Despite his historic late exit from the contest, an unpopular President Joe Biden overshadowed the 2024 presidential election and ultimately cost Democrats the White House, nationally recognized political analyst Charlie Cook said Thursday.
The economy and immigration were foremost on many voters’ minds – a fact that did not bode well for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, Cook said.
“It was a targeted repudiation of Biden,” he told a Palm Beach Civic Association audience at The Beach Club. “People were upset about a 20 percent increase in the cost of living and upset about the border, too.”
Cook, who founded and contributes to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, was the keynote speaker at the Civic Association’s first Signature Series program of the 2024-25 season. Cook writes election forecasts and rankings in the Cook Report and for other media and has delivered election night commentary for various television networks since 1984.
Michael Pucillo, chairman and CEO of the Civic Association, interviewed Charlie Cook in a club-chair format.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, won the electoral college 312-226 and claimed 49.8 percent of the popular vote to Harris’s 48.3 percent.
Cook said about 47-48 percent of the voters were diehard Republicans and 47-48 percent diehard Democrats, leaving four to six percent undecided or swing voters. Those swing voters were the key to the outcome in the seven battleground states, and thus the entire election.
The seven swing states, where polls showed Trump and Harris dead even or within one or two points of the other, were Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.
“We knew that undecided voters generally don’t split down the middle – they break one way or the other in a strong way,” Cook said.
Of the seven battleground states, six delivered for Trump and one for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, six broke for Biden over Trump. This year, all seven jumped into the Trump column.
Young men, notably Latinos and African Americans who have traditionally voted Democratic, supported Trump, Cook said.
“I think a lot of these folks did not really want to vote for Donald Trump again but they sure as heck did not want the last four years to continue,” he said. “And those last two or three points, these were people waiting to hear Harris say why she would be different from Biden, and she never did.”
Speaking of Harris, Cook said, “I don’t think she was great. But I don’t think this election was really about her.”
Elsewhere, Cook said, the 2024 general election was more of a red ripple than a red wave – especially in the House of Representatives, where Democrats picked up two seats, but Republicans held on to a razor-thin majority, at 220-215.
In the Senate, Republicans flipped four Democratic-held seats and regained a majority for the first time since 2021, with 53-47.
But three of the seats that Republicans flipped were in Ohio, West Virginia and Montana – all deep red states. Republican Dave McCormick’s narrow win over Democratic Senator Bob Casey in purple Pennsylvania was “impressive,” Cook said. But elsewhere, Republicans failed to convert seats in four battleground states that Trump carried.
In the 11 gubernatorial races, where Republicans defended eight seats and Democrats defended three, not a single one changed hands, Cook noted.
All of which did not constitute a massacre for Democrats, despite some assertions to the contrary.
“At the presidential level you had one thing happen that was really noteworthy, then, below the presidential, it was extraordinary how ordinary it was,” he said.
Pucillo said that, beginning with the 2016 election, some traditionally Democratic voters have shifted toward the GOP. He asked Cook whether that trend will extend beyond Trump, who cannot seek another term in 2028.
Cook responded that Democrats are looking to capture support from college-educated suburban women but are losing votes from non-college educated men along the way.
“This will be a trend with downscale men, whether white or Latino,” Cook said. “This is something we will see for a good while.”
Thursday’s program was sponsored by Citizens Private Bank, which recently moved into new office space at 400 Royal Palm Way, Suite 300, in Palm Beach.
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