The result of the American elections shook consensus among political scientists. There are at least three issues that deserve highlighting. The first is that politics appears to have undergone a “de-escalation”. There was a certain convergence around the argument that the system was calcified due to the growing overlap between race, religion, gender, age group and party preferences. Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that Trump’s rise was a reaction of the white population to become a minority. These analyzes aged surprisingly quickly.
What was observed in the elections were significant changes in almost all segments. The majority of women and blacks still vote for the Democratic candidate but the gap between men and women or blacks and other ethnicities has narrowed spectacularly. Biden’s margin of victory in the Latino population, for example, which was 33% in 2020, fell to 6% in 2024. In 89% of the counties there was a change.
Trump increased his percentage of votes among men, women, age groups (proportionally higher among young people between 18 and 29), those with and without higher education, rural and urban areas. Among black men, the reaction was based on behavioral guidelines. There is also experimental evidence of reactions to the use of expressions such as . In New Jersey, Greater New York, the Democrats’ margin of victory fell from 16% to 5%.
The second controversy concerns the determinants of the radical right’s electoral success. For many analysts it would reflect a change in the preferences of the electorate that would have “turned to the right”. But there is solid evidence that the electorate’s preferences regarding economic or cultural/behavioral issues have changed little. The electorate’s level of agreement on issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage has not changed. Economic themes lost centrality in relation to themes such as immigration, nativism and behavioral issues. What effectively changed was the priority given to these issues vis-à-vis, for example, social policy, as argued by Gidron et al.
Trump’s election, however, seems to go in the opposite direction to the convergence of analyzes on the new priorities. The result suggests the centrality of the so-called economic vote. However, the evidence is mixed. The level of the unhappiness index (inflation rate + unemployment rate) in 2024 is the second lowest in 50 years. But this contrasts with the fact that 78% of voters agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction.
This negative perception leads us to a third controversial issue regarding the so-called incumbency effect. Here the expectation is that incumbents will have an advantage (occurs in 66% of cases). Some estimates put this effect for the USA at between 4% and 8% (historical data covering 216 years). But that wasn’t what was seen. In reality, not only in the American election but also in other democracies in general, incumbents are losing massively. According to John Burn-Murdoch in the 2024 elections, all incumbents lost significant shares of the vote, the first time this phenomenon has occurred since 1947! Thus, Trump would not have won; Biden would have been punished.
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