It has been nearly 60 hours since most major news outlets have called the Presidential election. The GOP will take the majority in the US Senate and are in pole position to maintain the thinnest of majorities in the House.

The GOP success was reflected down ballot as well. Looking beyond the Beltway, in Michigan the House was reclaimed by Republicans and the results in the Minnesota House might settle to a 50/50 split.

There is both an art and a science to winning an election and in today’s post I’d like to explore how they come together in building winning coalitions and importantly what lessons we can learn as public affairs leaders as we go into 2025 and beyond.

Polls Don’t Vote! People Do!

As my colleague Kevin Lawlor pointed out – polls don’t vote. People do.

Elections are all about building the most robust coalition you can to achieve victory. Here’s a look at what we saw (image credit goes to The New York Times):

The GOP gained massive ground with non-white men, young men, and non-college educated voters. Trump even crushed it with Gen Z men. He lost ground among virtually no groups, at least according to the data available, which is worth your time to review.

He moved the needle in red states and blue states, suburbs and cities. If you look at the returns, even deep blue areas like Manhattan and the Bronx swung toward Trump by double digits (still blue overall, but huge swings in his favor).

There are two ways to interpret these results:

Based on exit polls, the GOP has created a multiracial, primarily non-college educated, populist coalition. This could represent the biggest political realignment in American history since the “Southern strategy” realignment in the 1950s and 60s if this coalition endures.
This new coalition is built against the coastal elites, neocons, and the progressive left and leverages non-traditional media to communicate around traditional media to the voter base.
He also pulled in low-propensity voters, mostly men who — and this is anecdotal — saw him on Joe Rogan and thought, “I like him.”

The alternative explanation is that this is a temporary coalition held together by an aversion to the Biden administration and, more importantly, economic anxiety around rising costs of living and inflation. A few data points:

Two in 3 voters said the country is on the “wrong track”
The 61% of voters who were very concerned about the cost of housing broke for Trump by 6 points
The 40% of voters who identified high prices for gas, groceries and other goods as a top voting issue broke for Trump by 32 points.
Ultimately, the Democrats were unable to address effectively what was keeping the voters up at night, which led to the Red Wave.

So What Do We Do With This Information?

I think there are three big lessons that translate to the public affairs market, and it all comes down to one term: individual stakeholders.
First, regardless of whether this is a blip or a lasting coalition, the days of “moving the base” as a monolith are behind us. Issue advocacy efforts that reflexively go after the “low-hanging fruit” of energy advocates or healthcare champions or those with an economically vested interest in a particular policy or regulation to win should be thrown out.

We need to look at the policymakers with whom we need to engage and then look to their constituent groups and then connect with those groups based on their own values. New technology allows us to do this much more efficiently but we can’t simply rely on the latest new toolset – smart thinking and putting time and talent into how to engage with voters as individual stakeholders is the key.

Second and relatedly is the values alignment. This is easy to say in principle but much harder to achieve in practice. Regardless of the effort that we are looking to win on, success now hinges on our ability to connect the issue we care about with the issues that these individual stakeholders care about. Right now, it is economics. Tomorrow it could be foreign policy. The future (as always) is unclear.

I believe that simply trying to convince stakeholders of the superiority of our argument – if there is no nexus to their lived experience or what is keeping them up at night – does not work no matter how much money and sophisticated tech we leverage. Again, new platforms that DDC has leveraged help us better understand at a more granular level what is motivating our audiences beyond the issues we are seeking to address; it is the effort of strategists that help to craft the nuanced messaging that makes a difference.

And finally, success is going to involve throwing away preconceptions of who would or would not support a particular issue. This creates a great opportunity for all industry groups to assemble their own unique coalition of advocates and to engage with them in truly authentic ways to solicit and earn their support for the policies we care about. Leveraging alternative media outlets, micro-influencers, and one-on-one engagement will join tried and true methods of outreach and education in campaigns moving forward.

For additional deep dives into some of the policies we are tracking, please check out our post-election analysis page, which will be updated throughout the week. Keep an eye out for updates from the DDC team as we turn to the new Congress, Administration, and state legislative cycle, which is just around the corner.

2024 Elections Demonstrate the Power of Connecting with Individuals, not Identities