Themes emerging from the 2024 national and state election results

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Many were surprised by the Minnesota and national election results. Here is a short accounting of outcomes and their implications resulting from the Nov. 5 balloting, starting with national surprises.

1) The shrinking gender gap. Contrary to expectations, the gender gap in national voting was narrower in 2024 than in 2020. According to the reliable Associated Press VoteCast survey, Donald Trump won 46% of women’s votes, up from 43% in 2020. Will this shrinkage of the gender gap continue in future elections once Trump exits politics? The GOP had better hope so.

2) The big class gap. National exit polls show that Trump carried voters reporting incomes less than $100,000 by 50% to 46%, while Kamala Harris won those with incomes over $100,000 by 51% to 46%. There are far more voters in the low-income category, but their political allegiances are often volatile and buffeted by events affecting their pocketbooks. That augurs more unpredictability in national elections.

3) Mainstream media decline. The audience shrank by 25% from 2020 on election night, and no one can credibly call the coverage of the two candidates unbiased. The rising influence of podcasts and social media signals a new media environment for campaigns. Walter Cronkite has left the building, never to return.

4) Trump’s new troubles. He escaped several prosecutions, but governing as a lame duck will not be easy. His popular coalition is remarkably diverse and thus unstable. He will have trouble controlling the extremists in his likely narrow House GOP majority. His campaign promises are fiscally impractical. Good luck with all that.

5) Money does not matter. Spending more than a billion dollars on her brief presidential run did not secure Harris a victory. Never having proven herself as a vote-getter outside of the distinctive environment of California, her deficient candidate skills gained prominent display. As GOP consultant Alex Castellanos noted: “There is nothing worse for a bad product than good advertising.”

6) But money did matter this time, in Minnesota. The DFL’s 20-year project of building a superior money machine while the GOP became a festival of dysfunction paid off in state House races. Outspending their rivals by up to 4 to 1 in key races helped DFLers win several squeakers and prevent the GOP from taking control of the state House. The DFL even ran metrowide TV ads for individual state House candidates, a move that one veteran DFLer told me was astoundingly profligate. But it worked.

7) From penthouse to outhouse. Gov. Tim Walz enters the pantheon of Minnesota presidential election losers. He returns from his dazzling turn in the national spotlight to a bitterly divided state government and the challenges of a budget year. The last evenly divided state House descended into chaos in 1979. Not what the governor was hoping for.

8) Home for good. Though the Harris-Walz ticket carried the state, it lost Blue Earth County, Walz’s longtime home. When asked by a questioner about the governor’s future presidential prospects, star journalist Mark Halperin replied: “They are about the same as your chances of quarterbacking the Los Angeles Chargers.” True that.

9) More bad Pohlad management. The Pohlad family burned over $500,000 in contributions to Harris, but they could not afford similar funds to aid the Twins’ pitching staff to stave off the team’s epic end-of-season collapse. Let us hope they sell the ball club before they again try to move it or contract it into oblivion.

Steven Schier is the Emeritus Congdon Professor of Political Science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.