So what really determined the 2024 U.S. presidential elections?

Hi, and welcome to Good Authority, where we bring insights from political science to a broader audience. My name is Erik Wutten. After each election, pundits are quick to come up with reasons that explain just why the election went as it did. The US presidential election on November 5th was no exception. People have attributed the outcome to the economy, to immigration, poorly run campaigns, the war in Gaza, and numerous other causes. What does the evidence actually say? Here to talk about this, I am joined by two of my good authority colleagues, who are scholars of American politics and especially elections. Danny Hayes is a professor of political science, who has written three books about campaigns and US public opinion. Welcome, Danny. Hi, thanks for having me, Erik. And John Seitz, who is a professor of political science, and William R. Keenan, Jr. Chair at Vanderbilt University. John has written books, among others, on the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections. And John is also the publisher of Good Authority. Welcome, John. Thank you, Erik. So John, you wrote a piece on Good Authority last week about a poll that suggests that one of the big reasons why voters shifted from Biden to Trump is the war in Gaza and Biden's policies on Gaza. So you didn't really think that was all that persuasive, this poll, right? Can you explain why? Yeah, this particular poll was not persuasive, and I think there is a broader question and challenge in terms of identifying Gaza as a cause of what happened in 2024. This particular poll surveyed a group of people who said they had voted for Biden in 2020, but then either didn't vote for Paris in 2024 or didn't vote at all. They gave them a list of issues and said, "Which of these is the reason for that?" And they said, "What's the top reason?" And because 29% of people said that Gaza and Israel was the top reason, then the headline from a group that, of course, is not supportive of Biden's policies with regard to Israel and Gaza said that that was therefore the number one issue, and that's the implication being that's what maybe cost Harris the election. So the problem with that simply put is that people are not good at telling you the reasons for their choices. And so when you say to people, "Why did you do something?" or, "Here's a list of things. Which one of these things was the reason you did something?" You really can't be sure that they're reliably telling you why they did things. People often can't retrieve that kind of information from memory, and sometimes what they're telling you instead is a rationalization of why they did what they did, rather than a reason. That's a lot of political science supporting that. And this particular poll just really didn't give you any insight that would get us around that fundamental challenge. The broader, I think, question and challenge with regard to Israel and Gaza just has to do with the fact that in general, it's difficult for people to vote on foreign policy issues. That's a kind of a longstanding finding. Good authority contributor Elizabeth Saunders wrote a very long piece on this back in the year before the election, kind of running through some of this evidence. And again, it's just tough issues, challenging for people who are not paying a great deal of attention to politics, to have strong opinions, to be able to link those opinions to choices between the two candidates. The circumstantial evidence that people like to tweet is a map of like Dearborn, Michigan, where there are these precincts and voters that have a higher number of Arab Americans. She lost support in some of those precincts, but of course she lost support in lots of precincts, including precincts of other racial and ethnic groups who may not have the same investment in Gaza. So it's a little hard to say that Gaza was the reason she lost those votes, but maybe for other groups, it was other reasons. That doesn't strike me as a very, I don't know, as a convoluted way to sort of approach explaining the election. And even in the case of Dearborn, Michigan or Arab American populations in Michigan, it's just not a large number of people. So that alone does not explain why she loses Michigan, much less why she loses the popular vote in the elected college. Right. But there's a methodological issue here. It's really hard to know why people voted in the way they did, partially because they themselves often don't really know it or can't really state it very clearly in surveys. And then there's the issue, I guess, what you're saying is that the number of voters that are likely to have switched their vote because of Gaza is probably too small to really be a good explanation of why the vote swung as a whole. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, I would say it's both hard to explain why people were switched their vote. It's also hard to explain that it was the reason why people didn't vote at all. So sometimes people say, oh, clearly it was just a turnout issue and that's what Gaza did to these people that otherwise would have voted Democrat or were demoralized. It's possible that there's a non-zero number of people for whom that is true, but is that a large enough group of people to really explain what happened in the election? Or even if it's non-zero, is it such a small number of people that you really couldn't say at the end of the day? It was even a major factor in who actually lost the election. Sometimes there's a tendency to say, well, in a close election, a thousand things could have mattered, which I don't think it's very helpful because I think we can do some sort of rank ordering of factors from more important to less important, and I would put Gaza toward the less important end of that spectrum. And so the big one right after the election was that this is mostly about the economy, right? That was the most often listed important problem. People talked about inflation. People called 2024 the sort of global anti-incumbency year where people sort of punished incumbents partially for poor performing economies as a consequence of the war in Russia, Ukraine, COVID, and so on. So, Danny, how persuasive do you think that is as an explanation for why we saw the result we did on November 5th? I mean, I think of all of the explanations that people will offer for Trump's victory, that's probably the most persuasive one, and it's the one that probably sort of seems to have the most evidence behind it. I mean, one, you know, observation that is repeated, I think, is that if you look at the vote shifts between 2020 and 2024 across the country, in almost every state and in almost every county, Trump gained vote share in 2024 compared to where he was in 2020. And so that suggests that there's some kind of phenomenon broader than Gaza that's likely to affect a smaller, you know, be important to a smaller group of people. And so I think that's one reason that the economic explanation, inflation in particular seems to sort of be fairly persuasive as at least a significant factor that contributed to Trump's victory. It's also consistent with the way that polling looked after Biden let the race and that Harris certainly seemed to improve on Biden's standing. There was more support for her in the polls and, you know, for much of the last couple of months of the campaign, she's doing well relative to Biden. She and Trump are basically neck and neck. But voters' attitudes on the economy didn't really move very much, even after Biden left the race. You know, it wasn't really particularly about Harris even, and that there was just some kind of general disenchantment with the way things were going. Combine that with, as you noted, the fact that incumbent parties all over the world in the last year or two post-COVID have seen pretty significant defeats. You look at in the UK last year where the conservatives got hammered, you know, and I think the explanation for that is largely similar. You've got parties in power, people don't feel good about things, the economy is kind of slowly coming back, inflation is high post-COVID. And so I think all those dynamics are played out in 2024, you know, although it probably will take some more time to kind of sort out the extent to which inflation or the economy in general or anti-incumbency sentiment is really the driving factor. I think of all the things that are discussed, that's probably the one that, at least to me, feels the most compelling. And one issue that I've seen people raise here is that the American economy was actually doing pretty well, especially if you compare it to Europe and other parts of the world, like unemployment, it's pretty low, inflation's been coming down. So is it more about sentiment or is it sort of the real economic effects of crises or policies that we're doing to work here? John, maybe you have some thoughts on this? I think that the comparison between the US and other countries in Europe was comforting to some supporters of Biden, but I don't think that's fundamentally the comparison that American voters are making. What seems to be the case is that inflation just weighs more heavily in people's minds than the more positive aspects of the economy in the labor market or just an overall growth in the size of the economy. And part of the reason for that may simply be that a couple things. One is, of course, that even when the inflation rate goes down, as it did in the latter half of Biden's term, prices are not going down in nominal terms. And so you're still paying more, even if the rate of increase is lower than it once was. People also seem to sort of underestimate the extent to which incomes keep up with inflation. And so the fact that real wage growth was positive enough that in real terms, people were getting more for their dollar, I don't think just registers in the same way. So consumer sentiment did rebound by some measures, but by others, it was still pretty pessimistic. It kind of depends on the mixture of questions that you ask people. And if you look, I think, at the relationship between consumer sentiment, election outcomes, Biden's approval, and the historical relationship between presidential approval and election outcomes, 2024 is right where you'd predict. So that just may be the unfortunate consequence of having two years of inflation and a longer term like stickier impact that's not outweighed by the soft landing the country experienced when inflation came down, but we didn't have a recession. I mean, I can add one additional data point to that. I wrote a piece for good authority a couple of days after the election talking about what we had found in the GW politics poll, which I run with several colleagues at GW. It's a panel survey. So we're interviewing the same voters over the course of the election year. And we had an initial survey done in June before Biden had dropped out and surveys in August and October. And what we found over the course of that time when there had been news of inflation coming down, unemployment was continuing to be low, labor market was strong, you know, all these like objectively good economic news stories coming out that the perceptions of the economy barely budged over that five month period. So I think something like in June, 51% of the respondents in our survey said that the economy was getting worse. And that number only came down to 45% by the time we got to October, which, you know, slight improvement, but still you have almost half the country saying that the economy is getting worse. That's a difficult environment for an incumbent party regardless of who the candidate is. And so regardless of who the candidate is, it's important there. And as John already said, like these models that just had the economic fundamentals in them actually did really well in predicting the election this time. So did it matter who the candidate was here? There are others who say like, look, Americans will just never elect a woman, maybe let alone it's like a black woman, right, a non-white woman as president of the United States. What do we say to this? You're saying there are structural economic factors that are likely to be most important here, but did it not matter the racial gender identity of the candidate think in this election? I think it's hard at this point to say that it didn't matter at all, but my take at this point is that the fact that the Democratic Party again nominated a woman who lost does not mean that Harris lost or that Hillary Clinton lost because they are women. I think it's natural to ask that question for all kinds of good reason. We know that there are a lot of people who hold sexist attitudes. The Trump campaign is, to put it charitably, I guess highly masculine, but at times misogynistic and many of his supporters were outright sexist. And so you see all of that and it's natural to sort of assume that that's potentially driving voters against somebody like Harris. But one of the things that I think a lot of the research and political science over the last decade or so has found is that people's attitudes about gender and sexism in particular are really baked into partisanship now. They're so highly correlated with people's partisanship that there's not a lot of room for defection, for those attitudes to independently affect who they're voting for, for example, to have a Democrat who has sexist attitudes who decides they're not going to vote for Kamala Harris and vote for Trump. There's not a lot of evidence of that because those attitudes are so highly correlated with partisanship. Brian Chaffner and I wrote a good authority piece before the election showing that sexism predicted Joe Biden's approval rating virtually exactly the same way that it predicted Kamala Harris's approval rating, meaning that sexism among Democrats and Republicans was basically just predicting how they felt about the Democrat, not depending on whether the candidate was a woman. And then Michael Tesler had the piece, Michael Tesler and Chris Robertson, after the election showing in particular among Black men that sexism, again, was highly correlated with their attitudes about both Biden and Harris, but it didn't really differ much for either of them. So there wasn't that Black man in particular, for example, didn't turn out for Harris or didn't vote for Harris because she's a woman. Again, the caveat there is that probably it needs some more careful parsing of the data to figure out exactly the role that Harris's gender and sexism in general in the campaign play. But the evidence on that point is probably more limited than maybe the conventional wisdom suggests. Eric, you once said long ago, maybe we were talking about a blog post or something else. You said the question you always have to ask yourself when you're trying to do these kind of social science claims is compared to what, right? And so is Harris the candidate, the problem or compared to what? If you're Biden or apparently Biden's team, you think that she actually ended up being an inferior candidate compared to Biden. I don't think many people agree with the Biden team on this, and I think the evidence for this is pretty weak. She was able so quickly to improve on his standing in horse race polling against Trump. The number of Democrats that were clearly favorable, enthusiastic about the ticket increased quite a bit. Biden's basically saying, if you just give me more time, I would have been able to do the same thing. It's a little hard to imagine how, what would have sent a different signal than what was sent in that first debate? Could he have had a second debate that was substantially better? I guess maybe. But again, I think it would have been a much tougher route than the comparison that people say is compared to what? Well, it's compared to the other imaginary, magical Democrat that would have emerged from a competitive primary. Okay. There are other talented Democratic politicians out there, but is a competitive primary the thing that shines the light on them and makes them look amazing, or is a thing that makes all of them look a little tarnished by the end? I think there would have been questions raised about Josh Shapiro if he were the nominee within the party. There would have been probably similar questions about Gretchen Whitmer. So a woman office holder and candidate, so I'm a little skeptical that you can pin roughly a four point shift in the national popular vote on Harris versus the plausible alternatives to Harris. Like I'm not saying that candidates matters zero and certainly you can imagine like really off the wall candidates that might have had a larger impact on things, but it strikes me that the comparison here between Harris and a reasonable alternative is not likely to produce enough of a gain that would have won her the election outright or won that candidate the election outright. And so you're also saying that like Biden leaving the campaign so late probably didn't affect the outcome all that much? I don't know. I mean, she was able to do so much so quickly in terms of rallying the party. I don't know. I don't know if more time would have helped her to be honest with you or helped any Democrat in that role, or if actually she really made the most of the limited time that she had. I mean, she raised a ton of money. She spent a ton of money. She did a good debate. I mean, now, of course, because she lost, people are like Monday morning quarterbacking every speech she gave between September and election day. But again, like if it's hard to pin the loss on Harris versus another candidate, it's also hard to pin the loss on the specific words and phrases that Harris used in her speeches in October of 2020. Again, I don't want to say that there's a conclusive answer here. I think the way that I often think about this question is like, I always say I have a prior or I think it's less likely rather than more likely that this factor matter, but I think we should acknowledge a degree of uncertainty here, and that uncertainty is, of course, what is frequently lacking from the post-election narratives you referenced at the outset. So Danny, there's also been a lot of critique of the campaign strategies or tactics that the Democrats have used and you wrote a piece on the Democrats' reliance on the so-called ground game that worked really well for them in the midterm elections in 2022. So do you think that the Democrats sort of failed in their tactics here, or you also don't think that's really a big driving factor? I think if the Democrats' ground game, either devoting too much attention to that or failing to execute it in the right way, was a culprit here, what you would expect to see is that either that, you know, in the battleground states where they devoted a lot of resources to this, you'd see Harris doing worse or roughly equally well as she was doing in non-battleground states where they weren't devoting those resources, but in fact, Harris did better in the battleground states and in places where the Democrats devoted a lot of attention to the ground game and to other types of campaigning, which suggests that, on its face, that actually seems like it may have helped. It's hard to parse the effect of any single tactic or particular decision that parties are making and what they're allocating resources to, but that piece that I wrote based on some research that Josh Dhar and Sean Wired have been doing, the particular thing that they are interested in, which establishing these field offices in battleground states, does seem to help a little bit. And I think that in 2024, I guess if I had to place a bet on whether it mattered in some way, I'd say it probably helped a little bit, if anything. But I mean, like John is just saying, you know, like, what's the counterfactual here and how do we evaluate that, the idea that had they taken those resources and devoted them elsewhere, I'm not sure what that would have gotten them. So I don't see any kind of evidence to fault the campaign for that in particular. We estimated models after 2012 and '16 trying to estimate the effect of opening field offices and the associated activity. I think everyone would agree, like, there's some effect. It's not zero, but is it large enough? And I think people also underestimate how large of an effect it would take. And people, oh, well, if the state's only decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, that would have been something that additional ground game resources could have made up. And the answer is no, like, the effect of get out the vote work in a presidential general election campaign is very, very small, and you have to contact lots and lots of people to move the turnout by enough that you get a net of, like, 30,000 more votes, let's just say. So again, like, counterfactually, it's hard to come up with a plausible scenario in which a change in or reallocation of field organizing work or get out the vote work is the difference between winning and losing any presidential election, much less 2024. We have to acknowledge not complete certainty about that, but I would put that factor again towards the lower end of the spectrum in terms of what was important in 2024. I think another thing to think about there is that in Arizona and Michigan, lots of other places, the top of the ticket, Democratic candidates and Senate races or unilateral candidates outperformed Harris. And those candidates are benefiting from all the same kind of mobilizing and campaigning that the presidential campaign and the party is doing. And I think the fact that Ruben Gallego, for example, in Arizona beat Harris by six or seven points or something is another factor that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, anger or frustration directed at the Biden administration and the perception that the president and the administration of which Harris is part are in charge of the aspects of the economy or the country that I don't like very much. Whereas Ruben Gallego, who's just a member of the House, kind of step aside from that. But if the Democrats' tactics here were really failing them, I think you would have expected to see many of those Democratic Senate candidates doing worse, potentially, because they would have been sort of hamstrung by the same problems. You want a football metaphor? Eric, this is American football, not what you call football, which is probably called soccer. But after the 2012 election, the Obama campaign, like in '08 and '12, got a lot of credit for their campaign organization, especially for their field organization, which was, I think, admirably constructed and staffed. And I talked to some people who are Democratic campaign operatives who work in data and analytics. So these are pretty nerdy people, not old, grizzled veterans with anecdotes and war stories. And I asked them about, like, what is the effect of all this work? And the metaphor they used was a field goal. And they didn't actually mean a field goal in the literal sense of three points, which would be a lot, actually. They just meant it as, it's just a little extra thing you can do. But it's not really going to be the deciding factor, except maybe in the closest of closest of closest races, it's these bigger things at work, which, again, takes us back to a discussion about things like the macroeconomy, not so much into the day-to-day tactical decisions of campaigns. And kickers, of course, never get the respect they deserve in America. You're just sub-tweeting the Buffalo Bills who lost by a field goal to the Kansas City Chiefs. All of the Buffalo listeners of this podcast can be angry. It can make a difference in a close game, I guess. So that's, I guess, the conclusion of this part of the story. So another thing that's somewhat different in 2024 compared to 2020 is that Trump is now supported by all these sort of tech bros, the Bitcoin community, and of course, especially Elon Musk, who has a very large megaphone on Twitter. And some people think that he's been able to reach some voters that are normally not all that interested in politics, and has been able to sway some voters towards the Republican parties here. He's become awfully close to President Trump. He seems to always be by his side. So what do you think of this? Is there an Elon Musk effect? And how would we know? I mean, a lot depends on what the effect is. So has Elon Musk and several other people, Mark Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, I think arguably now, Mark Zuckerberg from Metta and some of a few others, have they, by virtue of aligning themselves with Trump, succeeded in shifting the public politics of people within the tech community in Silicon Valley? Yes, probably. So the permission structure, I think that changes when you see prominent leaders in the industry expressing conservative views and the like. So that's one effect that I think is real, but that's a very specific effect within a specific set of like wealthy people who live in one part of the country. If effect means it changes people's minds or induces them to vote for Donald Trump, then I don't think we have any kind of clear evidence for that. I mean, I'll make the best possible case that the best post-election survey we have or best kind of exit poll type survey, which is by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, it's called AP VoteCast. That show that Trump gained support relative to the 2020, especially among young men. So some people have sort of hypothesized that there's a set of people that young men are attentive to in terms of their media consumption. It's not just Elon Musk or Twitter. I mean, most people are not on Twitter, but like Joe Rogan and podcasts and all these kinds of things. And maybe a set of kind of right-coded masculine media personalities are influential with this particular group. That's a hypothesis, but like from our standpoint, you know, proving media effects or the effects of any kind of communication from Elon Musk or Joe Rogan or anyone requires more than looking at one exit poll and then anecdotal sense that these figures are listened to among young men under the age of 30 or whatever it is. So I would have to say, again, like we should be extremely cautious in attributing anything to a figure like Musk. And I would also say Musk is experiencing what Donald Trump himself is quite familiar with, which is the more politically he becomes, the less popular he becomes. That's true for lots of people who get involved in politics. So his approval rating, favorability rating in this case, has dropped recently. Maybe that's just one of the ironies of politics, which is, you know, you're credited for a win, but as soon as you win, you become less popular. What is becoming less popular mean here? Does that mean that you have fewer people who really look up to you and adore you? What does it mean just more people who really dislike you fiercely? Right? I see all our fellow academics leaving Twitter partially because they strongly dislike Musk, right? So you can still attract a constituency by being sort of very polarizing as Trump also has shown. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, there may be a minority of people who are like dedicated Elon Musk fans and, you know, they'll stick with him thick and thin through maybe a mock Hitler salute or whatever the latest controversies are. But I'm just saying like in terms of the percentage of Americans who express an unfavorable opinion, that trend is going in the opposite direction. So if anything, he's losing support and that's not great. I mean, Trump also, by the way, of course, starts his presidency with his approval rating at 50%. It's slightly better than it was when he did in 2016, but he's also starting from a pretty low point. So I would just say like, when a candidate wins, you know, we think of the candidate is doing the right things and the loser did the wrong things and we think of things, anything that's associated with the winning candidate must have been a positive influence on the candidate. So, you know, Elon Musk looks good because he backed the right horse. But at the end of the day, we don't know that Elon Musk really changed anyone's mind. And at the same time, what we do know is that Musk and Trump and others are experiencing now a very different sort of reality, which doesn't make, I think the halo that people draw over their heads shine quite as brightly as it perhaps did in the weeks after the election. Although Musk might care less about his public approval rating and more about his net value, which increased quite a bit when Trump won the election due to various traits and so on. But more broadly, there was a lot of talk about sort of culture war issues, especially related to DEI and those kinds of issues. In terms of the issues that played a role in this election, is there any evidence that those types of issues were prominent on the minds of voters, Danny? You don't have a better sense of that. I'm not aware of anything strikes me as particularly compelling on those counts. I mean, I think the story that seems to be told is that post George Floyd and Black Lives Matters in 2020 and the debates over transgender rights and the conservatives making a big stink about transgender athletes and high school sports and things like that, that the idea is that that then sort of peels off some kind of more moderate Democrats who are uncomfortable with some of those cultural trends. But I haven't seen any analysis and I just don't really know how easily that is disentangled from the other indicators of kind of generalized disenchantment with the Biden administration because of inflation and other post COVID dynamics. I would say that in terms of issues, I think that the extent to which immigration kind of dominated some of the campaign narrative, it was helpful for Trump. That's an issue on which the Democratic Party in the last four years has moved to the right. You see the Democratic Party becoming much more hawkish. They were in 2024 ready to sign on to legislation that would have increased border security until Trump scuttle that because he wanted to be able to run against the Biden administration and its weakness on immigration. The fact that voters are also simultaneously, even a lot of Democrats becoming more conservative on immigration was helpful to Trump because the more that voters are thinking about issues where one candidate or one party tends to have an advantage that tends to be more favorable to the candidate who's running on those issues. And so immigration strikes me as the place where we're looking for specific issue effects that there potentially may be something defined there. But on the other ones, I guess I'm just not sure at this point. I think if you go back to 2020, certainly one thing that was true in the shifts between 2016 and 2020 was that Trump did better among voters that were conservative on lots of different issues. And that was true of voters of different racial and ethnic groups. So people made something, I think appropriately, of Trump's gains among Latino voters in 2020. And those were disproportionately conservatives, but of course they're conservatives on a range of issues. And it's hard to pinpoint like what's the driving force for those voters fast forward to 2024. We have to break it down again by issue. It's not clear to me, at least in the initial stuff that I've been doing that we are seeing clear evidence that Trump's gains, especially among people of color, were disproportionately just conservatives on any number of issues. But we don't always have the best like survey evidence to tell you exactly what's happening on immigration, but also race and civil rights, but also trans issues, which trans issues in particular. So it would not surprise me at the end of the day that certain of these issues may have played a role for the relatively small number of people that might have switched their vote. But I think we got to figure out exactly which ones and that's really important to do because I think the public oftentimes has, I think complex and sometimes ambivalent attitudes about these issues. And so figuring out which ones matter more or less is going to be essentially figuring out like not just why the election turned out the way it did, but maybe what a party should learn going forward. Right. And so one issue that the Democrats, I guess were hoping on was abortion and they ran somewhat successfully on in 2022 and there were some referenda as well this time around. Is there any evidence that that issue didn't pan out for them as they expected or did it just not deliver enough votes to offset all the other things? I don't know. I think the challenge for Democrats was to some extent that the salience of that issue was heightened in 2022 and the salience I don't think persisted to the same extent. I just don't think it was viewed as a central problem. I don't think it was discussed as frequently. I think other things came to light. And certainly it was, I think, a more stable part of the agenda like Danny was saying. And then you get back to the economy when obviously inflation also occurred in 21-22, but the fact that there was some durable economic pessimism and the fact that the campaign itself tends to sort of reorient people towards the fundamental conditions in the country may just mean that the concerns about the economy, I think, took shape in a way that was different. Trump may also have helped himself here for once. He's not good at helping himself. Sometimes he gets in his own way, but he was pretty clear that he wasn't going to just jump on the bandwagon at every federal ban or federal restriction on abortion that some men think in the pro-life movement were hoping he would. And at times he would say different things. You know, at times he would sort of let the states handle it or he would even sort of agree with a state that had fairly restrictive policies. But then he clearly wouldn't just be the champion for that at the federal level. So he may have helped make the choice a little muddier than it might otherwise have been. That's again, sort of a circumstantial argument. I don't know exactly how we prove that. There's no counterfactual Trump that you can easily compare him to in 2024, but that's another possibility for why the issue just didn't resonate the same way. I think that's right. And I think that's one of the rare instances where Trump really showed some political acumen, which is sometimes lacking, or he just said, "I'm going to be fairly marky on my position on this." And I think that that turned the temperature down. It made the threat to abortion rights feel less significant. And I think compared to, for example, the attitude among Democrats and the feeling among Democratic voters in 2022, it made it feel much less threatening. And I think that probably dampened the effect of abortion. Again, how many votes are going to change because of that one issue? I don't know. But it certainly probably dampened some of the enthusiasm or anxiety or fear that might have driven some Democrats to turn out if Trump had, for example, said, "Yeah, I'm going to support a national abortion ban." Again, speculation, but I think there is something potentially to that. Speculation. So if I can summarize the conversation, I guess we sort of all believe very strongly that the economy had a pretty big effect on the election, and we're quite uncertain. But we think that a lot of the other things might have some effect, but it could be very small compared to the effect of the economy. And I should also say that as political scientists, we don't really know the answers to a lot of questions that also became very clear in this conversation again. But none of the less, I found it pretty illuminating to think through all these issues. Yeah, I would say that one thing that I think that sometimes happens in post-election commentaries is that the most interesting stories to tell are ones about people, like the candidates, because you can always imagine what if we just nominated somebody else, and stories about policy. Because then you can say, well, if the Democrats had only taken such and such position, they would have done better. So that must mean that the number one thing we must learn going forward is to take those positions. I would say that what really deserves more discussion is performance, which is to say, when incumbents are perceived as doing a good job managing the country, whether we're talking about the economy mostly, or perhaps immigration, or at certain points in American history, foreign conflicts and war. When they're perceived as handling those things well, then they get reelected or their party gets reelected. And when they don't, they don't. So we're back to the discussion of inflation. So I would just say that the challenge with a performance explanation, though, it's not very interesting in the long run, because that just basically means what should the Democrats do to win again? Well, if you just wait long enough, there'll probably be another economic downturn, or at least Trump will be relatively unpopular towards the end of his term. And so maybe that wins the Democrats win, even they don't change anything. Well, that's not even remotely interesting for editorial writing and coffee table conversation. And so I think as naturally, but gravitate to other things, but I would really elevate it. I think performance is like not just an explanation for 2024, but as a reason why we keep seeing presidential administrations winning and losing over a much longer period of time, including Trump's loss in 2020 as an example of that. That to me would be one thing we can take away, even though we can also admit our uncertainties about other things. Thank you very much, Danny. Thank you very much, John, for an enlightening conversation. And thanks for contributing to Good Authority. Thanks very much, Eric. Thank you. Good Authority's mission is to bring insights from political science to a broader audience. Everything we publish, including this podcast episode is freely available, with no paywall or subscription fee. All good authority content are under a Creative Commons license and can be copied and redistributed, as long as the work is attributed to us and any changes are noted. We'd like to thank our funders, especially the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Democracy Fund and Vanderbilt University. This podcast is hosted by Eric Wooten, director of the Georgetown University Mortara Center for International Studies. With help from Good Authority Editor-in-Chief Kimmy Dion and Multimedia Research Assistant Emily Hahn. You can find links to what we mentioned in this episode on our website, goodauthority.org.