Why Democratic Turnout Cratered — And Why It Won’t Be Easy to Fix

In the days following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, Democratic politicians, journalists, and pundits have been searching for potential explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat. We have offered up some of our own. On Monday, Rolling Stone spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for Democrats.

Podhorzer, who chairs the Analyst Institute and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is an expert in data-driven politics. In a blog post Monday, he writes that the election results were not about Americans embracing Trumpism — but rather a continuation of a trend in U.S. politics: Elections are consistently “change elections,” because “Americans are simply fed up with the system not working for them.” That was the case before the Covid era — and even more so now.

Further, he says, the election was no MAGA mandate: “If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for [Joe] Biden in 2020 just stayed home,” Podhorzer writes. “And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.”

In our conversation, Podhorzer suggests the 2024 election results were in part about media coverage that didn’t capture Trump’s threat, as well as Americans’ discontent with an economic system and job market that are more precarious than ever — with neither major political party interested in solving those issues.

Rather than ask what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters, Podhozer says the better question is: “What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party?” The other related and necessary collective project, he says, is taking on a Supreme Court that has deemed itself Washington’s only “actual functioning legislative body,” and has fundamentally rewritten the rules of our democracy.

The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

You are digging into the Biden 2020 “surge” voters, the infrequent voters who turned out for him in 2020 and did not turn out this year for Harris or flipped to Trump. Is there anything today that you can tell me about those voters?

What we already have available to us, I think, is pretty clear. In both the VoteCast and CNN exit polls, four percent of those who voted for Trump in 2020 voted for Harris. In VoteCast, only four percent of those who voted for BIden voted for Trump; in the CNN exits, it was six percent. But in both, way more — six or seven points more — of the people who voted for Trump came out in 2024 than people who voted for Biden. And we won’t know exactly who they are until voter files are appended.

In both the 2020 and 2024 exits, voters were asked whether their vote was mostly for the candidate they cast their ballot for or against the opponent. It’s really clear with the calculations that I have in there, that she pretty much kept those who had said they were voting “for” Biden four years ago, but really tanked with people who had said they were casting their ballot against Trump four years ago. Those people just stayed home. That’s about 20 million people.

Do you have any theories or have you seen any compelling arguments as to why those 20 million people might have stayed at home this year?

Yeah, it’s what I’ve been writing about over and over again in the run-up. The big difference, what was most alarming this fall, was how much less alarmed everyone was in the media and civil society than they had been four years ago. Four years ago, we had honestly forthright coverage of how bad Trump was, and very much less this time around. And although there were excellent side pieces on that, it was as if the people doing the daily reporting about the election didn’t bother to read it, and just covered it like it was a normal election. People were just not as alarmed.

The thing that speaks to just how resistant Americans are to Trump is that compared to other countries around the world — center, left, or right — the margin here was so much less than it was elsewhere, not because I think voters like the Democrats, but because enough voters had some sense of what the stakes of election were. Just not enough of them.

Do you see this election not as some type of MAGA mandate, but more as this toss-out-the-bums election, effectively a referendum on the incumbent in an era when incumbents are getting tossed out with frequency?

Yeah, of course. I mean, we have a two-party system, and — especially for the 21st century — we should stop calling them “winners” and start calling them “not-losers.” In nine of the last 10 elections, they’ve thrown out either the president or the party controlling the House or the Senate. That never came close to happening with that regularity before. Americans are just fed up with a political system that’s not responsive to their actual needs, or understands the challenges in their lives, or speaks to them, and they’re caught between two bad alternatives, in their minds, and this is the politics we get. All this stuff about, after the fact, doing a head count on this demographic group and that demographic group and all of that is confusing what the effective cause is. If it is a general phenomenon, then of course people in all these demographic groups are going to seem to move. But there’s not evidence that they’re moving to [Trump] or MAGA.

As I said, for the most part, there weren’t that many voters who had voted for Biden, who had been Democrats, but were now joining the Republican coalition. Pick any group you have heard about “moving right,” say noncollege voters. The category, noncollege voters, in 2024 is not the same set of individual noncollege Americans who cast ballots in 2020. A very disproportionate share of those 2020 noncollege Biden voters stayed home. They didn’t move right; they moved away from the political process altogether. The inevitable effect of that is that the noncollege voters in 2024 were more Republican, simply because fewer noncollege Democrats bothered to vote. To be clear — I’m not saying that there were no conversions — there were, but that’s hardly the biggest part of the story. And to be clear this is not meant to suggest that Democrats have nothing to answer for — if anything they have more to answer for, since all they had to do was get them out to vote again.

Furthermore, we cannot lose sight of the fact that Democrats who won in 2020 promised to fight the battle for the soul of America and got little done about that. And the mainstream media just checked out on it. So how are voters supposed to know?

There seem to be these two narratives forming where pundits and politicos attempt to explain why Harris lost. One being that Democrats either abandoned or were abandoned by working-class voters. The other being that Democrats are too “woke,” and the Republican campaign against trans Americans was really effective. Do you buy either of those theories, or do you feel there are a lot better explanations out there for what happened this cycle?

I think there are a lot better explanations. The root limitation of both of those things is the completely unsubstantiated idea that the only reason for anything happening is what happened in the last 15 minutes. There can be no bigger causes than somebody’s TV ads or the kinds of things you’re describing. It’s ridiculous and it’s not the way all of this works.

The biggest thing that’s not part of that conversation, is that, especially beginning after the crash in 2008 and then the Great Recession, the way in which the labor market changed radically meant that everybody who has come into the workforce since then is coming into a future that is more constrained and more precarious than they were expecting. People before 2008 took for granted that if you had a job, that you’re probably going to have it for the indefinite future, you knew what your hours were going to be, your wages were fairly stable. After 2008 there was such a successful shredding of that kind of labor contract with people who are not in unions, where people stopped being able to expect what their job would be, where they’d be working in a year or two, or even what their hours were the next week or the week after.

That created all sorts of insecurity and mental overhead of just trying to figure out how to keep juggling everything. It made relationships harder. It made raising families harder. Combined with housing, it meant more people feeling like failures because they’re moving back into their parents’ homes. In America, where how you show up as a worker is so much of how people see your identity and worth, it’s really difficult. So then you’re going through that, and then you get Covid — and Covid, you’re fired, right? And even though the [pandemic relief] checks came and kept you from being destitute, there was a period where you didn’t even know if your job was coming back, and who you’re going to work for or what you’re going to do. And social isolation in that context. You’re just insecure. And then you get inflation. And as you know, in this period, two-thirds to three-quarters of people think that the country is going in the wrong direction, over and over again. The confidence and approval of every institution just plummets.

So you have two parties, two approaches — one which says, “Yeah, we’ve got to burn this system down,” which, in rhetoric, is appealing. But when they hear, “I can’t get an abortion,” it isn’t anymore. And then you have the party that is saying, “We will defeat Trumpism,” telling you that they’re doing it to protect those institutions and that way of life that you have lost your patience with, that you’ve lost your support for. And that’s what this is about — and why it keeps going back and forth between who not loses elections — because [the parties are] not putting on the political menu what people want to buy.

Does that, to you, signal the Democratic path back here?

I think it’s much more difficult than that, because I think that it isn’t a tactical error that we’re in this position. It’s a consequence. It’s not like someone didn’t ask the right question on a survey, and Democrats slapped their forehead and said, “Oh, that’s what we should have been saying.” It’s that the financial stakeholders in the party absolutely don’t want to touch that precarity. I mean, it is what the financial backers of both parties just completely agree on: that corporations should be as free as possible to manage their workforces without intervention from the government. That is a bipartisan agreement that’s been in place for quite a while, and Citizens United opening up the system to even more billionaire money makes it even more difficult to imagine that changing.

So the path for Democrats taking back power in some kind of enduring way involves taking on the billionaire class and attempting to fix people’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis?

Right. And an agency crisis.

Can you expand on that?

I was talking before about how both parties completely ignore the value of job security and the security about the expectations that you need to think about raising a family or having a reasonable, good life. These are all things that the people in the leadership of both parties don’t experience at all. They’re blind to that aspect of what’s going on. And instead, they just look at data like GDP growth or unemployment or all of that, and don’t understand what’s important to them in their own minds — quality of life and relationships, how your kids are doing, their schools — is increasingly cut off for many voters. Instead, it’s then: “Well, why don’t they understand they just got a 10 percent raise after inflation? And they don’t know how good it is.”

I’ve had an issue with that media narrative, and you hear it occasionally from Democrats — they’ve sort of flipped and flopped on whether to acknowledge there’s this ongoing c ost-of-living crisis, or say the economy is good. Since the start of the pandemic, the Census Bureau has been collecting data on whether people have difficulty paying their bills, or whether they’re struggling to afford food. And those numbers have all been higher, stubbornly sounder Biden, and they spiked after the rollback of the temporary Covid-era expansion of the social safety net. But it seems like that’s just not even part of the conversation.

No.

And obviously, higher interest rates are actually fully written out of most economic measurements in D.C.

Since you’re talking about economic data, most of the people making policy and writing about these things have seen steadily increasing net worth for themselves as the value of their housing goes up. They see that as prosperity rather than inflation. If the price of anything else goes up, that’s inflation, but if the value of your house goes up, that’s my smart investment in our prosperity.

I listened to your recent podcast with Harry Litmanand I saw you just wrote about this too: You point out that the right-wing Supreme Court has been, for effectively two decades now, putting its thumbs on the scales of American democracy — and you could obviously say before that, such as with Bush v. Gore. They’ve been allowing billionaires to swamp the electoral system, delegitimizing elections in this country in general. That all feels very right to me, but it also shows how there are no easy answers to fix what’s happening — rather, a very long fight against stacked odds. Could you talk a little bit about that and how you think we might begin to change that tide?

I get this question a lot, and the way I think about it is that if you have really challenging cancer, and you say, “Oh, but that means I have to have chemotherapy,” so you’re going to listen to someone who tells you that you’re just swelling or have a bad cough. We can’t begin to have solutions until we understand that it’s a difficult, already metastasizing cancer. I don’t have a 10-point thing we have to do. Getting out of this requires a greater collective awareness that winning the next midterm isn’t actually going to solve this problem. And when that happens at different points in history, when people collectively understand that the kind of approaches that are easier will not work, they finally roll up their sleeves and start coming up with ways of addressing big problems and there’s a change in the paradigm. But it’s like [James] Baldwin said: Not every problem that’s faced can be solved, but no problems can be solved unless they’re faced. The first step has to be facing where we are. And that’s what I’m hoping that I’m helping to do, and that it becomes more of a collective project to do something about it.

To go back for a second to what you were saying, in terms of [Supreme Court justices] putting their thumb on the scales, I think that really understates what’s going on. What was going on is that you had a portion of the business community, along with the wealthy, who never wanted to accept the New Deal, and who did not want to accept government intervention in their businesses at all, combined with the Southern, theocratic approach that never accepted the challenges to the social and racial hierarchy. They understood that they were in a position where undoing any of it couldn’t happen through a democratic process. You could not pass a bill in Congress to say, let’s let billionaires spend as much money in the elections as possible, and then when they get favors back from the government, that’s not corruption. You couldn’t get a bill in Congress that says, let everybody have firearms. The Supreme Court has been the actual functioning legislative body in this country for the last 16 years, and it’s because they keep grabbing cases to use as pretexts to legislate, and we’re just sort of standing by and letting it happen.

It does seem like Democrats have, for the most part — I mean, there’s, there’s some examples of people who have been leading the fight against it — but it does seem like they haven’t had any kind of response to this.

Yeah, 100 percent. Because it’s this kind of mindless institutionalism that presumes that everybody really does agree with the liberal view, I don’t mean progressive, of what government should do — but half the country doesn’t. Half the country thinks most of the major questions have already been taken care of by the Bible, and the purpose of government is to make sure everybody obeys it, not to come up with ongoing solutions to living together.

If you were to give any kind of advice to either Democratic politicians or Democratic voters, what would you advise?

I’ve gone through this whole period not giving advice to the Democrats at all, because the advice I give is to the media to do the job that the First Amendment expects of them. And to religious leaders to not sit on their hands when their congregants are threatened. Civil society has been sitting on its hands for the last four years, not seeing, not being willing to talk about it in the way they were four years ago. That’s the problem. We have attenuated democracy — the idea of democracy — to the point where it’s really just a sporting event between Democrats and Republicans, and it’s sort of made us spectators, rather than realizing we’re the owners, and feeling like the best we’re going to do is whatever our party wants to do, but we don’t actually get a say in what our party’s going to do.

To go back to something you said, I’ve been asked like 10 billion times how do Democrats win back the working class. Probably until I say it to you, you haven’t even heard someone say: What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party? The unexamined us and them in that sentence is the problem. [Democrats are] like, “What do we give them off the table?” The answer is a seat at the table.

What you mean is working people need to take back the Democratic Party.

Exactly. Or something like that.