She may be retired from her professorship at the University of South Florida, but she's still among the country's most respected political analysts. On Monday, December 2, celebrated Political Analyst Susan MacManus was dissecting last month's election for members of the Capital Tiger Bay Club in Tallahassee. Her main message was that Democrats - in Florida and nationwide - totally misjudged almost everything about the electorate.
"The working class, the economy...sometimes that wouldn't matter, but this time it did. So it's the demographics, plus the issue. But because we have such diverse demographics like bellwethers, it elevates the issue that ends up affecting the whole country."
It seems Florida was ahead of the curve in modeling how the majority of people would vote in the 2024 election. MacManus said the state's Democratic Party leaders must make a lot of changes and the national party would be wise to follow that course of action.
"It's clear they're going to have to go back to square one and be honest about these results and figure out better ways to get a feel for how everyday voters are behaving. So the stereotypes where all the solid blocks of voters that were 'ours' didn't turn out that way at all because the blocks themselves had splintered as was evidenced in the registration we looked at."
Meanwhile, MacManus said the Republicans had nearly all rallied around Donald Trump and the issues he'd pushed as the most important.
