“while Americans are generally supportive of abortion rights, there was little evidence to show that abortion was going to end up mattering more than other issues, like the economy and immigration, and even less evidence that it would be a more motivating issue than it was in the 2022 midterms, which took place just months after the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Generally speaking, Americans are supportive of abortion rights. When asked a standard polling question about whether abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in all cases or illegal in most cases, majorities of Americans typically say that it should be legal in all or most cases. And we saw that support show up in the 2024 election results: Six states* passed ballot measures that enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, and these measures significantly outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in every state they were on the ballot.”
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“Polling before the 2024 election did seem to show an increasing share of voters saying abortion was their top issue — on average, even more than in the months preceding the 2022 midterms. According to YouGov/The Economist’s weekly tracking survey, there was a slow but steady increase in the number of registered voters choosing abortion as their top priority over the course of the campaign, from around 5 percent in the summer of 2023 to around 10 percent before the election.
But 10 percent is still relatively low compared with other major issues in the election. The percentage of respondents choosing an issue related to the economy*** in the same surveys averaged 39 percent in polls conducted in October 2024, much higher than the percentage saying abortion was their top issue, which averaged 9 percent in October.
And the increase in Americans prioritizing abortion may be an artifact of a well-known quirk of political polling: partisans forming their political opinions based on what trusted elites are saying. In other words, the Harris campaign’s focus on abortion may have made Democratic voters more likely to say abortion was an important issue to them. Indeed, if we break down the YouGov/The Economist polling numbers by party, we see that abortion’s increasing prioritization as an issue in 2024 was driven almost entirely by self-identified Democrats.”
“Trump’s share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.
Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.
There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.”
A lot of the public were Googling if Biden dropped out right before the election. Maybe a primary would have helped informed the public about Democratic candidates’ positions.
“And yet, Democrats might not be in as much danger as it appears. There’s evidence that this year’s vote does not represent a pure, wholesale ideological transformation of Latinos. On the ground in Starr County, and in similar places across the country, I met voters who thought of the election simply as a referendum on the economy. The school teachers and gardeners and ranchers didn’t talk like Steve Bannon or J.D. Vance. They talked about the price of milk and gas. More than that, they saw national Democrats as apathetic — the party didn’t see their path to victory going through many Latino neighborhoods, so they focused elsewhere. And the results reflected that.”
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“These two Latinos had gone through an actual ideological shift. Lira voted for Obama twice, but had transformed into a passionate Republican. Other Trump voters I met in town, however, were much less ideological. Their message, instead, was something like this: Under Biden, there were days I couldn’t afford to fill up my truck with gas; the price of eggs doubled; my rent went up. Entonces, Biden is fired. It’s time for change. While the White House could point at record-high unemployment, and historically high blue-collar wages, high prices under Biden were much more keenly felt than any boost in paychecks. Accordingly, Trump’s ability to run as the change candidate gave him a huge, structural advantage with Latinos upset with the economy.”
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“Lira was disgusted with Democrats’ flip-flopping: She had voted for Obama in large part for his promise to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers. But after 12 years of Democrats promising that pathway with no evidence of anything changing, Lira came to believe she’d been lied to.”
It’s sad because it was mostly Republicans that blocked a pathway to citizenship.
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“Here’s how profoundly damaged Democrats were by losing both immigration and the economy as winning issues: They lost support even among undocumented Latinos. Lira told me she had undocumented friends in Denison who (though they couldn’t vote) nonetheless supported Trump. Some had lived in the states for decades, working long hours, paying Social Security taxes they’d never get back. They felt bitter and aggrieved that the newest arrivals, especially those from Venezuela, had been given humanitarian parole under Biden, while they themselves still lacked legal status. They felt cut in line. And the feeling of being cut in line is the glue that unites conservatives in this country. Democrats flip-flopping lost them both pro-immigration voters and anti-immigration voters. It wasn’t just that their proposals weren’t popular — they had simply lost all credibility on the issue.”
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“Still, the situation for Democrats in swing states looks a lot better than it does in South Texas and Florida. Odio said that, in his own analysis of the vote, Democrats only performed a few points worse among Latinos in battleground states than they did in 2020 — “erosion, not realignment,” as Odio put it. When you grade on the curve on inflation and a super-unpopular incumbent, Democrats get even better grades — back when Biden was the nominee, Odio expected them to lose in a blowout. “I actually think the Republicans underperformed,” Odio said.”
“Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and Democrats lost control of the Senate.
But when you zoom in on the details of that result, there’s a striking pattern: Democratic Senate candidates are outperforming Harris. Or, put another way, Republican Senate candidates are doing worse than Trump.
In recent years, the outcome of a state’s US Senate race has increasingly matched the outcome of its simultaneous presidential race. Ticket-splitting has decreased in our era of polarization and partisanship. The vast majority of people voting for a presidential candidate also vote for their party’s Senate candidate.
But not everyone does that. And there’s still some variation in how much better or worse Senate candidates do compared to the top of the ticket. Looking at that variation can provide clues about what sorts of candidates overperform (even if they don’t actually win).”
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“Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race.
My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally.”
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“Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.”
“Unauthorized immigrants aren’t broadly eligible for naturalization — and have few paths to citizenship. To qualify for naturalization, someone generally has to have been a lawful permanent resident for five years, married to a US citizen and a lawful permanent resident for three years, or a member of the military.
Additionally, the US is approving citizenship applications at its swiftest pace in years, but it’s not because regulators are trying to skew the election in Democrats’ favor. The government is doing so because there was already a backlog that got worse during the pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reports. Now, the Department of Homeland Security is effectively doing catch-up.
The US naturalized 878,500 people in 2023 and is now processing applications in roughly 4.9 months – a pace that’s comparable to how quickly the government was approving applications in 2013. According to the New York Times, processing time for naturalization applications spiked during the Trump administration as the White House sought to reduce legal and unauthorized immigration.
These new citizens also aren’t guaranteed Democratic voters. Polling has indicated that naturalized citizens lean Democrat, but both parties are likely to pick up some new voters as people undergo this process. According to a survey from the National Partnership for New Americans, 54 percent of naturalized citizens said they’d vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, while 38 percent said they’d back former President Donald Trump.
It’s worth reiterating that naturalized citizens aren’t unauthorized immigrants, and that the bulk of them — roughly 83 percent, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — have been lawful permanent residents for five years. Unauthorized immigrants have limited pathways to citizenship, and many aren’t eligible for naturalization.”
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“This Republican talking point appears to refer to a “parole” program the Biden administration has approved for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans amid instability in their home countries. Under the program, people can temporarily enter the US for two years, pay for their own travel, and fly into the country. There is no evidence that people are being flown specifically to swing states, and as a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) spokesperson told Vox, DHS does not choose the airports that parolees fly into, and it also doesn’t control or choose where parolees settle down.
Additionally, parolees do not have a path to citizenship and as a result would be unable to vote in future elections.
As legal immigrants, asylum seekers do have a path to citizenship; according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), 3.3 percent of those naturalized in 2023 came to the US as asylum seekers — roughly 29,000 people. While that might be enough to swing a state as close as Georgia was in 2020, it’s not enough to affect the outcomes in all the states Musk listed, even if Democrats were flying people there. Which, again, they aren’t.
In addition, most naturalized citizens have settled in states that are not swing states, with California, Texas, Florida, New York, and New Jersey topping the list, per USCIS.”
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“It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and noncitizens have very rarely been found to be illegally voting. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit that focuses on voting rights, election officials responsible for the counting of nearly 23.5 million votes in 2016 identified just 30 possible cases of noncitizen voting for investigation.
Noncitizens are able to vote in some local elections for positions like City Council and school board in some jurisdictions in Vermont and California, but they aren’t able to vote anywhere in federal elections.”