Sver since Election Day, experts have given us a series of articles to explain why Republicans won and Democrats lost the 2024 election. Their results tend to focus on opinions and guesses rather only on concrete evidence. The reality is that it was a close election, with the Republicans winning by one of the narrowest margins since the 1900s. And the only real mistake Democrats made was running away from their economic record , instead of accepting it.

A colleague bragged to me the day after the election that it was the biggest landslide since Reagan in 1984. Republicans made the results look like a landslide. Democrats felt the results were the same. Some didn’t even pay attention to my findings that I presented to our local Lions Club, which showed a close election and the one factor that cost the Democrats this otherwise close election.

Was it close? As of this writing, Donald Trump has received 50.47% of the vote, the 22nd highest percentage of the popular vote in the 32 elections held between 1900 and 2024, just behind George W. Bush in 2004, and just ahead of Jimmy Carter in 2004. 1976. Six parties below Trump had to deal with third parties, which lowered their popular vote totals.

Trump won 57.99% of all Electoral College votes, enough to rank 23rd out of 32 presidents elected since 1900, just behind Barack Obama in 2012, but ahead of Harry Truman in 1948. As for the margin of victory, Trump won the popular vote by 2.52 percentage points, good enough for 26th place in 32 presidential elections. In other words, it wasn’t a landslide, and it doesn’t appear to be grounds for office, as it did for Democrats like JFK, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

However, you won’t miss articles critical of Harris, claiming she was too conservative or too liberal. Or they say she was too negative, or not negative enough. The speculation continues. But was she a bad candidate? An internal poll reported when Biden was the nominee showed that Democrats were on pace to lose 400 electoral college votes. Harris picked up a number of those votes in a historically short period of time, but it wasn’t enough.

But was there anything Harris, or Biden, could have done in 2024 to change their fortunes? There is only one, supported by statistical evidence. It was a decision to flee their own economic record. By failing to appreciate their economic successes, Democrats have allowed Trump and the media to define the economy as the worst ever. And it wasn’t. In fact, the Democratic Party’s policies have improved the economy.

We now know that the vast majority of voters voted on the economy, or on their perception of it. This included perceptions of inflation, which were often worse than the actual numbers. The Inflation Reduction Act reduced inflation from more than 8 percent at the time of signing to 2.4 percent. If Trump had been president, he would have touted it as the greatest reduction in inflation in history. Biden and Harris could have run ads showing this success, but chose to run away, leaving others to define their policies as failures.

When Biden took office, unemployment exceeded 6.5 percent. During his term, his administration lowered the unemployment rate to 4.1 percent and achieved a lower overall unemployment rate than Trump. Trump called the latest jobs report worse than ever. But Biden and Harris have chosen to focus on other issues, rather than their economic success, ceding the economic realm to criticism from the presidential race and the press.

Showing evidence of economic success would have given Harris the votes needed to win in 2024. But abandoning good economic numbers has led Republicans to criticize the economy. And the facts show that’s how voters made their choices in November during a close election.