Election 2024: Candidate and Party Vulnerabilities

CU Denver School of Public Affairs | Photo via Instagram

In their respective 2024 presidential campaigns, the professionals in each party analyzed the opposition’s vulnerabilities and spent most of their campaign energy highlighting them. The following graphic displays each party’s weaknesses. Polling and content analysis show the Democrats’ vulnerabilities of incumbency, inflation and immigration were the greater liability.

Donald Trump’s greatest vulnerability was his own personality and character. Kamala Harris opened and closed her campaign focused on it. Harris’s biggest vulnerability was having been in office the last four years with the aftermath of the pandemic, the economic disruption – especially inflation, and a world in greater conflict. She inherited the weakness of the incumbent, President Joe Biden. And of course, Trump never stopped discussing immigration, which he linked to crime and all manner of other problems. Unfortunately for Democrats, the voters, even liberal Californians, are angry about crime and weak prosecution. They regularly remove controversial district attorneys. Although Trump’s personal focus on inflation and DEI was at a lower level, it was a major feature of online and legacy media advertising, especially during football games, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Besides Trump’s personality, the Democrats’ most influential issue was abortion. Trump was never able to get around his responsibility for overturning Roe v. Wade and the extreme views of many Republican legislatures. Democrats also focused much attention on the threat to democracy that the January 6 violence posed and Trump’s responsibility for it. His authoritative rhetoric highlighted by the Madison Square Garden rally made it a major Democratic issue late in the campaign.

On Friday, November 8, Floyd Ciruli presented the “Vulnerabilities” at the CU Denver School of Public Affairs program on the election aftermath. Some 100 participants joined a Zoom panel discussion as a foot of snow closed the school. It was the last of a 5-session program on the election. Ciruli, a Senior Fellow of the school developed the program with Dean Paul Teske and moderated three of the panels.

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