On the election: ‘Headwinds,’ Arab Americans, ineffective messaging

(Matt Grossman is a political science professor and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. His interview with City Pulse editor and publisher Berl Schwartz has been edited for clarity and condensed.)

Surprises?

The main surprise is the paucity of Harris’ gains.

We had been in a realignment for two presidential elections in a row, which meant that although there was a shift overall, there usually were some shifts in the other direction. They were quite limited this time, basically with up around Traverse City moving toward Harris. There were no compensating gains for the losses that the Democrats had.

Why didn’t Arab Americans come home to the Democrats?

There are plenty of Arab American voters who are relatively conservative. Gaza pushed them to the Republican side even if they usually vote for Democrats. In addition, there was a high third-party support (for Jill Stein) that presumably had more of a straight line from those uncommitted voters.

Why didn’t Michigan Democrats turn out for Harris in the numbers they did for Biden?

We were one of only seven states with increased turnout. There were high levels of participation, although it was down in Detroit. You can’t just conclude from vote totals that there weren’t high levels of participation because those vote totals also include people who switched sides, and there was some of that as well. The thing people get wrong is they think that there’s a big trade-off between mobilization and persuasion when, actually, the kinds of things that make people turn out to vote for your candidate also make them swing toward your candidate.

In this election, the explanation that people were upset with the Biden administration and upset with the inflationary economy applies to both. It applies to winning over more swing voters to the Republican side and mobilizing more people to the Republican side than the Democratic side.

Why else did Trump win?

The closing message was the most normal in a presidential election. It was, “OK, just compare my administration to the Biden administration, and mine was better.” He could move the debate to just having people compare things, especially because people now view the first Trump administration with rose-colored glasses.

Democrats said, “Look at all these horrible things that Trump has done,” even though they repeatedly hear back in research that those aren’t the most effective messages. The most effective messages are about what Harris would do because people have already made up their minds about Trump and hadn’t about Harris. They took those to heart, but that doesn’t mean it was enough to switch people.

However, we always want to take the losing campaign and say what went wrong. But in this case, Harris overperformed in the swing states, as did Democratic Senate candidates. It could be that everything the campaigns were doing on the Democratic side worked better than what they were doing on the Republican side. It’s just that it was not enough to overcome national winds that were moving toward the Republicans.

What national winds?

Every incumbent party this year has lost vote share worldwide, and voters tend to credit themselves with wage gains and blame the government for price increases. Also, Biden’s approval rating would’ve been the lowest on which the incumbent party has been reelected. So that was also a significant headwind for the Democrats.

Why did Slotkin win, albeit narrowly?

We have survey data that asked people to rate the candidates on an ideological spectrum, and they did rate Harris substantially more liberal than Slotkin and Biden between them. The median voter placed themselves closer to Trump and closer to Slotkin than Rogers. She won over more Trump voters than Rogers won over Harris voters. But there’s also just who is voting in each election, and it appears that more Trump voters didn’t make it further down the ballot than Harris voters.

Did Michigan Democrats dwell too much on abortion, which was settled in 2022?

We definitely learned that the 2022 election was an aberration because of the abortion referendum on the ballot. It led to a different electorate than normal that was younger and cared more about abortion. We learned that it didn’t benefit Democrats as much as they expected in this cycle. Overall, though, the evidence is not strong that it helped even in the states where it was under a potential threat. So, I don’t know that that specific circumstance made it ineffective.

I think it’s just a different environment where other issues were higher on the voters’ agendas, and I will say Trump also did his best to try to inoculate himself. He knew this was an area of vulnerability and tried to make it clear that he was not for a national abortion ban. There’s a long-running pattern where he can get away with seeming more moderate on this issue because no one ever believes he was a strong pro-lifer.

The main thing that helps in the midterms is that you have an incumbent party at the national level to run against. And chances are strong that Trump will continue to make unpopular moves while in office, that the Republican Congress will make unpopular moves as well and that they will overshoot the voter and swing things back in the other direction. That is the normal pattern. That’s not advice to the Democrats, but it’s just to say that history already favors the Democrats to win the next election.

They have to do something to go back to these Arab-American voters, potentially making use of what happens in the Trump administration, where I don’t expect them to get what they want, and try to rebuild that relationship and trust.

They also need to stop assuming that young voters will vote for them and vote in large numbers.

The 2022 election was, as I said, an aberration because of that abortion referendum, and so I don’t think they can count on that same electorate showing up in 2026. They have to be in better touch with those potential voters earlier in the campaign. In terms of issue coverage, the Democrats should finally learn the lesson about talking about Donald Trump, even though there are tons of things that people hate about him personally. Those kinds of messages just have not been as effective as the more traditional policy messages.

So, suppose Donald Trump personally does a bunch of crazy things in office, and the Republican Congress passes bills that reduce, say, Medicaid funding. There’ll be the temptation to focus on the crazy things that Trump is doing personally. But it’s the direct policy backlash that is the more likely scenario.

We have already seen Trump seek recess appointments and offer a few controversial nominations — Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK Jr. Are you confident or even hopeful that systems will keep us from veering far off path?

There’s definitely a reason to be concerned about democratic backsliding in the U.S., especially about the fact that Trump is very prepared to expand executive power under the second administration and test the limits more than he did in the first administration with more compliant executive branch officials and more assurance that Congress will back him up.

I don’t expect Trump to be able to get all his executive branch nominees through in recess appointments or outside of recess appointments. The House Republican majority will be small and prone to factionalism as it has been, and the legislative calendar is such that the expiring tax cuts at the end of the year will be the main subject of policy discussion for the next year.

I think Congress will change less than people expect from the previous Trump term. However, the executive branch changes are potentially more severe, especially if they succeed in reclassifying many employees and then engaging in mass firing. That would signify more possibility for change in the Executive Branch.

How significant a role did misogyny and racism play in the election?

3Misogyny, racism and other kinds of related attitudes are already strongly related to partisanship and partisan voting patterns. I don’t think they made any more of a difference in this election than in previous elections. Kamala Harris ran a very different campaign than Hillary Clinton in not emphasizing that she would be the first woman president and placed even less emphasis on race than Obama ‘08.

Also, even among racial minority voters, there are divisions about racial issues that correspond to broader cultural disagreements and where there are conservative members. Some people in all minority groups are slowly moving toward the party with which they agree on those and other issues.

That said, I think it’s going to be a while before the major parties nominate a woman candidate again because they tend to interpret these losses along those lines.