The ‘most momentous’ in living memory: The 2024 US presidential election

Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at pollster YouGov, said data coming out of the current US presidential election confirms significant cultural and demographic shifts that are reshaping the political map. Rivers told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium that the once-popular “demographics is destiny” mantra predicting permanent centre-left majorities has lost meaning in the Trump era. 

Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at pollster YouGov, said data coming out of the current US presidential election confirms significant cultural and demographic shifts that are reshaping the political map.

Rivers, who is also a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium that the general election underway in the US between former president Donald Trump and current vice-president Kamala Harris is the “most momentous” in living memory.

“It’s been scripted to generate more surprises than anything I can remember, but it is serious business,” Rivers told the symposium, hosted by Top1000funds.com and held on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California, last month. “It’s been amazingly devoid of discussion of issues, but a feast for anyone that likes following elections.”

Rivers presented insights from a historic data set called ‘Say 24’, compiled via a major survey of 130,000 voters jointly administered by teams at Yale, Arizona State and Stanford universities.

He described the poll results for much of the past year as a “snooze” as Trump and previous Democratic frontrunner President Joe Biden seemed to enjoy peculiarly entrenched support and preconceived perceptions, both unable to shift deeply held opinions about them in the electorate or persuade new voters to join their respective coalitions.

But Rivers said the race was thrown on its head by the presidential debate in June, after which President Biden suffered sustained negative press commentary about his performance and age, and high-profile defections of allies and donors, leading to his withdrawal and endorsement of Harris as Democratic nominee, which she clinched at the party’s convention in August.

“Harris started down about four points relative to Trump, and then quickly overcame him, and then now leads, typically by two, three, sometimes four or five points in the polls,” Rivers said. “What Harris has done – and they’ve run an amazingly good campaign over the last six weeks – is to improve her positives. The views of Harris were pretty negative as being a ‘lightweight, inarticulate, unprepared’ and so forth. Since then, she really has done extraordinarily well.”

Demographics is destiny (or is it?)

However, he added that the data suggested Harris, who is perceived as more left-leaning than Biden, still faced a “problem on her ideological positioning” given that the US electorate has an inherent Republican advantage.

“The US is a centre-right country – that is, about a third of American voters describe themselves as being ‘conservative’ [and] about a quarter is ‘liberal’. So, there’s about an eight-point gap there,” Rivers said.

While the traditional right-wing/left-wing schism that has dominated electoral politics in liberal democracies throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries still holds sway in the US, Rivers said the data suggested there have been profound shifts in allegiance and sentiment since Trump entered, and disrupted, public life.

“20 years ago, you heard about ‘demographics as destiny’, which was that if Democrats maintain the majorities among these two minority groups [Blacks and hispanics] and were able to just do reasonably well among whites, they would have a permanent majority,” Rivers said. “What happened is completely different since then.”

Following an “autopsy” of the 2012 election – at which Barack Obama won a second term and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was defeated – Rivers said Republicans embarked on a new strategy to woo latino voters, with some success.

Trump has also gained support from Black males, and has a near 80 per cent stranglehold on rural voters, Rivers said, both of which are new developments that overturn historical allegiances. Similarly, under Trump, Republicans are now seen as broadly isolationist on foreign policy, while Democrats are more globalist, also overturning traditional norms.

The growing support for Trump and Republicans among working class and minority voters reflects similar dynamics emerging other Anglosphere democracies. In the UK, for example, the right-leaning Conservative and Reform parties have attracted more support from working-class and non-tertiary educated voters, as has the conservative Liberal party in Australia.

On the flipside, these declines in support for Democrats among traditional bases have been offset by increases in support from university-educated and suburban middle-class voters, especially women, he said.

Notwithstanding the dynamics signalled by the data, Rivers added the caveat that polling can be an inexact science.

“It’s beyond our ability to make precise predictions,” he admitted. “The dirty little secret of counting votes is only accurate to about a 10th of a point. If you recount a state, you can expect movements of about a 10th of a point on a recount. So, whenever an election is that close – it’s anyone’s guess who actually won.”