The 2024 Analysis that Every Dem Should Read

A new report from Catalist offers new details on how people voted in 2024

My analysis of the 2024 election results came with a giant caveat — exit polls are flawed, and we needed to wait for the more robust analyses of the voter file data.

Well, that analysis is here.

Catalist, a top Democratic data firm, has released its comprehensive report of what happened in 2024. The Catalist data is what every political operative and analyst has been waiting for.

The results are alarming. Democrats lost ground across the board, particularly with core segments of the Democratic base. In fact, the only group Harris gained vote share over Biden was with married white women.

Even though it’s challenging, I encourage you to read the whole analysis (or at least the summary) because it tells an important story about how Trump won and the degradation of the Democratic coalition since 2012. This is a call to arms for Democrats to think deeply about how we govern, campaign, and communicate.

Here are the key points:

1. Turnout and Persuasion Elected Trump

Since the election, the Democratic Party has debated the roots of Kamala Harris’s defeat. Did she lose because 19 million people who voted for Biden stayed home, or did she lose because she failed to persuade enough swing voters? This turnout vs. persuasion debate happens after every losing election because it’s an opportunity for party actors to argue a shift in the party ideology. If Harris lost because of turnout, she should have been more unabashedly progressive; and if persuasion is to blame, she wasn’t moderate enough.

Those are, of course, massive oversimplifications, but the argument matters for the party’s direction. The Catalist report answers that question.

It was both.