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Since Election Day, we’ve been given a series of columns by pundits to explain their reason why the Republicans won, and the Democrats lost, the 2024 Election. Their results tend to focus on opinions and guesses, instead of hard evidence. The reality is that it was a close election with Republicans winning by one of the narrower margins since the 1900s. And the only real mistake the Democrats made was running away from their economic record, instead of embracing it.

A colleague crowed to me the day after the election that it was the biggest landslide since Reagan in 1984. Republicans made it seemed like the results were a landslide. Democrats felt like the results were the same. Some wouldn’t even look at 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 contest.

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

Trump won 57.99% of all Electoral College votes, good enough for 23rd out of 32 elected presidents since 1900, just behind Barack Obama in 2012, but head 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 out of 32 presidential elections. In other words, it wasn’t a landslide, and it doesn’t sound like grounds for a mandate, the same as it was for Democrats like JFK, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Though you’ll find no shortage of articles critical of Harris, saying she was too conservative, or too liberal. Or they say she was too negative, or not negative enough. The speculation goes on. But was she a bad candidate? A reported internal poll while Biden was the nominee showed that Democrats were poised to lose 400 Electoral College votes. Harris got a number of those votes back in a historically short period of time, but it was not enough.

But was there something Harris, or Biden, could have done in 2024 to have changed their fortunes? There’s only one, backed by statistical evidence. It was the decision to run away from their own economic record. By not embracing their economic successes, Democrats allowed Trump, and the media, to define the economy as the worst ever. And it wasn’t. In fact, Democratic Party policies improved the economy.

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

When Biden took over, unemployment was over 6.5 percent. During his time in office, his administration lowered the jobless rate to 4.1 percent, and had an overall unemployment rate lower than Trump’s. Trump called the last jobs report the worst ever. But Biden and Harris chose to focus on other issues, instead of their economic success, conceding the economic field to its critics in the presidential race and in the press.

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