What We're Seeing So Far

More on how Democratic campaigning is fundamentally broken; plus some of the juiciest takes on the lessons Democrats should learn from this election. And a few signs of hope!

Nov 12, 2024

On Election Night, as the hour drew late and North Carolina and Georgia were already falling into Donald Trump’s column, Harris-Walz campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon sent an email to her staff that swiftly appeared in the press. It read:

Subject: What We’re Seeing So Far
Team,
As polls close across the country, I wanted to give everyone an update on what we’re seeing. As we have known all along, this is a razor thin race. Thanks to this amazing team, we have seen incredible turnout across the Battleground States, and the closeness of the race is exactly what we prepared for. While we continue to see data trickle in from the Sun Belt states, we have known all along that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies through the Blue Wall states. And we feel good about what we’re seeing.
• In Pennsylvania, we overperformed turnout expectations in Philadelphia, and overperformed in our early vote expectations in Bucks County. We don’t have Election Day results from Philadelphia, but we do know that we overperformed turnout expectations there, and have seen especially high turnout in places with large non-white and student populations. We expect to see higher turnout in Philadelphia than in 2020. Outside of Philadelphia, we have limited data on turnout and support right now, but what we do have is tracking with our expectations. We are awaiting more results (like everyone else!), and hope to get a closer read in the coming hours.
• In Michigan, we are awaiting a significant amount of votes to come in. The City of Detroit won’t be reported out until roughly midnight, but we have seen strong turnout throughout early vote and Election Day there. Other results in Michigan are harder to parse, since results are coming in more piece-meal than elsewhere.
• In Wisconsin, we know there is a significant amount of vote remaining in Dane and Milwaukee counties, and we are seeing signs of strong performance in the WOW counties, where we have partial data. We don’t expect complete results from Wisconsin until tomorrow morning between 3 am-5 am.
Polls just closed in Nevada and Arizona so, as expected, it will be a while before we have more information from both states.
We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight. Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: It takes time for all the votes to be counted - and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works. What we do know is this race is not going to come into focus until the early morning hours.
We’ll continue to keep you all updated as we get more information. This is what we’ve been built for, so let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep, and get ready to close out strong tomorrow.

In fact, by roughly 2:00am EST Wednesday morning the election was over. And some very important assumptions that O’Malley Dillon made about the contours of Democratic turnout were completely wrong. As Michael Bender showed in yesterday’s New York Times (gift link), Democratic turnout in Philadelphia was down, not up. In the five big Democratic counties of Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia, total turnout was down from 2020, “which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden” statewide, Bender writes. “Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.”

The confidence O’Malley Dillon expressed about Michigan was equally unfounded. “In Michigan, Mr. Trump’s victory was mainly a result of the drop-off in Wayne County, home to Detroit and diverse suburbs like Dearborn and Hamtramck that supply the state with its most significant source of Democratic votes,” Bender notes. “While Ms. Harris easily won Wayne County, she did it with 61,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden had, a decline of about 10 percent, while Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes, a jump of about 9 percent. That swing limited Ms. Harris’s hopes of winning Michigan, where Mr. Trump was ahead by about 81,000 votes.”

Wisconsin appears to be the only swing state where Harris got more votes than Biden, which is likely because the Wisconsin Democratic Party is one of the few state parties that actually exists year-round. But even there, the additional 20,000 votes she pulled out of Milwaukee, Madison and nearby suburbs was not enough to outset the equally big gains Trump made from those same places.

What all this reinforces for me is the point I made here last week. The way Democrats campaign is fundamentally broken. In addition to an over-reliance on message testing, data analytics and paid media, the core elements of field organizing place far too much trust in the voter data collected by eager but often naive volunteers and/or young, poorly paid door-knockers and phone-bankers. How else could the Harris-Walz campaign have imagined that it was going to get higher turnout from Philadelphia—the biggest city in the most important swing state—only to see it drop from 749,000 to 703,000? Harris got just under 548,000 votes in Philly compared to 604,000 for Biden in 2020. I don’t believe O’Malley Dillon could have asserted that she expected “higher turnout” from Philly if the data her field team was collecting wasn’t dangerously soft.

Who got paid to “do” the work that helped produce this mis-read? As best as I can tell, while more than a billion dollars flowed into the Harris campaign, it spent no money itself on canvassing and instead transferred large sums to the DNC which in turn contracted this work out. [UPDATE: Some readers have written me saying I’m claiming Harris-Walz had no field operation; obviously they did and I wrote a bit about their Pennsylvania operation here. The point I’m trying to make here is that actual paid canvassing gets contracted out to firms that inherently are incentivized to do this cheaply/poorly, and that volunteers generally don’t get trained or managed to do much better.] According to FEC records, the DNC spent $47.5 million on canvassing companies like The Outreach Group, OTG Strategies and Donohoe Partners; the DSCC spent about another $5 million and the DCCC about $2.3 million. That may sound like a lot of money, but if we assume half of it goes to administrative overhead and bloated salaries for the owners of these companies, perhaps it paid for 3,000 full-time canvassers for the months of August, September and October (assuming an average pay rate of $24 an hour). That, by the way, is a living wage only if you have no children, which is why almost all paid canvassers are young people. They are paid by volume, not quality, of contacts. Obviously the bulk of door-knocking was done by lightly trained volunteers, many of whom just wanted to “do something” to help make a difference.

As a friend of mine said to me this weekend, why do Democrats use “door-to-door wandering salesmen” as their model for getting out the vote? Why do field staff ignore the notes that volunteers input about the conversations they have at the doors with potential voters? This is not a time for pollyannaish statements, like this one from Jonathan Alter, claiming that Democratic door-knockers made a difference in this election and shouldn’t be disheartened. No, what they should be is furious that their time and money wasn’t used as effectively as possible.

—Related: Writing in The New York Times, Harvard’s John Della Volpe digs (gift link) into the way the youth vote swung in 2024, with Harris getting 54% of 18-29 year olds compared to 60% for Biden in 2020. He says many of them didn’t perceive the tangible impact of their 2020 vote, making them more receptive to Trump, or to a third-party candidate, or simply not voting. He adds, with language I can’t help but admire:

I’ve watched with growing concern as the Democratic Party has increasingly replaced the art of listening to and polling voters with an almost religious devotion to data analytics. This approach combines voter file data, consumer databases, short surveys, social media insights and information from canvassing and events to create detailed profiles and models of potential voters. While this can certainly aid in deciding where and how to spend campaign money and resources, it often results in outreach that feels to voters like inauthentic, overly tailored messaging that lacks genuine connection or depth.
Anyone sitting in focus groups with undecided voters saw the writing on the wall. The warnings were clear and consistent from spring through fall. Economic anxiety never wavered — Mr. Trump’s era felt more financially secure, while a Harris future felt uncertain. When young women finally made their choice in the campaign’s final weeks, many reluctantly chose their pocketbooks over reproductive rights.
While data analytics have their place, this near-blind faith in random control trials and modeling has created more than just an illusion of scientific precision — it has built an algorithmic fortress that isolates Democrats from the very voters they seek to represent. The irony is stark: a party full of voter data yet starved for true voter understanding and connection.

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

Here’s a bad idea, from David Pepper, author and former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. Noting, quite correctly, that Democratic political campaigns prioritize talking to likely voters and skip over whole communities or neighborhoods because they’re mostly populated by irregular or non-voters, he argues that it’s our job (meaning local orgs mostly run by volunteers, plus random individuals) to do all the precinct-level outreach that the Democratic party doesn’t do in order to get more people involved in voting. Nope, no amount of individual volunteer engagement can match the scale of the problem—in the same way that no amount of individual acts of charity can do as much to alleviate poverty as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This is only something that a political party interested in party-building can do at scale.

Far better to consider this essay by Pete Davis in The Nation, which argues for a Democratic party that gets rid of its consultant class and switches to a membership model. He writes, “Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders. When you go to Democrats.org, clicking “Take Action” does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is ‘DONATE,’ not ‘JOIN.’” Instead, Davis calls for a new model centered on membership, maps with precinct captains for every neighborhood, meeting halls and mutual aid. At the rate things are going with the incoming Trump administration, we may end up with this model by necessity, starting with mutual aid and working backwards towards an actual party.

Speaking of which—while we’ve all seen all kinds of statements from national Democrats about what happened, have any of you received any kind of communication from your local elected representatives addressing the meaning or lessons of the election? I haven’t. Do share in the comments.

Did you know?

That apart from references to “men and women” the number of individual mentions of the word “women” in the 2024 Democratic Party platform is 79, while the number of individual mentions of the word “men” is one.

Or, based on this detailed textual analysis of the whole platform by Josh Johnson, a environment engineer living in Washington state who works at a mill, the number of identity-related words in the platform that can describe him or his son number 13, while the number of other identity-related words number 317. See below.

Meta-mortems

There are too many interesting takes on the election to possibly read and digest them all, but here are a few that I recommend:

—Jen Pahlka, “Curiosity and conflict,” November 10, 2024. Did you know that of the $1.1 trillion in direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure appropriated by Biden’s signature mega-bills--the 2021 pandemic relief package, known as the American Rescue Plan; the bipartisan infrastructure law passed later that year; the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act; and the president’s premier climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act--less than 17% had been spent by April? Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, argues that instead of making excuses for how closely Harris lost, we need a deep conversation that includes a hard look at how poorly government actually delivers for the people it claims to serve. And as the party of government, she writes, Democrats have to start “caring about outcomes instead of intentions.” She also says:

“…it seems the sledgehammers are coming for government, and if I were asked where to aim them, I would answer. Not Schedule F, please, but yes, take our civil service system down the studs so that we can rebuild it. The guiding principles are correct, but the operational structures that've been built atop them don’t work, and they need to. Not mass layoffs and contracting the work to cronies, but, yes, right-size the stop energy and bring in the go energy so we can get stuff done. Don’t get rid of all guardrails and let government run wild, but yes, pull back on processes that no longer serve us, that turn what so much of what civil servants must do and what taxpayers foot the bill for into bullshit jobs. And stop pretending those mountains of procedures protect the vulnerable. In practice, paperwork favors the powerful.”

There’s more where this is coming from and it’s spot on.

—Michael Slaby, “Ready for another way,” November 12, 2024. In which this former Obama campaign CTO and CIO argues that Biden’s election in 2020 was the aberration, not the return to normality that so many Democrats wanted to claim it was, and that it unfortunately gave us one more reason not to work on the deeper problems in American civic life.

—Peter Levine, “Time to build,” November 7, 2024. He argues that in addition to devising better models for political community organizing, we need to address gaps in our civic infrastructure, including where money flows (and doesn’t) and how to create federated organizations out of disparate individual groups.

—Waleed Shahid, “Postmortem-palooza: Ten genres of takes for why Democrats lost to Trump,” November 12, 2024. This one will save you a lot of time!

Signs of Stirring

—From Amanda Litman, one of the co-founders of Run for Something: “In all of 2017, 15k people signed up to consider a run for office. Since Election Day - just six days ago - 3600+ people have raised their hands at runforwhat.net.”

—Last Thursday night, about 150,000 people RSVPed to participate in “Making Meaning of the Moment,” a mass community Zoom spearheaded by MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party and Public Citizen, with dozens of other partners. Most encouraging, during the Zoom, more than 8,000 people volunteered to host local community meetings on the suggested theme of “Worth Fighting For.” That could be the basis for a much larger local infrastructure than existed back in 2017, when the Women’s March and Indivisible spawned about 3,000 local chapters. We shall see.

End Times

I missed this in-depth report by Radley Balko on Trump’s deportation army when it came out last May. It’s unfathomable and yet, now, terrifyingly possible.

One Fun Thing

I could play with this all day.

The Connector

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