How did it go wrong for the Democrats? Barron Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offer clues
Kamala Harris lost every one of the seven swing states to presidential rival Donald Trump.
As the Democratic Party licks its wounds and searches its soul over how it all went wrong this election, some remarkable trends are starting to emerge.
In the wash-up, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is impossible to divide American voters the way pollsters and strategists have in the past.
And spending tens of millions of dollars on traditional cable network advertising might not be as effective as listening to your teenage son Barron Trump when he suggests sitting down for a three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
Americans are getting their information from new places and listening to new voices.
Now, voting data is helping explain how that led to complexities, and what might have been perceived as contradictions, on election day.
Voters in key areas did not always vote on party lines and instead split away from the Democrats when it came to the presidential vote, even if they supported the party down ballot.
There were Americans who voted to support state-level reforms that protect legal access to abortion, while rejecting Kamala Harris and her women's rights platform in the presidential race at the top of the ticket.
A joke said at a Trump rally in New York was expected to impact support for Donald Trump.
Just a week before the election, a comedian at a Trump rally called the US territory of Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage", and there was an assumption that could hurt Republican support among Latino and Hispanic voters.
But in Florida's Osceola County where more than 56 per cent of the population is Latino or Hispanic, including a large subset of Puerto Rican voters, Trump flipped the county red for the first time in his three runs for office.
And there are now new red spots in reliably blue states such as New York, New Jersey and California.
Perhaps the most stark example of how an American voter is no one thing is in the New York City areas of the Bronx and Queens that sent darling of the left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) back to Congress, there was a swing to Trump in the presidential race.
Overnight, AOC asked her followers about that.
People who voted for AOC and Trump
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her followers who voted for her as well as Donald Trump to explain their thinking.
Since Sunday night, local time, Ocasio-Cortez has been running Q&As on her Instagram account asking followers how they split their vote and why.
"If you voted for Donald Trump and me, or if you voted for Donald Trump and voted Democratic down ballot, I would really love to hear from you," she asked.
"This is not a place of judgement, I'm not going to put your stuff on blast … that's genuinely not the intent here, I actually want to learn from you and hear what you're thinking."
The responses streamed in and included lines like:
"It real simple … Trump and you care for the working class."
"Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie [Sanders]. I don't trust either party establishment politicians."
"I feel like Trump and you are both real."
"I support you and did this. Felt like I didn't have a choice after Biden's administration."
The areas of the Bronx and Queens that cover Ocasio-Cortez's congressional district are rich in cultural diversity, with residents who speak more than 200 languages.
Over the past two years, while Trump was promising mass deportations if he was to be re-elected, New York City welcomed more than 200,000 new migrants.
But still, in the boroughs of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, support for Harris was lower than both Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
"Donald Trump came to New York a lot, actively campaigned in this state, not just the Madison Square Garden rally, he did rallies in the Bronx, rallies out in Long Island, Queens, so he had an active presidential campaign here," Ocasio-Cortez said.
"There are also a lot of places … where a lot of house Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket."
Meaning, down ballot Democrats had success at precincts that also voted for Trump.
"This applied in my congressional district, but it also applied to many other different kinds of congressional districts of all ideologies and geographies across the country," Ocasio-Cortez said.
Kamala Harris won New York as expected, but reduced the Democrat margin in the state.
Commentators and pundits had long said the 2024 presidential election would be won and lost on four issues: the economy, immigration, access to abortion and the strength of the United States democracy.
Harris made access to abortion and concerns about democracy the defining issues of her campaign.
Trump hammered home extreme messaging on immigration and border issues, even if so much of it was presented without evidence.
And when it came to the economy, Trump asked the electorate if they were better off now than they were four years ago.
Besides the fact it was a powerful question to ask in the dying days of the campaign, the answer from Americans themselves turned out to be a resounding no.
And as the political commentator class breaks down where the Democrats went wrong, not hearing that message from the country before election day has been held up as a critical failure.
'Not the party of common sense'
Democratic Party strategist Julie Roginsky is among those who believe they know where things went wrong.
She said last week's comprehensive defeat could not be attributed to the current president, Joe Biden, or Harris.
"It is the fault of the Democratic Party in not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters," she told CNN.
"We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us.
"Language has meaning. When we address Latinos as 'Latinx', for instance, because that's the politically correct thing to do. It makes them think that we don't even live in the same planet as they do."
Bernie Sanders, who stood unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination ahead of the 2016 presidential election, has been scathing.
"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working-class people, would find that the working-class has abandoned them," he posted on X the day after the election.
He told Meet the Press: "The working people of this country are extremely angry. They have a right to be angry."
"Sixty per cent of Americans are living pay cheque to pay cheque and millions of families worry that their kids are going to have a lower standard of living than they do.
"It's not just about the campaign, it's about what does the Democratic Party stand for?
"Do ordinary people say, 'Yeah that is a party that is fighting for my interests?'"
Bernie Sanders said the Democratic Party had abandoned America's working class.
Veteran democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi — the house majority leader — disagrees.
"I do have a discomfort level with some of the Democrats right now who are saying, 'Oh, we abandoned the working class,'" she told the New York Times after the election.
"No, we didn't. That's who we are. We are the kitchen table, working-class party of America."
During the campaign, the Democrats insisted the US economy was strong — Biden said in October it had grown 12.6 per cent under his presidency — and pointed to metrics like falling unemployment to back that up.
But around the country, working people told their government they were feeling a cost-of-living crunch. Life was getting tougher.
Inflation, which has since come down, peaked at over 9 per cent in the summer of 2022, midway through Biden's term.
Multiple polls in the lead-up to the vote had shown Americans trusted Trump to run the economy over Harris.
Many also said they thought Trump would manage the border better. Unsurprisingly, the Republican nominee latched on to it as a campaign issue.
Pelosi accused Republicans of making the border a "cultural" battleground. Earlier in the year, Trump had railed about the prospect of a bipartisan effort to introduce stricter asylum criteria, which was subsequently voted down.
Aside from Trump's rhetoric, analysts argued the issue was a major blind spot for Harris, who did not visit the US-Mexico border until September.
If there are lessons to be learned from the campaign for the Democrats, Pelosi, in the wake of the crushing defeat, was not keen to look at them.
"We don't agonise over what happened," she said. "We organise about what comes next."
It's a dramatically different approach to Ocasio-Cortez who has been engaging directly with voters.
In her Instagram Q&A overnight, she also asked where Trump and Harris voters got their news and tapped into a key difference between the Democratic and Republican campaigns.
The campaign 'sleeper' agent
Diving into the data behind the youth vote, the 2024 election delivered a first for Trump.
This election was the first time more than 50 per cent of young men voted for him and their top reason for doing so was a perception that he'd be better for their personal economy.
To reach this group though, Trump had a "sleeper" agent.
When his father became the president of the US for the first time, Barron Trump was 10 years old. He stood to the side as a fresh-faced, well-dressed child with hair that looked neat and expensive — the perfect politician's accessory.
Barron Trump reportedly helped his father's campaign to target young men via podcasters.
Eight years later, Barron Trump has had a few ideas and as the success of the Republican campaign is analysed, he has been praised for delivering his father "the manosphere".
This week, Lara Trump said Barron became the campaign's "sleeper" agent.
"There have been many times over the course of the campaign with my father-in-law in the car, and Barron will call and say, 'Dad I have an idea of how you can get more votes,'" she said.
By all reports, Trump listened as his youngest child suggested he do three-hour interviews with podcasters, sit down with gamers and go after the voter who was consuming a lot of content, just very little of it from the likes of CNN.
Barron Trump helped his father go after the very online guy and if the young white men voter results are anything to go by, it was a resounding success.
On stage last week, as Donald Trump stepped back from the mic and let his high-profile supporters say a few words, UFC boss Dana White thanked the men who loaned Trump their platforms.
"I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin' with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan," he said.
Rogan is believed to be the most listened to podcast in the world and the Trump episode was streamed more than 27 million times.
Trump was reluctant to subject himself to one-on-one interviews with traditional sources: he did not, for instance, agree to an appearance on 60 Minutes which has been customary among candidates.
Although Harris did the show, she also faced similar critiques about exposing herself to searching questions.
Trump got his message out there by chatting for hours on sympathetic podcasts. Harris did speak to the Call Her Daddy podcast, but ran a largely traditional campaign.
The Democrats raised more than $US1 billion all up, vastly more than their opponents.
They out spent the Republicans in political advertising, had a much larger army of volunteers and were boosted by the country's most famous celebrities.
Among the abundant fossils of US politics, Harris — who at age 60 is more than two decades younger than Biden and 18 years Trump's junior — was positioned as the energetic option.
Connecting with generation Z, of whom many would be first-time voters, was an obvious priority.
Her campaign seized on a social media post by English singer Charli XCX, who declared: "Kamala IS brat" — a reference to her acclaimed and recently released record of the same name.
In the end, though, Harris only won over voters aged 18-29 by 6 per cent, a far cry from the 25 per cent margin Biden enjoyed in 2020.
Trump took his message about the economy into the spaces where it had the most impact.
He overcame perceived barriers in immigrant communities and in states where access to abortion was actually a motivating factor.
He asked his supporters to "swamp the vote" and to make the election result undeniable.
Analysing the results from multiple angles tells an unlimited number of stories about how his supporters did exactly that.
By：ABC(责任编辑：admin)
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