Just how many votes did Harris lose on Gaza?
More than enough to lose the election!
Quick little post here. Today, Holly Otterbein reports for Axios that
Democratic officials who worked on the party's still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration's approach to the war in Gaza…
Unfortunately, Otterbein doesn’t have their numbers on this, and unless something dramatic happens it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see them. So in their absence, there have been a lot of arguments today over whether Harris actually lost enough Gaza voters to cost her the election, with journalists like Corey Walker insisting that it just wasn’t a priority enough voters to have made a difference.
Is that true? Let’s look at some numbers:
Catalist reports that 30 million 2020 voters didn’t vote in 2024.
They also report that 55.7% of those voters had backed Biden, meaning that Harris lost about 16.71 million Biden voters.
IMEU, meanwhile found that 29% of Biden voters who didn’t back Harris said Gaza was their most important issue. Assuming that those Biden voters who didn’t back anyone look anything like those voters who voted for someone other than Harris, that means she lost around 4.85 million voters on Gaza. This figure does not include people who voted for someone other than Harris because of Gaza.
Harris lost the popular vote by 2.29 million.
That assumption in step three is admittedly shaky, but if Biden→non-voters cared about Gaza even half as much as Biden→third party or Biden→Trump voters, that still would have been enough to have cost Harris the election.
The stronger objection here, I think, is that this election was so close that all kinds of issues can mathematically account for her loss. For instance, making the same assumptions we made before, we can conclude that around 4 million Biden voters stayed home in 2024 because they disapproved of Harris on the economy; if she had won those votes, she would have beaten Trump despite her support of Israel. When we also account for voters who Harris lost to Trump it seems likely her positions on welfare and healthcare were difference-makers as well.
Nevertheless, looking at the numbers we do have, it seems likely that enough voters prioritized Gaza to have cost Harris the election.
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