In this election cycle, the resiliency of inflation and other ‘pocketbook’ issues displaced concerns over reproductive rights and democracy. This was true among almost every demographic group where Trump gained ground—Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, the young and women (e.g., the vaunted “gender gap” never really materialized).
Moreover, the inability of the Harris campaign to ‘un-couple’ the Vice President from Biden Administration policies made her the de facto incumbent—responsible for high grocery prices, high gas prices and a general economic malaise.
There were also strategic and tactical errors in the Harris campaign. Chief among them was the almost obsessive focus on Trumps’s negatives—to the exclusion of selling voters on Harris' own policy prescriptions for the country. Voters were looking for candidates who offered a way out of their economic struggles, but Harris never articulated her solutions well enough.
Finally, this election may be the first where the so-called “legacy” media lost its influence on voters. The rise of social media offered voters a myriad of non-traditional information sources—on both the left and the right. They used those sources.
All in all, while Americans weighed multiple issues on Election Day, it was almost exclusively their worry over the economy that determined their vote.