The media is full of analysis on why Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the recent election. At various times I have mentioned factors such as voters’ frustration with high inflation, illegal immigration, and woke excesses on college campuses.
However, the more I think about the election, the less confidence I have in any explanation. This is especially true in a close elections. And while Trump had a comfortable majority in the Electoral College, if just 1% of the electorate had uniformly switched from Trump to Harris, she would have won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Consider the following thought experiment. The popular vote margin went from trailing Trump by about 4.5% in 2020 to winning by 1.5% in 2024. You can think of that as 3% of the electorate switching from Democrats to Republicans. If only 2% had switched to Trump, he might have lost. This means that almost any factor that moved an extra percent of the electorate could legitimately be considered decisive. So if (relative to 2020) five different issues each moved 1% of the electorate toward Trump, and two separate issues moved 1% of the electorate toward Harris, that could explain this year’s outcome. In that case, any of the five issues could be considered decisive in Trump’s favor.
Here it is Bloomberg:
Among the movements [Trump] promised – and this is all up to Congress, not him – to extend the 2017 tax cuts that largely benefited corporations and the wealthy (price tag: $4.6 trillion); eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips ($250 billion); increase the child tax credit from $2,000 to $5,000 ($3 trillion); and eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits ($1.8 trillion). But Republicans can’t possibly deliver on all of this, or even most of it, even though they have complete control over Washington.
That’s an impressive list, but it doesn’t even include Trump’s promise to bring back the SALT deduction, which is a hugely important issue for many voters in states like New Jersey and New York (two states where Trump did much better than expected). Nor does it include Trump’s proposal to abolish taxes on overtime. But I almost never see these tax plans discussed as the reason why Trump won, by experts from both parties. Most analyzes have focused on other issues. It almost seems like there is something unreliable about talking about election results in raw financial terms.
Perhaps experts believe that most voters did not vote for Trump based on these promises. But that is not the issue at stake. The question is not how “most voters” vote, the question is whether there is a promise to increase the child tax credit to $5,000 And bring back the SALT deduction And abolishes taxes on tips, And abolish tax on overtime And Eliminating taxes on Social Security income was enough to impact 1% of the electorate. That doesn’t seem all that unbelievable.
Another objection is that the Democrats also made expensive promises, and that the various promises may have been balanced. That’s a reasonable counterargument. Democrats, for example, have tried to forgive student loans, even though the initiative has stalled in the courts. Harris also promised to exempt tips, but only after Trump did so. So her promise received less attention.
But Trump’s promises on tax cuts far outweighed Harris’s and were only partially offset by higher rates. In addition, some voters wrongly believe that the rates are paid by foreigners. So I suspect that Trump’s tax program was more popular than Harris’ proposed program, even among lower-paid workers. This is a source of extreme frustration for progressives, who see Democrats as the party of the working class.
I don’t have a hard conclusion here. Rather, I would encourage people to be open to election declarations in a close race. Thus, the claim that 98% of voters would not reject a candidate because she was a black woman in no way refutes the claim that Harris lost the election because she is a black woman. (To be clear, I believe the main reason the Democrats lost has to do with other factors, like the ones I mentioned at the top of this post. But in a very close race, almost any single factor can be decisive.)
The above analysis applies even more strongly to complex historical events. So there could be a dozen factors that led to something like the Great Depression or World War II, where a different outcome for a single factor could have led to a radically different outcome. This is of course related to the famous ‘butterfly effect’ from chaos theory.
P.S. In a highly close race like 2000, almost every single factor could plausibly be cited as decisive, even if it yielded only a few hundred votes.
(0 COMMENTS)