A glance at American history confirms that the 2024 election was unusual. The last time the presidency alternated between parties in three successive elections was from 1884 to 1892, when Grover Cleveland was elected to nonconsecutive terms. Benjamin Harrison’s election in 1888 intervened. (Mr. Harrison also won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, which did not happen again until George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and then Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016.)
The 2024 election was also the fourth consecutive election in which the margin of the popular vote was less than 5 percentage points, the longest such streak since the six times between 1876 and 1896. By historical standards, partisan control in Congress has also been brief and tenuous in recent years; neither party has controlled either house of Congress for more than eight years since the Republicans lost the House in 2006.
This is not to suggest that past is prologue, or that poring over the history of the 1890s can predict the path forward. Rather, these historical comparisons offer confirmation, if such is needed, that in our present era, American politics is unusually closely divided.
As Americans try to understand the results of Mr. Trump’s re-election, with his decisive Electoral College win and roughly 1.5-percentage-point margin of victory in the popular vote, this background of more than a decade of slim margins and partisan alternation deserves attention. It is not enough to simply analyze exit polls and look at the particular counties that voted for President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, then President Trump again.
The array of often contradictory post-election analysis based on exit polling offers little more than a blurry and unsatisfying sketch of the electorate. Much of it focuses on determining what issues were most important for swing voters—the economy, or immigration, or the current administration’s handling of either issue, or attitudes about Mr. Trump’s disruption of political and constitutional norms—and what sort of mandate the incoming administration might claim.
While all of those are significant questions, we should also be asking what background conditions have left the country so closely divided across so many different issues. There may be an intersection between exit polling and the background question of a closely divided electorate. Almost three-quarters of voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and three-quarters also see democracy as threatened. In the seven swing states that decided the election, 68 percent to 73 percent of voters said democracy was threatened.
Before the election, most commentators—including the editors of America, in repeated warnings about Mr. Trump as a threat to constitutional norms—would have assumed that strong voter agreement that democracy is in trouble would have benefited Kamala Harris. Instead, we face the reality of voters who both see democracy as threatened and voted for Mr. Trump.
Some combination of effects is likely in play here, with the relative proportions being difficult or impossible to determine. First, there could be voters who believed democracy was threatened by Mr. Trump but decided that some other concern, such as inflation or immigration, was more pressing. Second, there could be voters who saw Ms. Harris, rather than Mr. Trump, as a threat to democracy, either because of concerns about government overreach (for example, during pandemic lockdowns, which were generally stricter in states run by Democrats, or in the various prosecutions of Mr. Trump) or because they still believe Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election having been stolen.
Third, and probably hardest to characterize fully, are those voters who might be saying that democracy is threatened because of a feeling that the system itself does not work—because the elites of both parties do not prioritize the concerns of the average American, being focused on maintaining their own grip on power in Washington. For some of these voters, Mr. Trump’s performative disdain for traditional political norms may be attractive, even if his policy proposals are incoherent, unjust or threaten economic upheaval.
While the first two cases above are mostly topics for debate and persuasion, turning on the judgments that voters make based on good or bad information about the character and policy aims of the candidates, the third issue runs deeper. Both parties routinely make policy proposals they describe as prioritizing “regular” Americans, but rather than being able to coalesce around a consensus set of proposals, some voters seem to be left in the position of casting one protest vote after another, serially rejecting the current incumbent.
It is also worth remembering that millions of voters who went to the polls in 2020 then chose to sit out the 2024 election, perhaps feeling that they had no one to vote for who represented their interests.
One clear lesson to be taken from the last election is that a large number of Americans are unsure whether our existing democratic norms and institutions actually do, in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, help to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” In the language of Catholic social teaching, we might say that voters doubt whether the system in which they participate sustains the common good.
Another way to put this might be that Americans struggle to recognize a good that can truly be held in common across our differences. What is good for the coasts seems not to be good for the heartland; what is good for those with college degrees seems different from what is good for blue-collar workers.
In his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis reminded the church that political charity involves seeking “the good of all people, considered not only as individuals or private persons, but also in the social dimension that unites them” (No. 182). The place for those who are committed to the common good to begin, then, is by working to rebuild a sense of “the social dimension that unites” individuals and communities. “Good politics,” the pope says, “will seek ways of building communities at every level of social life.”
That is a high ideal, and will require political patience as well as charity. We offer two suggestions for how this work might begin. First, local examples of cooperation, as in states where a governor of one party has proven able to work with the other party holding a legislative majority, should be both studied and celebrated. The national parties should work to recruit candidates who have proven their ability in such settings.
Second, building community requires making a distinction between opposing unjust actions and policies and vilifying or ostracizing those who voted for, or failed to vote against, the leaders who are implementing them. The same recognition of “the good of all people” that animates advocacy for justice also requires seeking to hold that good in common even with political opponents.
