The GOP has to expand the battleground in 2024.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

If anything, it was probably closer to an R maximum (in the party’s current form) than a D maximum because as I pointed out earlier, R turnout was significantly better than D turnout

I wonder how much of that was Trump-specific enthusiasm, Democrats not fully engaging minority/campaign outreach due to COVID or some combination of the two.

Because either of those answers could make the problem even worse for the GOP than it already looks.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

This feels basically false, right? The GOP came within 0.63% of winning a presidential election while losing the popular vote by 5 points, and ran generally ahead of their presidential nominee down-ballot (such that the D+3 result in the House "translates" to a comfortable win in the Electoral College). We're at the point where a result like D+1 nationally not only translates to a clear Republican victory for the Presidency, but a filibuster-proof Senate majority if sustained (or improved upon) across three cycles. (Combined with control of the judiciary for the foreseeable future: as the parties are currently constituted, the Republican Party is probably closer than the Democratic Party to being a "natural party of government" under the current alignment.)

I actually think this election illustrates the GOP’s problem well. They had absolutely stunning turnout, won a number of key swing states the Dems were hoping to, and they still fell up short. They need something close to a best-case scenario (as the incredibly close 2016 victory was) to win the White House; the Dems can underperform expectations as they did this year and still win.

This year was in the aftermath of a horribly mismanaged pandemic and a recession in the year of the election, with a candidate who had persistently terrible favorability ratings for four years and with Democratic turnout so juiced that Biden won the most votes of any candidate ever, though. Long-term trends are what they are, but the circumstances of 2020 suggest it was a local Democratic maximum and probably not a sustainable performance.

(And in fact 2020 was a huge Democratic victory in a certain sense. This was the second-largest popular vote margin of my lifetime after the Obama landslide. It's just that the electoral system really didn't reflect this: assuming universal swing Trump '20 came closer to a victory than Clinton '16.)

It was a “maximum” for both parties. In 2024 neither side is going to replicate 2020 turnout.

I mean that it was probably a local maximum in Democratic margin (at D+5); I too expect turnout to fall under a Democratic presidency, as it did under Clinton and Obama (but rose under Bush and Trump). Some of the characteristics of the year boosting Democrats (such as Trump being seen as responsible to some degree for the pandemic/recession) are obviously going to disappear in the near future, and it seems no likelier to me that Democrats can maintain this than they could maintain D+7 after 2008.

The difference is that at that time the system tended towards helping Democrats; House Democrats ran ahead of Obama and the Electoral College buffeted him by two points. Obama had a ways to fall and still control the country. By contrast, a fairly tiny slide for Biden and House Democrats (to D+1, which would be an historically successful midterm) would still be a result the system would interpret as a Republican landslide.

Also, as I said, it was actually the Republicans who were far closer to their maximum possible turnout as the registered Republican turnout rate was at least 15% higher than Democrats being very very generous with the math. Independents could turn against Democrats more, and they may not vote by the lopsided margin they did for Biden again, but you can't use the argument Democrats were at their maximum in 2020 when only about 62% of registered Ds actually voted while about 91% of registered Republicans voted.

I feel Mr. Vosem is trying everything he can to conveniently ignore that or brush it aside, as it pretty much negates his entire take.