The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To understand the 2024 election results, it helps to go back to 2020. Donald Trump lost the election that year, but he made significant gains with nonwhite voters. At the time, a lot of Democrats saw that as a fluke, a hangover from Covid lockdown policies. But the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini saw it as bellwether. In his 2023 book, “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” Ruffini argued that Trump was ushering in a party realignment. A trend that had been happening for years in the white electorate – college-educated voters moving to the left, and non-college-educated ones moving to the right – was now evident, he said, among voters of all races, breaking up the core of the Democratic base. And so far, the data we have from this election suggests that Ruffini was right. In this conversation, Ruffini, a founding partner at Echelon Insights, contextualizes the 2024 election results by looking back at 2020’s. We discuss what Democrats missed about these voter trends; the appeal of Trump’s brand of class politics; why Democrats might have been better off with a red wave in the 2022 midterms; and how Kamala Harris’s campaign may have hurt her with nonwhite working-class voters. Book Recommendations: Steadfast Democrats by Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird The Real Majority by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg The New Americans by Michael Barone Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, Jack McCordick and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we begin today, I'm going to be recording an Ask Me Anything episode in a few weeks. I imagine we're going to have a lot of questions about the election, but anything is fair game. To submit a question, email us at Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com with the subject line AMA by November 17th.
0:23.6	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now.
0:57.2	At the very least, you should be if they didn't tell it to you before the election.
1:02.0	But Patrick Raffini, a longtime Republican pollster, who is a founding partner at Eschlon Insights,
1:07.5	he did tell it to you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called
1:12.4	Party of the People, inside the multiracial populist coalition remaking the GOP. What he argued in
1:19.6	that book is really two things. First, the educational divide reshaping American politics
1:24.9	would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated
1:28.8	voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results,
1:35.2	weird as they seem to many, that they weren't a fluke. Donald Trump performed a lot better in
1:41.4	2020 than the poll said he would. A major reason he performed so much better
1:45.8	is that he did better among black and Hispanic and Asian voters. That was to put it very mildly,
1:52.2	not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobic chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he
1:58.6	talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about
2:02.3	black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his
2:09.4	margins among white voters. And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency,
2:15.6	is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did
2:19.8	among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among non-white voters.
2:26.2	There was a theory among Democrats that this was just a weird hangover from the pandemic,
2:30.7	from the lockdowns and the school closures. But Rafini thought that they were wrong.
2:36.6	He thought this was a realignment, that the coalitions at the core of American politics were
2:41.3	changing and that it was going to continue. And that's more or less what we saw in 2024.
	...

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