Albany-Area Political Science Professors Analyze 2024 Election Outcome

By Thomas Fink | April 28, 2025

Pictured above: Dr. Ronald Seyb, Associate Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College, and Connor Moran, adjunct professor of political science at the University at Albany.

Photo Credit for Seyb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_H_0qO7M8A

Photo Credit for Moran: Thomas Fink / The ASP

Two political science professors from the Albany area spoke of their analyses from the 2024 election outcome: Ronald Seyb, Ph.D. (an associate professor from Skidmore College) and Connor Moran (an adjunct professor and doctoral student from the University at Albany) discussed how Republican candidate Donald Trump triumphed with a victory and what went wrong for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Professor Seyb never had a prediction for the election as he found it to be too much of a “toss-up” whereas Professor Moran accurately predicted a Trump comeback and winning all swing states.

“How will/should history remember why Donald Trump won and why Kamala Harris lost?”

Professor Seyb criticized Harris on the vagueness of her anti-Trump rhetoric, especially regarding the narrative of Trump being a far-right authoritarian; she failed to go into detail explaining exactly how Trump would govern like a fascist. He also said that the Democrats were over-reliant on their frequent, alarmist talk of Project 2025 in which they also failed to substantially make their case as to why that document is particularly dangerous.

“Trump did a good job of distancing himself from…[Project 2025] as well,” Seyb said. “If you’re pointing to a document, you have to be losing...because there’s nothing that’s going to get people’s blood up by saying, ‘Well, there’s this document out there that you should be scared of.’ It’s a document! Why should I be scared of it?”

Professor Moran said that Harris overestimated the value of running mainly on being “not-Trump” as she unwisely prioritized anti-Trump rhetoric over policy goals. He believes that Harris “refused to take stances on pretty much anything and everything…she just ran on ‘Trump-being-a-fascist.’ She seems to have overexaggerated not only how much the public dislikes Trump, but how much faith the public has in her.”

“On Israel and Palestine, she refused to take a [position]...because ‘she’s not as bad as the other guy,’” Moran said. “This backfired comedically and spectacularly in…Dearborn, Michigan, where Trump actually won the Arab vote…And so, the other big point...tying to this is this perception that the Democratic Party establishment presents this sort of out-of-touch system. I think that is key in this election...I’d hope history remembers this fact. I think this played a huge role...I think that this is, in part, an elite-induced echo-chamber.”

“This [in turn] is largely sustained by a legacy-media-echo-chamber,” Moran said. “I think a lot of these Democratic politicians and elites just read The New York Times, The Washington Post, watch…CNN, NBC...which all kind of made it seem as though everybody is constantly horrified by Trump when really it’s just kind of these center-left and center-right elites—like, never-Trumper-center-right-elites kind of talking to one another.” Moran particularly criticized Harris for campaigning with neoconservatives such as the unpopular Cheney family as a foolish strategy.

Moran said that “there are some media analyses studying the coverage” which found that Harris had “overwhelmingly positive coverage on all the cable channels except, like, Fox.” He said that “Trump was doing much better on the new media” such as “the podcast circuits.” He said Harris’s refusal to go on “The Joe Rogan Experience” affirmed this “out-of-touch” perception. 

Moran said that the Democrats “need to take advantage of the new media,” because “if they don’t learn this lesson, they’ll be in very big trouble.”

Seyb said that Harris had a “difficult” time making a persuasive case for a “new approach to the economy” as she was vice president to former President Biden.

“There are a lot of Americans who felt like…the economy was not going in their direction,” Seyb said. “...They had moved from seeing themselves as a middle-class family to a lower-middle-class family or working-class family, because of grocery bills, because of heating and cooling bills, and so, when you have that kind of shift in class perspective that’s going to harm the party in power and...there was nothing Kamala Harris could have done to reverse people’s thoughts about that.”

On the southern border crisis, Seyb said that “it was an impossible situation for her to be in” as Harris would not have been able to campaign on a convincing solution to said crisis. Seyb said because President Biden never took any action to secure the border, his vice president could not campaign on supporting border security as it would have been viewed as insincere and unconvincing as well as inconsistent with the Biden administration. 

Seyb criticized Biden for downplaying or even denying the severity of the border crisis as in “border communities in Texas… [American citizens] were suffering.”

“Biden did not move quickly enough to try to secure the border,” Seyb said. “And so, he was at fault for that.”

Seyb said that Harris made a notable error with emphasizing the “democracy” rhetoric throughout the remaining days before Election Day. He said that Harris was guilty of preaching to the choir as the narrative of Trump being a threat to democracy is a top issue solely to Democrats.

“For a lot of independent voters… [democracy] is too abstract,” Professor Seyb said. “They know Donald Trump is somebody who has authoritarian tendencies, but they don’t really seem to care that much. They more want him to fix the economy, fix the border, fix crime.”

Seyb said that the reason why the pro-abortion rhetoric did not help Harris was because that although anti-abortion politics had been politically hurting the GOP since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Trump managed to move slightly leftward towards the center on abortion, all the while refusing to articulate a concrete position on the issue to avoid alienating both anti-abortion, right-wing voters and centrist voters who are mildly open to abortion.

Overall, Seyb believes that no matter how Harris could have campaigned differently or better, she still would have lost. He explained that Harris’s major obstacle was her role as Vice President to a “severely unpopular” president. This created an “impossible task” to promote herself as a “change-candidate” to an “electorate that was looking for change” as the polls demonstrated that most Americans believed that the country was going in the wrong direction.

Seyb said that Trump succeeding with Black voters and Hispanic-Latino voters was ultimately due to a “frustration” with “the pain of inflation” and they voted with a “primal scream” in response to the economic problem.  

Professor Moran said that “the Obama coalition is probably dead” as Trump triumphed by earning votes from this racially diverse working-class.

Seyb believes that it was not a mistake for Biden to drop out of the race, “because of the bad debate performance” which added additional damage to his low approval ratings. 

“And frankly, I do think that there has to be some criticism lobbed at the Democrats, because they did engage in some misinformation about Joe Biden’s condition,” Seyb said. He said that Harris and other Democrats were in denial of President Biden’s cognitive decline prior to his infamous debate performance which resulted in “the public feeling very betrayed by that.”

Because of that debate performance, Seyb believes that had Biden remained as the Democratic candidate, he would have suffered a worse electoral loss than Harris as he would have earned even fewer votes from “Black voters and Hispanic voters in all these swing states.” 

Moran agrees Biden “would have gotten destroyed” had he remained the candidate. He mentioned that although Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama pressured Biden to drop out, neither one supported the idea of Harris becoming the nominee; Moran viewed Biden’s immediate endorsement of the “unelectable” Harris upon exiting the race as “Biden’s last F-you" to those two prominent Democrats.

Seyb said that he is unsure if there could have been any other Democrat who would have been able to defeat Trump in 2024. He said that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer likely would have the strongest electoral performance, but probably not strong enough to stop Trump. 

Seyb is doubtful that misogyny played a role in Harris’s loss. However, he did say that political scientists have discovered that female Democrats often are unelectable. He said that research has found that this is because many voters tend to find some female Democratic candidates as too left for their liking as women are statistically far more likely to be progressive than men. He concluded this point by arguing that because Harris is a woman, because left-wing Democrats tend to be unelectable regardless of gender, and because Harris did not convincingly disown the “far-left” policy positions that she ran on throughout her failed 2020 presidential primary campaign, the electorate rejected her simply because they viewed her as a genuine radical leftist.

Seyb believes that America will eventually elect a woman president, but the hypothetical female president-elect would have to be “a generational talent” whose policy positions are exciting and popular with voters all across the political spectrum.

Seyb said that he finds “a lot of wisdom” in a certain theory, being that the first female U.S. president will be a Republican. He said because Americans tend to be attracted to leaders who are “tough,” the Republicans are perceived as the “party of toughness” whereas the Democrats are perceived as the “party of softness.” He believes Iowa Senator Joni Ernst could be an electable female GOP candidate.

“It is widely believed that this election outcome is a devastating defeat for the progressive left-wing faction within the Democratic Party.  To recover from this humiliating loss, do you see the Democratic Party moving rightward? If so, in what ways would they abandon the Left in pursuit of reconnecting with centrism?”

Seyb said that although he believes that the Democratic Party has become less left-leaning compared to how they were in 2019, they still need to move rightward as they need to abandon their image as being too left on cultural issues such as race and gender. In order to reconnect with working-class voters, Black voters, and Hispanic-Latino voters, he believes that the Democrats need to do away with “woke ideology” and to re-focus heavily on “kitchen table issues.”

“Give the Republicans a great deal of credit, because Trump ran that commercial about ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them; Trump is for you,’” Seyb said.

Seyb said that ad worked immensely for Trump, because it tapped into how most Americans thought that the Democrats had become “too far left” on gender politics. He discussed how Trump’s anti-Harris commercial argued “she supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens” and because of that, he said that ad was “very damning” for her.

As Trump won the majority of Hispanic-Latino men, Seyb said that in order for the Democrats to win back that demographic, the party would need to move strongly rightward on cultural issues because Hispanic-Latinos tend to be “socially conservative.”

“The Democrats have treated Hispanic voters as an identity group rather than as a class group or economic group” Seyb said. “What Donald Trump has done is treating them like other voters and saying, ‘You care about having good schools and safe streets and being able to pay for your food bills.’ Where, again, the Democrats were running all these ads in Spanish and talking about them as a marginalized group and it just doesn’t work with those people, because...they want to be treated like other kinds of voters who have the same kind of concerns and I think that’s Donald Trump’s and the Republican Party’s...secret sauce. They don’t treat them as an identity group, they treat them as Americans who want to realize the American dream.”

Moran predicts the Democrats will avoid “social issues” while moving rightward on border security. He expects the Democrats will compromise with Republicans on the issue of illegal immigration where the Democrats would support deportations only in cases of illegal immigrants committing violent crimes on American soil.