In the wake of the 2024 election cycle, political experts and the Democratic Party are looking for answers to why the Republican Party won the presidency and both chambers of Congress.
“[There’s going to be] soul searching to figure out what went wrong,” Jacob Schiller, a teaching assistant professor of political science at Pitt, said.
As many Americans continue to process Republican victories this election cycle, political scientists have begun developing theories on what societal shifts caused the electorate to swing in President-elect Trump’s favor.
Schiller said that the incumbency effect usually helps candidates running for lower offices because they can use their name recognition and fundraising apparatus more effectively, but that it may have hurt Vice President Kamala Harris because she served in the Biden administration.
“The evidence that I’ve seen points to voters generally looking back on the last four years, not feeling happy about how things have gone, and choosing to punish the incumbent, to vote against the Democratic candidate, more so than this was necessarily a vote for Donald Trump’s vision,” Schiller said.
“Presidents [and their administration] tend to be held singularly responsible, and in fact, held responsible for things even more than what they’re actually capable of doing,” Schiller said. “And so, in this case, the incumbent administration, the Democratic administration, was held responsible for everything that’s happened these past four years, regardless of how much they actually are responsible for it.”
Across the nation, exit polls showed that the economy was one of the top issues voters based their decision on. According to Schiller, even though many economic indicators — such as GDP, wages and unemployment — are trending in a positive direction, inflation still loomed large in the minds of voters.
“Prices have gone up on goods,” Schiller said. “Even though we’ve gotten the inflation down from where it peaked — we peaked somewhere around 8% and we’re down into 2.4-2.6% — people still feel like economic conditions haven’t gotten better. Even though, by many different measures, we can see that President Biden’s policies did fix a number of the problems that existed, people didn’t feel like he had fixed them well enough to where they wanted them to be.”
At a local level, Jonathan Cervas, a teaching assistant professor of political science at Carnegie Mellon, found the results of Pennsylvania “interesting.” While most of Pennsylvania, including both rural areas and urban counties like Philadelphia, swung right of where they were in 2020, Allegheny County swung slightly left. Cervas theorized that this happened because the Harris campaign focused heavily on Allegheny County, which had political and social circumstances that favored Harris.
“Harris invested a lot of time and resources into the area, including an appearance in Pittsburgh on the final day of the campaign, as did Trump. We [also] had several very competitive local races in Allegheny County in 2023, which maintained a strong mobilization operation,” Cervas said. “Allegheny County is [also] less diverse than Philadelphia, and the typical demographic profile of a voter in Allegheny County was the exact kind of voter who Trump failed to move,” Cervas said.
At the national level, pre-election polls predicted a 50-50 toss-up in the election. Even though Trump swept all seven swing states and garnered 312 electoral votes, Quinnipiac poll analyst Tim Malloy said that the 2024 election played out similarly to what pollsters predicted.
“Almost all the races were within the margin of error,” Malloy said. “We were very close and better than we’ve done in the last couple cycles. I think we got more of what the public was really saying this time than we did back when Trump first ran.”
According to Malloy, the polls did not predict Trump’s victory in 2016 because of the “shy Trump voter,” the Trump voter who did not tell pollsters they were voting for Trump or who changed their mind at the last moment. Malloy said pollsters expected a reverse effect in favor of Harris in this election.
“Kamala Harris did fairly well, considering nobody knew who she was five months ago or six months ago,” Malloy said. “We thought that the shy Kamala voter … [might] give her a better chance of winning. It happened. It didn’t happen in a big enough way.”
Though the Republican Party secured the presidency, Senate and House of Representatives, Cervas said that the people did not vote decisively for the GOP.
“Trump won a very narrow victory that could have ended differently if a few hundred thousand people who voted in 2020 but not 2024 showed up on Nov.r 5,” Cervas said. “Victories in the Senate were limited to states where Republicans were already doing well. It appears as if the Republicans will have failed to make any gains in the House of Representatives, another sign that the electorate wasn’t delivering any mandate.”