The Democrats’ 2022 Error Message

In 2022, Democrats defied the political history of poor midterm-election results for the party holding the White House by running expectedly well in the seven key swing states—most crucially, the former “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—despite pervasive dissatisfaction with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance. That success, ironically, may have helped seal the party’s fate in the 2024 election.

Two years ago, the Democrats succeeded in quarantining the swing states and won most of the key governor and Senate races within them, even as the powerful nationwide current of dissatisfaction with Biden and the economy moved virtually every other state, red or blue, toward the GOP. If the midterms had gone as badly as many analysts initially forecast—with predictions of a towering “red wave” of Republican gains—Biden likely would have faced greater pressure to renounce running for a second term long before his disastrous debate performance in June. That might have forced him from the race much sooner, allowing a full-scale primary to take place, which would have either yielded a nominee unconnected to the administration or helped Vice President Kamala Harris establish an identity independent of Biden.

By the same token, their strong 2022 result also left Democrats too confident that former President Donald Trump had become unacceptable to voters. The decisive defeats of handpicked Trump candidates such as Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, and Doug Mastriano across swing-state governor and Senate races encouraged a complacency among Democrats about the degree to which voters had rejected the former president himself. That overconfidence contributed to Democrats reacting too slowly as voters’ retrospective approval rating of Trump’s performance in office started rising through 2023. By Election Day 2024, a majority of voters in the VoteCast survey conducted by NORC said that they approved of Trump’s presidency, a level of support he famously never reached in office.

As a result, the persistent discontent with the country’s direction overwhelmed the Democratic defenses in the Blue Wall and the other four swing states—North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. That allowed Trump to sweep them all, propelling him back to the White House.

[Mike Pesca: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party]

Before the 2022 election, the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg was one of the few operatives in either party predicting that Democrats would avoid the supposed “red wave.” Rosenberg believed that Democrats would lose ground outside the states where the two sides were spending heavily in 2022. But, he argued, inside the states where Democrats were concentrating their organizing and advertising, they could neutralize the effect of conservative media and win elections by shifting voters’ attention to issues more congenial to the Democratic Party: abortion rights, democracy, and the extremism of Trump’s allies.

Rosenberg was thus an early exponent of the “two elections” theory, which held that the electoral environment inside the swing states could be isolated from the conditions that would determine voters’ choice beyond them. Mike Podhorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, was another advocate of the theory—and the two influential Democratic strategists seemed validated by the 2022 results. With most voters disapproving of Biden’s job performance, and with three-quarters of them describing the economy as “not so good” or “poor” in 2022 exit polls, the national environment did tilt to the right. Indeed, Republicans won the national popular vote in races for the House of Representatives by 2.6 percentage points, a 5.6-point swing from the Democrats’ margin in 2020.

Despite that national current, Democrats did win governor’s races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, as well as Senate contests in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania that allowed them to maintain control of the upper chamber. (The only blemishes were Republican wins in the Nevada and Georgia governor’s races, and Senate races in Wisconsin and North Carolina.) Wins in a number of white-collar suburban House districts also suppressed GOP gains in that chamber far below expectations.

“The big lesson for us here is that when we run full fledged national campaigns we can control the information environment, and stay in control of our own destiny in the most important battlegrounds in the country,” Rosenberg wrote shortly after the 2022 election.

The 2024 election replicated the general rightward tilt, with most voters again disapproving of Biden and expressing negative views about the economy. As of Wednesday, Trump has improved from 2020 by about 6.6 percentage points in the national popular vote (from a deficit of 4.5 points to a lead of roughly 2.1 points); when all of the votes are counted (notably including California’s), Trump’s gain is expected to be about 5.8 points, a swing almost identical to the GOP’s improvement in the House popular vote from 2020 to 2022. And as in 2022, in the places where the parties were not heavily spending, that overall national shift widened the GOP lead in red states and narrowed the Democratic advantage in blue states.

This time, though, Harris could not hold the swing states where Democrats won so many races two years ago. Harris ran somewhat better in most of the seven key swing states than she did nationally, but not nearly to the degree that the party did in 2022, nor well enough to carry any of them. Trump thus torpedoed the “two elections” theory that had underpinned Democratic hopes that Harris could still overcome Biden’s unpopularity in 2024.

The Republican pollster Gene Ulm points to one reason for the change: the operational advantages that helped Democrats so much in those states’ Senate and governor races two years ago aren’t as consequential in a presidential contest. “Tactics, money, and things like that,” he told me, “are just less important in a presidential race when the news is covering it wall-to-wall.” The fact that Democrats won the Senate races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada despite Trump’s victories in those states supports Ulm’s argument: Those contrasting results suggest that the Democratic financial and organizational advantages mattered more in those contests than they did in the presidential race. (Among the swing states that Trump won, Republicans appear, pending final counts, to have captured a Senate seat only in Pennsylvania.)

[Jonathan Chait: Republican leaders are more afraid of Trump than ever]

The political landscape was tougher for Harris in the swing states than for Democrats in 2022 in at least three other respects. One is that Trump turned out far more low-propensity, right-leaning voters than GOP candidates did in 2022. Across the swing states (as well as nationally), the electorate in 2024 tilted Republican much more than in 2022, as the exit polls and VoteCast both determined.

The second crucial change was that Biden was even more unpopular in many of these states than in the last election: The share of voters who gave him positive ratings for his job performance compared with 2022 was eight points lower in Wisconsin, seven points lower in Michigan, and four points lower in Pennsylvania, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

The Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me that in spite of all Biden’s other successes on the economy, his reluctance to acknowledge the continued pain that most working-class voters felt from inflation further alienated them from him. “One of the big differences between ’24 and ’22 was, in the effort to get credit for the economy, we sounded out-of-touch to voters, and we sounded like we were the status quo,” Lake told me. In each of the swing states, at least four-fifths of voters who disapproved of Biden voted for Trump, meaning that the decline in Biden’s approval rating from 2022 to 2024 left Harris in a deeper hole.

The third big change in the swing-state environment may have been the most decisive. Far fewer of the voters in those states who were dissatisfied with the economy backed Harris in 2024 than had supported Democratic candidates two years earlier. Then, the exit polls in Pennsylvania, for instance, found that John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate, lost voters who were negative about the economy by 18 percentage points; this time around, Harris lost those voters by twice as much. Then, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, lost voters who were negative on the economy by 12 points; this year, Harris lost them by nearly four times as much. Harris lost voters who were down on the economy by at least 40 percentage points in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. In each case, that was considerably worse than Democratic candidates had performed with comparable voters in 2022.

Tellingly, the Democratic Senate candidates who narrowly won in the swing states in this cycle (as well as Josh Stein, the Democrat who comfortably won the North Carolina governor’s race) all won a slightly higher share of voters dissatisfied with the economy than Harris did. To some extent, that reflected the tactical advantages Ulm stressed. But these Democrats’ success, like the 2022 results, also suggested that voters were more willing to look past their economic discontent when picking for positions other than the presidency—the office to which they assign responsibility for setting national economic policy.

Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who studies economic attitudes as part of a bipartisan team that conducts surveys for CNBC, told me that Harris could not prevail against the widespread verdict among voters that the cost of living was more manageable under Trump’s presidency than Biden’s. “The Harris campaign did what it could,” Campbell said. “We saw evidence that her middle-class-focused messaging was memorable to voters, and was sort of addressing the issue, but at the end of the day, the current of prices being as high as they still are, was just too strong.”

The greater difficulty Harris faced on the economy contributed to Democrats’ deep disappointment that, despite a big ad spend, abortion rights did not prove a more effective issue. Voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances provided crushing margins across the swing states in 2022: In governor races, Democrats won more than four-fifths of such voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and about three-fourths of them in Arizona and Wisconsin. This year, however, the exit polls found that only about two-thirds of pro-choice voters in those four states voted for Harris. That fall-off proved insurmountable for her.

In the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “Democrats, and probably some independents, were much more animated by the abortion issue than they were [by] concerns about the economy,” Campbell told me. This year, that ranking reversed, particularly for the working-class white women who proved essential to Trump’s victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Trump’s insistence that he would leave abortion rights to the states probably helped him mute the issue. But the biggest factor appears to be the primacy that voters placed on the economy in their presidential vote. Previously unpublished results from the exit polls provided to me by the CNN polling unit found that a little more than one-third of voters said they supported legal abortion but were negative on the economy—and they preferred Trump to Harris by a narrow margin. This phenomenon was especially visible among blue-collar women, Lake told me: “They decided that they were going to ignore the other issues and were going to vote the economy, because they just had to get the economy going for their families.”

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Trump is anything but a normal candidate, but the unavoidable conclusion from last week’s returns is that most voters treated him as one. The race followed the familiar hydraulic pattern of American presidential elections: When a president of one party falls in voters’ esteem, the nominee of the other party rises. In the major exit polls, 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with the country’s direction voted for Trump—exactly the same percentage of “wrong track” voters who backed Barack Obama in the race to replace George W. Bush in 2008.

Exactly how the race slotted into these familiar grooves remains a subject of debate among Democrats. Podhorzer blames the media for normalizing Trump and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court for blocking Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which might otherwise have reminded voters about the threat he poses to the constitutional order. Both exit polls and the VoteCast survey, Podhorzer notes, suggest that millions of people who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home this year. He attributes this to ebbing concern about the MAGA agenda among voters generally resistant to it. “The thing that struck me,” Podhorzer told me, “is how alarming the lack of alarm was.”

Rosenberg regrets the Harris campaign’s lukewarm effort to sell the Biden administration’s economic achievements, such as the strong job market and revived investment in manufacturing. “I think they took an enormous risk by not litigating and defending her record as vice president in this administration,” Rosenberg told me. “What she ended up getting was all the downside of the Biden record and none of the upside.”

Perhaps no set of strategies or messages or alternative nominee could have overcome the discontent over Biden’s record on inflation and immigration. Still, the unusually strong Democratic performance in the 2022 elections gave the party a false sense of security about its ability to surmount widespread discontent with Biden. The surprise may not have been that Trump swept the swing states in 2024, but that the Democrats got a stay of execution in them two years before.