supportive of Trump. You know, rural voters, people without a B.A., all these sorts of things, ” Ladd said at the event. “There was a big debate before the election, was this aggressive weighting correct? And it turns out it was.”
Ladd also agreed with Brown that the election results couldn’t be chalked up to shifts in any one demographic, citing a Washington Post analysis that examined the partisan shift toward Trump in nearly all of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties.
“What we saw is a pretty uniform movement,” Ladd said. “It’s about the same figure everywhere: They cut up by urban areas, rural areas, suburban areas, by state and you just find, compared to 2020, a movement of two, two and a half, three points.”
Kazin said he believes Trump is the most significant political figure of the 21st century, and his continued influence is something people in the U.S. must grapple with.
“In the end, enough people decided that ‘all I care about is what I think he might be able to do. I don’t really care about anything else about him, and he’s kind of entertaining,’” Kazin said. “And that clearly shows, I think, a change in our political culture.”