Lessons from my four decades of covering politics: Prepare to be surprised

David Lauter on a TV news set with Lisa McCree

Nov. 23, 2024 3 AM PT

WASHINGTON — Because they are all-or-nothing contests, American elections lend themselves to over-interpretation.

In 1988, Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush defeated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, winning more than 400 electoral votes — a mark that seemed routine at the time, but which no presidential candidate in either party has hit since.

The election marked the third lopsided victory in a row for the Republicans. Analysts declared the GOP had a lock on the electoral college.

Bill Clinton picked the lock four years later.

In 2004, Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, won reelection. His electoral victory was much smaller than his father’s, but the coalition he put together seemed robust. His backers, and some nonpartisan analysts, claimed that the GOP had achieved a long-term, stable majority.

That putative majority barely lasted two years. Democrats recaptured the House in the 2006 midterm election, and in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama shattered the idea of long-term Republican dominance.

With Obama’s victory, it was Democrats’ turn to declare that a long-term majority was within their grasp, courtesy of demographic trends that would make the American electorate less white, more college educated and more liberal.

The demographic trends proceeded as forecast, the political consequences, not so much.

Time to say goodbye

I’ve lived that history.

The 1988 campaign was the first of eight that I’ve covered, and I’ve spent much of the past 36 years writing about American politics as it has become more rigidly polarized, more partisan and more calcified, to borrow a term from political scientists Lynn Vavreck, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch.

Since September 2015, I’ve written this weekly newsletter/column, aiming to understand and analyze the changing nature of politics in what turned out to be the era of Donald Trump.

This is the last one. After writing on deadline for more than four decades, it’s time to retire.

An election with consequences, but …

Ending brings me back to the beginning — the perils of over-interpretation.

This year’s election brought striking changes to the electorate:

President-elect Trump won a notably larger share of Latino voters than the Republican norm — 43% according to the AP/NORC VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters, 46%, according to the exit poll conducted for major television networks.

Trump made especially significant gains among young Latino and Black men, the surveys showed.

The Republican won nearly half, 47%, of voters younger than 45, up from 40% four years ago, the AP survey showed.

Trump also narrowly won among voters with family incomes of less than $50,000 a year, reversing a long-standing Democratic advantage, the network exit poll showed.

Those numbers describe a big shift toward the GOP, enough for some conservative analysts to proclaim a realignment of U.S. politics and to justify a lot of introspection (and some finger-pointing) among Democrats.

Some other facts don’t fit so neatly into the prevailing narrative:

For the first time in more than a century, we’ve had three elections in a row in which control of the White House changed parties.

Trump’s final margin in the nationwide popular vote will end up at around 1.6 percentage points, making this the closest election since 2000 and one of the four closest in the past 100 years.

After hundreds of millions of dollars spent, control of the House is ending up almost exactly where it started, a 221-214 split. Republicans currently have 219 seats, and with two California districts and one in Iowa still undecided, they’re hoping for 221 again, but may have to settle for 220.

About three in four voters said on the final NBC News preelection poll that they follow politics closely. Harris was winning those engaged voters by five points, the poll found. Trump was winning by 14 points among the one in four voters who said they mostly don’t pay much attention to politics — a group that, not coincidentally, is younger and less white than the more engaged group.

The first of those findings underscores the volatility of this political era. The next two should inspire caution about declaring a sweeping change.

The last finding highlights Trump’s ability to inspire a big turnout of people who only sometimes cast ballots. It also points out why Democrats have had an advantage in recent low-turnout special elections and may have a boost going into the 2026 midterm elections.

What we don’t know

While those shifts are clear — at least in general outline — a lot remains unknown.

The results of both the 2020 and 2024 elections suggest the country is becoming less polarized by race, for example, which is almost certainly a good thing. But they also suggest greater polarization along lines of education and religion.

How is each of those trends reshaping the U.S. electorate?

Who, exactly, shifted in 2024 and what drove them?

We know, for example, that in 2020, the Latino voters most likely to switch to Trump were politically conservative Latinos, many of whom had cast ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after a Trump campaign that explicitly targeted “Mexicans,” but whose values were a difficult fit in the Democratic Party.

Trump made further gains among Latino voters in 2024. To what extent did that increase go beyond voters who were already ideologically conservative?

How much of Trump’s gains among Latino and Black voters were tied to economics and the rapid inflation of 2022 and early 2023? How much was driven by cultural or values issues, which Republicans sought to highlight by campaigning against transgender individuals?

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have shifted American attitudes toward government, science and expert opinion, with disruptive consequences for both parties. How far have those shifts gone, and will they last?

How do voters perceive the two parties? What do they now think the Democrats and Republicans stand for?

And beyond the obvious policy preferences such as keeping inflation low, what is it that voters really want politicians to deliver?

The success scenario for Trump

A lot of voters have strong partisan or ideological commitments and will stick with their party through all sorts of ups and downs. The swing voters who decide close elections, however, have only loose partisan tethers. They reward (or punish) parties for performance.

In their eyes, President Biden delivered higher prices and chaos at the border.

As I wrote the week after the election, as best we can tell from surveys, those voters hired Trump to accomplish two things — keep inflation down and reduce the number of immigrants entering the country.

The best scenario for Trump would see steady economic growth, declining interest rates and a reduction of tensions overseas. If that happens, the gains he made in this year’s election could start to solidify, and talk of a realignment of American politics might be justified.

The failure scenario

A lot could go wrong.

Already, Trump’s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general has blown up. The president-elect will still get some benefit from picking Gaetz — the replacement candidate, former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, will seem far more reasonable by comparison.

Nonetheless, the Gaetz nomination was an early test of strength, and Trump lost.

There’s a risk that losses compound. Gaetz’s decision to bail out early means senators will be able to reject some other nominee, perhaps former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, without risking too much wrath from Trump’s supporters.

Beyond clashes over high-level jobs, Trump faces policy risks.

The cost of housing ranks high among voter concerns — especially for younger voters who are less likely to own a home.

Trump promised in the campaign to “drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2% again.”

Instead, rates have risen since the election and now sit just below 7% for a 30-year, fixed mortgage. No amount of yelling at Federal Reserve officials will change that. Markets have bid up rates as investors bet that Trump’s economic plans will restart inflation.

Trump’s tax plans risk greatly increasing the federal deficit — adding roughly $9 trillion in red ink over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, longtime advocates for fiscal restraint. At a time when the economy is already operating at or near capacity, that’s inflationary.

Republicans in Congress could try to reduce the deficit by slicing the cost of Medicaid, health insurance subsidies and food stamps — all programs that the GOP has gone after in the past.

In Trump’s first term, however, Republican efforts to cut those programs proved wildly unpopular.

That problem may be even worse for the GOP now.

One consequence of winning more votes among low-income Americans is that more Republican voters now benefit from federal programs. That’s especially true for Medicaid, which, among other things, now pays for more than 6 in 10 residents of nursing homes nationwide and 4 in 10 babies delivered in most states.

Those minefields for Trump can be easily foreseen. Other risks depend on his choices. How the public will respond to mass deportation of immigrants, for example, may depend on what Trump means by “mass.”

Still other risks involve events outside a president’s control.

Here’s one, for example: Many scientists fear that bird flu, which has decimated poultry flocks around the country this year, could evolve to more readily infect humans. If that happens — or if some other, unexpected, pathogen emerges — Trump’s campaigns against public health agencies could suddenly look like a very bad idea to voters who currently don’t care much.

In a closely divided country like the U.S., even small shifts among voters can carry big consequences. Demographic changes matter. So do long-term movements of public attitudes and values, like the three-decade-long trend toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriages.

But so, too, do contingencies and unexpected events — from the skills and personalities of individual candidates to the impact of a world-girdling pandemic.

The result is a kaleidoscope of changing patterns that makes the political picture endlessly fascinating and much less predictable than punditry would have it.

It’s been a privilege to describe that picture for you, our readers. For giving me that opportunity, thank you.