How the most unpopular US president got reelected

Polygraph | Newsletter n°288 | 24 Jan 2025

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Situation

Joe Biden left office with the second-lowest presidential approval rating on record, per Gallup. The only president less popular is the one Kamala Harris lost to a few months ago — the same one who was sworn back into office this week.

How Harris managed to lose to this convicted felon is the subject of an ongoing and let’s-call-it-spirited public debate. This debate isn't going away. It has evolved from just being about Harris’s loss to what Harris’s loss says about the Democratic Party.

From this debate, a particularly toxic narrative has emerged from the Democratic establishment: Harris didn’t fail the voters — voters failed Harris. While many appear to genuinely believe this claim, the top Democrats pushing it know it’s far from the truth.

How Kamala Harris lost to the most unpopular president on record

Winning wasn’t Harris’s primary concern; winning without the left and anti-war movement was. At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal — the left’s numbers aren’t overwhelming, and the anti-war movement’s numbers are depressingly underwhelming. However, this overlooks the widespread appeal of their core ideas, particularly among working-class voters.

And it’s no wonder: working-class well-being is acutely compromised when an administration prioritizes warfare over promoting the general welfare. In contrast, those in the top income brackets are far more insulated from such trade-offs. If your goal is to win as many votes as possible, compromising on policy with leftists and peace activists is essential, even if you find them annoying.

If there was ever a time for a Democratic candidate to invite those groups to the table, it was 2024. But Harris shut them out, ignoring an abundance of polling and well-being data practically begging her not to. Her choice ultimately led millions of would-be Democratic voters to stay home on Election Day, sealing her fate and, by extension, the rest of ours.

1. Biden’s failure

In 2020, Joe Biden ran and won on the promise of building an economy that works for everyone. That didn’t happen. Instead, the country experienced astonishing economic growth at the national level and greater economic despair at the household level. As the graph below shows, several measures of economic well-being and financial stability from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) show that Americans are worse off now than they were in 2019.

Biden initially reassured voters that he understood the difference between national economic indicators and people’s lived experiences, campaigning on a trillion-dollar-plus investment in social welfare. By 2024, however, he had erased that distinction, frequently implying an equation between macroeconomic health and household economic well-being — just as he seemed to unlearn the critical difference between national security and human security. The trillion-dollar-plus investment Biden promised for social welfare never materialized; weapons companies got it instead. Fittingly, the first page of the final Investing in America report — a glossy summary of Biden’s domestic agenda — features only one chart, and it’s on GDP growth.

This disconnect wasn’t a matter of ignorance. Biden, Harris, and the Democratic establishment were well aware that financial well-being was plummeting as GDP was climbing. They made a deliberate choice to ignore the former and brag about the latter. For instance, partisan pundit Brian Beutler advised Democrats in May to avoid acknowledging widespread economic hardship. Showing empathy for the deterioration in well-being, he argued, would leave the Democratic Party “carrying the stink of a loser everywhere.” (And what sort of billionaire megadonor wants to donate to a loser?)

^Alt text for screen readers: Financial hardship and instability have worsened since 2019. This graph compares 2019 and 2024 across four barometers of financial difficulty. The numbers refer to the percent of the U.S. population experiencing each difficulty. Low/very low financial well-being: 17% in 2019, 22% in 2024. Overdraft or NSF fees: 25%, 29%. Fluctuations in income: 24%, 31%. Difficulty paying bills: 40%, 43%. Data: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

2. Biden failed. Kamala Harris promised more of the same

The chart above highlights the biggest and most urgent challenge Harris faced upon becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee: convincing voters that, unlike Biden, she cared about the cost-of-living crisis — their top concern since at least July 2022 — and that she had a credible and comprehensive plan to reduce spiraling economic hardship.

Harris was the vice president the last time a dramatic reduction in hardship took place. The suite of welfare policies enacted or extended by the American Rescue Plan led to an across-the-board improvement in human security from 2020 to 2021, as the graph below illustrates.¹ I find this very pleasing to look at.

The graph also shows what happens when those programs are taken away during a cost-of-living crisis. This is the story that Harris should’ve hammered home: it explains to voters why their lives are worse now than in 2019-20 and gives them concrete evidence that she knows how to make their lives better. All Harris needed to do was campaign on resurrecting and permanently enacting a version of the social welfare agenda that radically improved economic well-being in 2021 — a plan she helped implement. This was the obvious solution to voters’ number-one concern, and it was a course the left had been urging her to take.

^Alt text for screen readers: Ending pandemic aid sparked a broad surge in hardship. This chart shows the percent of the U.S. experiencing financial distress, financial distress among young families, poverty, child poverty, food insecurity, and child food insecurity from 2020 through 2023. There is a large, across-the-board reduction in each hardship measure from 2020 to 2021, but then an even bigger across-the-board increase in each hardship measure from 2021 to 2022, coinciding with the expiration or elimination of several key social programs after 2021. Aside from child food insecurity, there is another increase across all measures from 2022 to 2023. Data: Household Pulse Survey, RAPID Survey Project, Census Bureau, USDA.

Notice how the across-the-board improvement then deterioration in material well-being visualized above coincides with the erection then demolition of the pandemic welfare state visualized below. (The following graph originally appeared in Polygraph n°265, but the most insightful analysis featuring this chart is this excellent analysis by economist Nathan Tankus.)

^Source.

Harris ultimately chose not to campaign on a social welfare agenda that could’ve delivered another historic reduction in poverty and improvement in overall material well-being. Her economic platform was far less robust. While it did include a few policies enacted under the 2021 American Rescue Plan like the expanded child tax credit, it failed to meet the moment. It was not a credible response to record homelessness, record household food costs, a record increase in child poverty, and so on.

To make matters worse, the Harris campaign’s closing argument revolved around platitudes about democracy and Trump’s threat to it, rather than tangible policy solutions to people’s most urgent problems. Instead of following the successful, policy-focused playbook of Biden’s 2020 campaign, Harris mirrored the failed, largely substance-free approach of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

3. Polling data: listen to the left and anti-war movement. Harris: no

In addition to a wealth of well-being data, a significant body of publicly available pre-election polling data strongly suggested that Harris should compromise with the left on domestic policy and the anti-war movement on foreign policy.

• Domestic policy: Regardless of party affiliation, the cost-of-living crisis was clearly at the top of voters’ minds. The left urged Harris to campaign on a plan akin to the ever-popular social welfare agenda that dramatically improved economic well-being in 2021. While Harris acknowledged cost-of-living issues — a step up from Biden — her platform and messaging failed to convince voters that she saw it as a real crisis.

• Foreign policy: Biden’s Israel policy was unimaginably cruel and remains a dark moral stain on this country’s conscience. It also sucked the oxygen out of the Democratic base. Despite nearly 8 in 10 Democrats saying the US should not send weapons to Israel, Harris promised in August that there would be no change in US policy. By that time, police had arrested over 3,500 people protesting this policy on college campuses.

• And for as much effort as Harris put into courting conservative voters, she conspicuously avoided engaging with those in the anti-war movement, opting instead to chase anti-Trump, pro-Dick Cheney unicorns. Majorities in both parties want to keep the US out of wars, and more than twice as many Americans support cutting the Pentagon budget than support increasing it. But Harris ceded the anti-war turf to Trump. Here are a couple quotes from her DNC speech:

  • “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”

  • “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Harris mixed an uninspiring domestic policy with a violent and deeply unpopular foreign policy. As discussed below, this toxic combination didn’t drive voters to the right, it drove them to the couch (and ensured that disengaged voters stayed there) on Election Day. It appeared to have amplified the widespread sense of despair and cynicism felt by many Americans about politicians and government. As one pollster noted, “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

Would Harris have won if she had listened to the left and the anti-war movement, embracing more sensible policies on these and other issues? I don’t know. Would Harris have had a better shot at winning? Absolutely.

4. What happened when Harris tried to win without the left and anti-war movement

Harris ran for president while effectively issuing one middle finger to the left and the other to the anti-war movement. While this decision may have appealed to certain pundits, it’s extremely difficult to win the majority of working-class votes this way, or really any group outside the upper middle class and above.

And, unsurprisingly, she didn’t. In 2020, 56% of voters with household incomes less than $100K voted for Biden and 43% for Trump. But in 2024, Harris only secured 47% of those votes (a 9 point drop compared to 2020) while Trump got 51% (+8). Among voters with incomes under $50K, Biden won 55% and Trump 44% in 2020. In 2024, Harris earned just 48% (-7) with Trump getting 50% (+6). This marked the first time since the 1960s that the majority of voters in this low-income bracket preferred the Republican nominee.

This wasn’t the result of a massive, nationwide rightward ideological shift, as this misleading map from the New York Times suggests. Rather, Harris motivated far more working-class people to stay home on Election Day than Trump managed to bring over to his side.

^Misleading.

In 2020, there were 239.2 million eligible voters (eligible voters = people who can vote; voter turnout = eligible voters who did vote). Biden secured 34% of the eligible vote to Trump’s 31%. By 2024, Trump’s share of the eligible vote had barely increased, growing by just 0.56 percentage points. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate’s share dropped by 3.32 percentage points. If Harris had maintained Biden’s share of the eligible vote, she would have won the popular vote by 5.9 million. Instead, Harris lost by 2.3 million. Overall voter turnout fell from 65% in 2020 to 62% in 2024. The issue for Democrats wasn’t that the Republican candidate performed better than in 2020 — it was that their own candidate performed a lot worse.

This isn’t to deny that some voters shifted to the right on certain issues. Immigration immediately comes to mind as an example. But the Democratic Party also shifted to the right, both in policy and discourse. For example, consider how the Biden administration primarily blamed immigrants for record homelessness, even though the biggest contributing factor was ending pandemic aid during a cost-of-living crisis. In fact, cutting pandemic assistance at the worst possible time likely fueled reactionary attitudes toward immigration. To illustrate, here’s an excerpt from a New Yorker interview with a Haitian community leader in Springfield, Ohio:

5. Democrats know they’ve got a policy problem — and their plan is to do nothing

Harris’s policy problems are the Democratic Party’s policy problems. This is evident when comparing the 2020 and 2024 Democratic Party platforms: the latter was more hawkish on foreign policy and far less ambitious on domestic policy, mirroring Harris’s campaign compared to Biden’s. Notably, in 2020, the left and anti-war movement had a seat at the Democratic Party’s table (albeit at the far end). By 2024, they appeared to have been shut out entirely.

The fact that the most unpopular president on record lost in 2020 but won convincingly in 2024 suggests something is deeply broken. Yet top Democrats deny there’s anything to fix. Take Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the highest-ranking Democrat in office. In a recent Meet the Press interview, he attributed Democrats’ across-the-board loss to poor messaging, not bad policy:

We talked about the mechanics of the legislation and the details of the legislation. And we really didn’t show the kind of empathy and concern — or show enough of it — to average working families who didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them. So, what we're going to do is spend a lot of time talking to working families, showing them how much we care about them…And that’s going to be a significant change.

Schumer is implying that not only are Americans policy illiterate, but so dense that they can’t even assess their own economic well-being. He’s wrong: the ten measures of material hardship illustrated above all show a deterioration in well-being during the Biden administration. This isn’t a messaging issue; it’s a substantive policy failure. If Democrats want working-class voters to appreciate their policies, they need to enact better ones.

The real question is whether the Democratic Party even sees the working class as a group it wants to make substantive policy for. Schumer gave us a revealing clue in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This strategy has now failed twice. In 2024, the same failed strategy from 2016 was chosen over the successful strategy of the 2020 campaign. Liberal pundit Jennifer Rubin best summed up the Democratic establishment’s attitude toward winning: “[Kamala Harris] ran as a center-left candidate, and that worked,” Rubin said. “She established herself in exactly the right place in the political universe.”

Winning doesn’t appear to be the Democratic Party’s primary goal — winning without the working class does.

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1. Because of data limitations, this chart and the one above have different sets of hardship measures: Census Bureau’s poverty data goes back to 2019 and beyond, but hasn’t yet been released for 2024. The Household Pulse and RAPID Surveys have 2024 data, but data collection began a few months into 2020. CFPB has no data for 2020 for most indicators. This makes me sad.