Why Harris lost
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Some interesting insights.
Democrats have spent months debating how and why they lost the 2024 election. But the full picture of what happened on Election Day is only now coming into view.
The most authoritative election analyses draw on a variety of different data sources, including large sample polling, precinct-level returns, and voter file data that shows definitively who did and did not vote. And those last figures became available only recently.
The Democratic firm Blue Rose Research recently synthesized such data into a unified account of Kamala Harris’s defeat. (Blue Rose Research did ad testing for Future Forward, the largest PAC supporting Harris, which had disputes on strategy with the campaign itself.) Its analysis will command a lot of attention. Few pollsters boast a larger data set than Blue Rose — the company conducted 26 million voter interviews in 2024. And the firm’s leader, David Shor, might be the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party.
I spoke with Shor about his autopsy of the Harris campaign. We discussed the problems with the popular theory that Democrats lost because of low turnout; why zoomers are more right-wing than millennials; how TikTok makes voters more Republican; where Donald Trump’s administration is most vulnerable; what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters; and whether artificial intelligence is poised to turbo-charge America’s culture wars, among other things. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
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I read a lengthy interview at NY Times today with Ezra Klein and his guest from Blue Rose Research. It was good, lots of food for thought. I'm pissed at NYTimes though: I checked that the comments section was open before I started reading (I always do that now having found myself wanting to comment on something only to find the comments section closed). It was a long read and I took a few notes and when done put my notes together into a comment, opened the comments section, pasted my comment and clicked send (or whatever the button says). I got an error message and when I refreshed the comments were closed!! GGGGrrrrrr. I was so pissed I wrote the editorial board and kvetched about it. They could very easily put up a message at the top of the comments saying that it will close at such-and-such a time. But no. Several times I've been caught by their shutting the comments down in the middle of me reading an article or writing a comment. Besides, who shuts comments down in the middle of the day!?
