Harris over performed, while Trump underperformed in this election.

The day after, or the first few days after, is a questionable timing practice to examine the aftermath of a presidential election, especially one as crucial as this one. I will let others examine all the demographic shifts and the messaging points of each campaign and candidate. I want to focus on one conclusion I have come to: it is actually amazing that Vice-President Harris made this race as close as she did.

Let me explain.

I had thought up until election day that Harris would win the popular vote and closely win most of the swing states targeted by both campaigns. I thought this because Donald Trump had demonstrated he was extreme, he wasn’t to be trusted, and a majority voters didn’t like him. And interestingly voters on election day through exit poll surveys agreed with that assessment. Harris was better liked, more trusted, and seen as less extreme than Trump. So what happened?

President Biden’s job approval on election day was 40%, and this weight of negativity was just too much for Harris to overcome. I had thought because of perceptions of Trump, she could and would overcome, but the anchor of Biden was just too weighty, and she never really had an opportunity to separate herself from him in any substantive way.

In every Presidential election in modern times, an incumbent President running for re-election gets on election day what their job approval number is. If a President has a job approval of 45%, they get around 45% of the vote. Carter in 1980, Reagan in 1984, Bush in 1992, Clinton in 1996, Bush in 2004, Obama in 2012, Trump in 2020, received on election day exactly what their job approval number was.

In 1988, President Reagan had a 55% job approval rating, and his Vice-President Bush received 53% of the vote in his run for President. So he underperformed Reagan’s approval by a couple of points.

No president running for re-election in modern times or vice-president running under the incumbent party, has received a higher number than the incumbent President’s job approval number! Until this election.

In any normal election against any normal opponent, you would have expected Harris to get around 41 or 42% of the vote. By the time all the outstanding votes are counted, she will end up with north of 48% of the vote. Thus she will have over performed the norm by 8 points!

This has to do with a combination of the negative perceptions of Trump and the threat he was seen as, and a nearly flawless campaign run by Harris. She is the first vice-president or president to ever substantially exceed the incumbent President’s job approval.

Biden’s low job approval not only weighed down Harris, it also weighed down Democratic candidates throughout the country but especially in swing states. Harris ran approximately 7 or 8 points ahead of Biden in all the swing states and in nearly every jurisdiction, and this just wasn’t enough to pull some down-ballot candidates across the finish line. But a great sign for Democrats is how many candidates were able to over come the negative weight at the state level and win. This is exactly what we saw in 2022 at the state level.

So before we go too far afield with asking why certain voters or certain places voted for Trump, or posit some huge cultural shifts as the rational for the election results, it might be helpful to understand the single most predictive stat of this election was the incumbent President’s job approval. And the fact Harris only lost by a point or two is quite remarkable when it should have been a landslide loss.

One question we will never know the answer to is if President Biden had decided much earlier than 100 days out not to run, and opened the nomination process to many candidates to pursue the nomination, and thus allow candidates including Harris to establish their independence through a national campaign and debates, would the result have been different?