Volume 22, Issue 2-3

Electoral contests in presidential years bring out a plethora of analyses of the specifics of the contest, enriched by assertions about the unprecedented character of whatever has just happened. Yet the same contests are more or less automatically the register of an ongoing, shaping context for the ultimate result. This paper is an effort to tease out these basic background influences in advance, while demonstrating both their continuity and their roles in the governing administrations that followed. The paper begins with the coming of a modern era in American politics, characterized by split partisan control as the default electoral outcome. It then moves to the diagnostic characteristic of succeeding years, in the rise of the activists. The basic structural factors that characterize this extended period are then brought to life through the specific processes of policy-making in the Trump and then the Biden administrations. Together, these make the ongoing structure of American politics evident – and a larger contribution to the particular results of 2024 than are those various and diverse excitements of the moment.

This article describes efforts to understand how partisan actors respond to electoral losses differently across party lines, leading to different decisions for future nomination contests. I further focus on the events of the spring and summer of 2024, in which both parties were offered compelling reasons to reject their expected presidential nominee (a criminal conviction and a poor debate performance) but only the Democrats followed that path, while Republicans reaffirmed their support for a damaged candidate. These events demonstrate the relative power the two party organizations have but also their overall orientations toward elections and electability.

This paper leverages comprehensive data on political advertising on television sponsored by candidates, parties and outside groups in the 2024 election. We show, for one, that the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was extremely close in terms of the volume of advertising. Second, Harris and Trump focused their ads on bread-and-butter issues like the economy and taxes, though Harris focused more on abortion and women’s rights and Trump pivoted for a brief period to attacks on Harris and her prior statements on transgender issues. We also examine the scale and scope of advertising in congressional races. Democrats heavily out-spent Republicans on the air in the fall of 2024, despite losing ground in the Senate and falling short of reclaiming control of the House. This research represents a first-cut look at the campaign information environment on television ads in the 2024 campaign.

We analyze digital advertising by candidates in federal races (presidential and congressional campaigns) in the 2024 U.S. general election cycle. We focus on election ads placed on Meta (which includes Instagram and Facebook) and Google (which includes YouTube, search, display and banner), and we provide some spending numbers from Snapchat advertising. We consider variation in ad spending across Meta and Google to get a sense not only of how digital spending stacks up across both venues but also to compare spending to television and radio. Beyond spending, we consider the content (including tone, goal, and issue focus) of Meta ads and Google video ads and compare it to television. All told, the analysis in this paper represents a first-cut look at the information environment in digital advertising sponsored by candidates in 2024 federal races during the general election period.

Kamala Harris’s nomination at the 2024 Democratic National Convention was both unusual and historic. Not only was she the first woman of color to be nominated for the presidency by a major party, but she also emerged as the party’s choice without having competed in any nominating contests, an outcome made possible by Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the candidacy. National nominating conventions are important opportunities for parties and candidates to draw media attention, and this coverage shapes the political impact of conventions. This was especially important in 2024, given the shortened nature of the Harris campaign. Using a sample of newspapers and TV news programs, we find that the media over emphasized controversial issues such as the war in Gaza and immigration while under emphasizing other substantive policy areas such as the economy. In addition, the coverage tended to amplify attention to so-called “women’s issues” and downplay Harris’s patriotic appeals. These findings highlight the divergence between what the candidate emphasized and what the media reported, with important implications for public perception of the campaign and Harris’s policy priorities.

Economic circumstances and vote choice have long been shown to be closely linked, but increasing partisan polarization may be weakening this traditional relationship. We examine whether pocketbook voting – the tendency to vote based on personal economic circumstances – still influences presidential vote choice in this polarized era. Using the Cooperative Election Study’s data from 2020 to 2024, we explore how different indicators of economic vulnerability affect support for incumbent presidential candidates. We find that while partisans remain largely loyal except when suffering the most difficult economic hardships, independent voters show strong anti-incumbent voting when they experience financial strains. Our findings suggest that personal economic circumstances remain influential in American elections, but primarily among voters without strong partisan attachments.

We use data from three nationally representative surveys conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll in the months leading up to the 2024 general election to provide a data-driven foundation for discussion about the factors contributing to the 2024 presidential election results. Although we do not claim to causally identify any one driver of the election outcome, our polls provide insights about public opinion reflecting the context of the election, the potential drivers of voting behavior, and the degree to which the second Trump Administration enjoys a public mandate for policy change. The public started 2024 with low levels of enthusiasm for a potential rematch between Trump and Biden, although the entrance of Kamala Harris into the race elevated interest and, for Democrats, increased enthusiasm. In the weeks before Election Day, the economy and immigration were top-of-mind issues that a majority of respondents thought Trump would handle more effectively. Heading into a second Trump presidency, we find middling support among Americans for some of Trump’s key policy proposals and those of conservative policymakers entering his administration.

This paper examines the Latino vote in the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. We examine the factors that were most important for Latino voters and investigate how these shaped their candidate choice. Specifically, we argue that it is important to explore the demographic heterogeneity within the Latino category, as well as to explore the various issues that different subsets of the group prioritize. In doing so, we focus on differences by gender and socioeconomic status and explore how those impacted vote choice in the 2024 election. We rely on data from Texas and nationwide to examine these differences. We find that Latino men were more likely to vote for Trump compared to women. Similarly, we explore the role of issue prioritization, finding that Latinos who prioritize various economic issues and immigration were more likely to vote for Trump. On the other hand, Latinos who prioritize abortion were more likely to vote for Harris. We also find notable differences in how issue prioritization worked distinctively for women, men and those with and without a college degree. This paper underscores that Latinos are not an ideologically cohesive group and that the label of “Latino” should not operate to homogenize the group’s multifaceted interests. Instead, it gives us a better understanding of which specific issues were salient for different segments of the Latino community in 2024, and how these worked in particular ways to drive presidential candidate choice.

Pre-election polls in 2024 showed former President Donald Trump performing relatively well with African-American voters, especially males. Now that Trump has beaten Vice President Harris to retake the presidency, a question arises: Did Trump actually put together a racially diverse coalition, as the polling foreshadowed, or did White and Black voters ultimately slip back to levels of racial polarization seen in previous contests? Exit polls on balance show Trump as having made negligible gains with African Americans, while anecdotal evidence drawn from swing states suggests he did better than the poll results indicate. This analysis uses Louisiana’s precinct-level data, released soon after the 2024 presidential election ended, to gauge African-American support for Donald Trump, as compared to the Black support for Republicans in 2020 and 2023. Because Louisiana was not a swing state in 2024, the analysis might generalize to what happened in the electorate better than observations drawn from the battleground states. Results imply that the exit polling and the descriptive analyses could both be correct: Trump made only minimal gains as a whole, but his support picked up in heavily Black areas.

The 2024 elections resulted in a rightward shift, with Republicans taking back both the presidency and Senate while holding onto a very slim majority in the House of Representatives. Despite multiple felony convictions and near constant controversy, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris to win the presidency and all six of the swing states he had lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Down-ballot Republicans were also successful in their congressional races. Though Democrats had controlled the Senate since 2020, Republicans ultimately flipped four seats to take a 53–47 advantage in the chamber. Lastly, despite some concern among pundits that the dysfunctional Republican leadership in the House could negatively affect Republicans’ reelection chances across the board, Republicans were able to retain the House majority by a narrow margin of 220 to 215. This article highlights the political conditions and circumstances that defined the 2024 contest especially considering the increasingly nationalized nature of U.S. elections.