Blame and credit for the outcome of last week’s Presidential election are being copiously assigned, with numerous villains and heroes, human and issue, variously ranked foremost or among the most consequential.  For example, “it was the economy stupid” or “Harris stupidly refused the trip to Austin and Joe Rogan’s popular podcast.”  And in that circular firing squad there are even more explanations or excuses about why “sure thing” voting blocs and issues did not deliver.

Joe Rogan

But one thing predicted did, deliver that is.  The abortion issue, and it delivered with extreme prejudice.  Before resorting to the numbers demonstrating this, let’s examine some of the most conspicuous prediction failures.  And for this we principally rely on the highly regarded Washington Post/Edison Research exit poll – that will be compared with Pew – the gold standard – when their calculations and analyses of the vote by gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, formal educational attainment and issue ranking is released.

By far the biggest and most frequently stated failed prediction was that the widening gender gap would deliver a close election to Harris.  There are more women, and a higher percentage of that greater number vote.  But fewer women voted in 2024 than in 2020 and though more voted Democrat than Republican, a lower percentage voted for Sister Harris than had for Brother Biden.

Two additional improvident predictions were that old folks (65+) like HL, would strongly favor Trump as they had last time and that young voters (18-29) would favor Harris, the far younger candidate, even more than they had favored ancient Joe Biden.

But in fact Harris did far better with senior citizens than Biden had, going 50/50 with Trump, or in truth 49/49, with RFK, Jr., Jill Stein, Cornel West, Chase Oliver, Randall Terry, Joseph Kishore and Do and Ti dividing the roughly 2% who voted for them on their way to Comet Hale-Bopp.

The youth vote swung decidedly toward Trump, the oldest major party candidate ever, reducing Biden’s 24 percent advantage in 2020 to merely 11 percent for Harris.  Though not worthless that advantage was worth less because fewer 18 to 29s voted this time, with so much at stake, especially for them.

Preemptively maligned black men (most conspicuously by Barack and Michelle Obama) did not abandon Harris, voting for her at roughly 80 percent, as they had for Biden.

Jews, who Trump threatened would be largely responsible for his loss if only 40 percent voted for him, backed Harris 78/22, as they had Biden in 2020, Obama in 2008 and significantly more than they backed Hilary in 2016 (71-29).  This was predicted in HL 191 (9/28/2024) as Jews generally back liberal candidates with minority and outsider backgrounds like theirs’.  As they did with Obama and Roman Catholic JFK in 1960 (90-10) while RCs backed him only 80/20.  And what of the now insider Roman Catholics, they voted 60/40 for Donald Trump.

The much-ballyhooed “Hispanic/Latino” vote both delivered and failed to.  Delivering the biggest surprise with Latino men not merely increasing the percentage who vote for Trump (as predicted) but actually backing him 52-48, and with that reducing the overall Latino vote for Harris to just 52/46.  But Latinos failed to flex fully their increasing potential political power, with fewer voting than in 2020, despite significant increases in their number and share of eligible voters.

Moving from voting blocs, real, presumed or increasingly illusory, to issues that were predicted to be crucial, the exit polls suggest that what voters say is most important to them is not necessarily nor most often the way they vote.  Leaving aside whether a voter’s understanding of their uber-important issue jibes with reality and their favored candidate’s accomplishments and plans relative to it, the numbers show that with one huge and dispositive exception, voters say one thing but don’t back that up with their votes.

The economy was not the number one issue for the greatest number of voters, “The state of democracy” was cited by 34 percent and edged out “the economy” at 32 percent.  And yes, one might argue that Trump voters gave him the nod on democracy, but frankly that’s as silly as saying that Harris voters, whose number one issue was immigration gave her the nod on that issue – at least this year.

Immigration was cited as most important by 11 percent, fourth place in the contest for “most important issue in [your] vote”.  In third place with 14 percent was “abortion,” the issue that actually determined the election.

65 percent of the people who voted, Republican, Democratic and Halle-Bopp party answered that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 31 percent said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.  But abortion was by far the most important issue for self-described “born-again Christians,” who were 22 percent of the 2024 electorate.  That 22 percent is more than the total for black and Hispanic/Latino voters. And born-agains voted for Trump 82/17.  Unlike 2022, when the abortion issue clearly helped Democrats and Trump was not on the ballot, in 2024 Trump was.  Evangelicals credited and rewarded him for “promises made and promises kept”: delivering on his promise to place on the SCOTUS bench Justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade and allow the states to enact restrictions that govern women’s bodies and medical practice in places where born-agains are powerful political forces. That one-sided and largely one issue vote from that huge bloc of voters made what was otherwise a dead heat or a small Harris advantage in six of seven battleground states into a clear Trump victory. The outlier was Arizona where Trump won by 5+.

I both respect and envy the evangelicals’ resolve, discipline, and skill at winning.  Democrats must take a break from the finger-pointing and back-biting to learn some things about discipline and about winning from them.