First published at International Socialism Project.
The story of the 2024 election turned out to be remarkably straightforward. In a political environment where most of the electorate thought the country was moving in the wrong direction, where they perceived the economy as poor, and where most of them reported that inflation has caused them serious hardship, voters decided to toss out the incumbent party that Vice President Kamala Harris represented.
Donald Trump won the popular vote for the first and only time, and he made gains not only in rural areas, but also suburbs, and even Democratic Party strongholds like New York City and Chicago. According to exit polls, Harris did better than Joe Biden in 2020 with the most affluent Americans, but Trump improved over 2020 with everyone else.
One of the truisms in U.S. politics is “It’s the economy, stupid.” If the economy is growing and people have jobs and higher wages, the incumbent party is usually re-elected. If the economy is declining and people are having trouble making ends meet, the voters usually “throw the bums out” by voting for the challenger. For most of the Biden administration, as the larger economy recovered from the shocks it received during the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden has been an extraordinarily unpopular president. Biden’s unpopularity has confounded his advisers, who can’t square it with the “macro” economic indicators showing the U.S. has had the strongest recovery from COVID of all of its peers.
Yet COVID left behind economic disruption, including the highest inflation rates Americans have experienced in 40 years — which is, of course, effectively a wage cut. The explosion of military spending to support wars in Ukraine and Gaza also fuels inflation. As a result, U.S. workers’ living standards have declined under the Biden administration, while the booming stock market has helped the wealthiest Americans to do quite well.
Nearly every incumbent government in Europe, Asia and Latin America — most facing worse disruptions and recoveries from COVID than the U.S. — that faced voters in the last year or so either lost or were severely weakened. The midsummer replacement of Biden with Harris gave Democrats hope that they could avoid that fate, as Biden was clearly on a path to lose to Trump. In the end, Harris couldn’t escape the fact that, as the sitting vice president, all of Biden’s negatives attached to her.
This is the third consecutive presidential election where the incumbent party lost and where the incumbent president spent most of their term with approval ratings below 50 percent. Perhaps that says more about underlying discontent in U.S. society than it does about any particular candidate.
The Democratic Party’s campaign playbook backfired — again
In 2016, Hillary Clinton demonstrated her contempt for Trump’s then-overwhelmingly white supporters by labeling them “the deplorables” — rather than trying to acknowledge the source of their anger: the gross inequality of the economic status quo. Eight years later, with Trump’s support bigger in virtually every demographic group, it is impossible to ignore the economic despair that drove voters away from the Democrats, while Biden continued to brag that the U.S. the economy during his tenure is “ the strongest in the world.”
But those without the financial means to make a killing on the stock market are living paycheck-to-paycheck, unable to make ends meet, often while working two jobs.
In political system in which the two major capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, take turns in dominating the seats of power — without an actual opposition party — the only way for voters to express their dissatisfaction with the party in power is by voting for the other one, the lesser of the two evils.
Moreover, since Bill Clinton occupied the White House, the Democrats have embraced the same neoliberal policies championed by Republicans, with only slightly less obvious enthusiasm. Republicans since Ronald Reagan had railed against so-called “welfare cheats”, but Clinton was the president who actually ended “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, sending millions of poor people into a downward spiral of poverty which has only grown today.
In recent decades, the Democrats have deliberately courted the votes of the well-educated and wealthy, and in turn, support for the Democratic Party has steadily eroded among its traditional working-class and Black constituents. This pattern has become even more exaggerated since Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign for president. Yet the Party’s powerbrokers have done nothing to change this disastrous strategy in the years since. They coronated Joe Biden as their 2024 candidate, even as his mental faculties were rapidly declining, and then, after finally dumping him, refused to hold an open Democratic Party convention in August — forfeiting even a semblance of democracy within their own party.
Now, the chickens have come home to roost. And the bigoted and mentally unstable convicted felon Donald Trump is going back to the White House, in an Electoral College landslide — while Republicans regained control of the Senate and perhaps will remain in control of the House, with vote counts still ongoing.
A closer look at the 2024 voting demographics should dispel the myth that the majority of the U.S. population is composed of incorrigible racists and misogynists who believe all of Trump’s lies — that Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats, or that the military should round up immigrants in mass deportations, for example. There is already some anecdotal evidence that many Trump voters don’t actually believe his more outlandish claims or expect him to fulfill his most draconian campaign promises.
As the New York Times reported in October, for example,
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “ one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “ a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
As one Republican pollster told the Times, “[P]eople think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.” Only time will tell us whether or to what degree this is a correct assumption.
Until votes are fully counted across the country, most of the current data rely on exit polls, which thus should be viewed as estimates. That said, exit polls showed that nearly one in five Trump voters were people of color — a major shift from 2016. Trump won 26 percent of the Latino vote, including a number of mostly-Latino border counties in southern Texas. Trump gained less dramatically among Black voters, but nevertheless won between 13 and 16 percent of the Black vote overall (compared to single digits in previous elections), and between 21 and 24 percent among Black men, according to Politico.
Despite the reproductive rights crisis resulting from abortion bans, Harris’s margin among women voters was just 8 percent, the smallest since 2004. In a number of states where pro-abortion rights referenda passed, Trump still carried the state. This includes Missouri, where voters undid an abortion ban but a majority voted for Trump.
Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza cost Harris at least some votes among Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian voters, though again national statistics are not yet available. But Trump carried the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, where many polls had already showed voters turning against Biden and then Harris over their support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon. Harris won only 36 percent of the Dearborn vote, compared to Biden’s 68 percent in 2020. It now appears that while some voted for Trump, a whopping 18 percent voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein at last count, compared with less than one percent for the Greens statewide.
Harris did, however, notably win among voters earning $100,000 or more annually, in what appears to be a long-term political realignment, although Trump maintains the support of super-rich billionaires.
Bernie’s advice
As could be predicted, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders waited only a day to issue a scathing critique of the Harris campaign. “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people should find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders’ statement said. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?... Probably not.”
Sanders critique is true (especially the “Probably not” part), but it’s hard to take at face value. After all, Sanders and other Democratic Party “progressive” surrogates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) were “all in” — first for Joe Biden and then for Harris throughout her short campaign. Both of them barnstormed for Harris across the swing states. Harris gave Sanders and AOC prime speaking slots at the Democratic National Convention (while refusing to allow a single pro-Palestinian speaker), where their speeches were intended to establish Harris’s bona fides among the Democrats’ progressive base. And now Sanders is telling us that the Harris campaign was doomed from the start?
Surely Sanders is correct when he criticizes the Democrats as a party of the status quo. Although we should also remember that Sanders and AOC were among the last defenders of Biden before Democratic leaders and donors shoved him out of the race. Harris’s “opportunity economy” agenda emphasized entrepreneurship with a few vague nods to cutting health care, housing and grocery costs. Even her ostensibly “big” proposal to add coverage for home care of the elderly and disabled to Medicare was barely more than a talking point — and even then, just a drop in the ocean of what it would take to fix the profit-based healthcare system in the U.S. that makes it unaffordable to many millions of people.
Could Harris have beaten Trump had she run on Sanders’ agenda? It’s doubtful. It’s hard to run as an “insurgent” when you’re the sitting vice president in an unpopular administration. But she didn’t even try.
Harris and AOC held set-piece events with union leaders like UAW President Shawn Fain. Union leaders cited Biden’s walking the UAW picket line, his National Labor Relations Board nominees, and creation of “good, union jobs” as part of infrastructure investment as proof that Biden (and presumably Harris, as his successor) was the most “pro-union” president in a generation. But union households provide only a slim advantage to the Democrats, with only 53 percent of household members voting Democrat, compared to 58 percent in 2012. And when the union density in the workforce is only around 10 percent — and just 6 percent in the private sector — even these pro-union issues won’t resonate in the broader working class.
In a period when the public gives unions their highest support ever, perhaps union leaders should spend more time and money helping workers to organize than to blow millions on Democratic election campaigns.
Who won turnout?
It will be weeks before we get an accurate picture of all the votes cast in the 2024 election. What isn’t at issue is that for the first time ever, Trump won the majority of votes. He is the first Republican to win the presidential popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
As of November 7, Trump had racked up about 72.7 million votes and Harris had 68.1 million. Elections expert Michael McDonald estimates that the overall turnout will be around 64.5 percent of the voting age population, compared to just under 66 percent in 2020. This represents a slight drop from the 2020 turnout, which was the highest since 1900. So, 2024’s turnout looks to be among the highest turnout in more than a century.
Exit polls suggest that Trump won 56 percent of the 8 percent of voters who were voting for the first time. About 6 percent of Biden voters in 2020 switched to Trump in 2024, compared to about 4 percent switching from Trump to Harris. For all the effort that Harris made to lure Republicans into the Democrats’ tent, it made no significant difference.
Compared to 2020, when Biden got 81 million votes, and Trump took about 74 million, both Democrats and Republicans appear that they will gain fewer votes, although Trump may catch up to his 2020 haul. But the Democratic Party’s decline will be more than 10 million.
So where did the Democrats’ 2020 votes go? A small number went to Trump, but it looks like most of them stayed home. In Detroit and Philadelphia, two of the main Democratic Party strongholds in the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrat turnout fell short. After all the hoopla about Harris’s door-knocking turnout machine, Harris won fewer votes from Detroit than the execrable Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
A telling account of why this happened in Detroit came from a Harris canvasser: “I was shocked by how many people said they already voted, basically allowing us to turn attention to people who hadn’t. There are some voters who are cynical and dissatisfied with everything, (who say) nothing ever changes. You could write 20 different stories about what Michigan voters care about, and it would be true.”
Harris, the “Republican-lite” candidate
The corporate media predictably drew the all the wrong lessons from the 2024 voting results. The New York Times, for example, blamed progressives, arguing,
The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election… It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults.
But as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) accurately observed, “Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.”
Harris chose to court Republicans, not progressives, in the leadup to the election. The traditional electoral courting rituals were thus turned upside down, as Democrat Harris groveled to Republican voters and Republican Trump (somewhat more successfully) sought out Latino voters in particular. Harris’s support for reproductive rights and breaking through the gender glass ceiling took a backseat to finding common ground with Republicans on social issues.
Rather than focusing on what distinguished herself from Trump, Harris ran a “Republican-lite” campaign, emphasizing what she had in common with Republicans: her opposition to immigration and support for cracking down on the Southern border; reasserting her unwavering support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine; bragging about owning a Glock pistol to appeal to gun advocates.
Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney joined Harris on the campaign trail. Her father, the war criminal and neoconservative Dick Cheney, endorsed Harris with great fanfare.
But amid all this electoral jockeying, it wasn’t clear what Harris actually stood for. As a district attorney and then attorney general in California earlier in her career, she was neither consistently right nor left, but transformed into a proud liberal when running for president in the 2019 primaries. This year, running for president after Biden dropped out, she seemingly wanted to appear more conservative. So, she flip-flopped on her 2019 liberal opposition to fracking for oil and support for “Medicare for All” — but without admitting she’d actually changed her mind on these major issues. Not too surprisingly, many voters rejected this disingenuous candidate representing the incumbent Biden administration and went instead for the impudent billionaire, who has proven he is willing to at least shake things up, for better and for worse.
These are the unfortunate choices voters yearning for change were forced to make from within the two-party duopoly that traps the U.S. electorate in a chokehold.
An angry electorate, without a viable left alternative, turns right
The U.S. left has been far too weak to have an impact on elections in recent decades — a trend that has only worsened in the last few years. The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was inspired by the independent socialist Bernie Sanders’s electoral successes in 2016 and 2020. But in both cases, Sanders acquiesced to the Democratic Party’s political powerbrokers and ultimately endorsed their chosen candidates, first Hillary Clinton and then Biden. And, as noted above, Sanders campaigned enthusiastically for Biden and then Harris.
Not surprisingly, the growth of the DSA — although a still very small organization with only a marginal influence on U.S. politics — coincided with the decimation of most of the revolutionary left, which had already been in decline for decades prior. The short-sighted goal of gaining broader political influence for the left via the Democratic Party no doubt played a role in furthering this development, but did not prevent the left’s overall deterioration. Sanders and AOC’s support for Biden and Harris illustrate this vividly.
If anything, the DSA accelerated the left’s decline in influence by its outsized focus on elections rather than prioritizing building grassroots movements that can influence politics outside of the electoral arena. There is a valid reason why the Democratic Party has been traditionally regarded by the revolutionary left in the U.S. as “the graveyard of social movements.”
This point can easily be proven in the negative, using abortion rights organizations’ reliance on Democratic Party politicians as a prime example. The abortion rights and women’s liberation movements won via grassroots organizations the right to abortion when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 — when anti-abortion Richard Nixon occupied the White House. But in the decades since, pro-choice organizations have depended on the Democrats to defend the right to abortion, and major pro-choice demonstrations have not been organized for two decades. Yet the Democrats, as the Party of Compromise, allowed the right to abortion to be eroded and then finally overturned in 2022. None of these politicians has sought to rebuild a vital pro-choice movement to change the status quo since then, even though it has caused a reproductive rights crisis that is killing women.
The only solution the New York Times — and the liberal establishment — has on offer is to wait until the next election cycles to vote: “Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course.”
But this is far from a solution. Elections themselves do not usually determine the balance of political and social forces at any given time. They normally reflect the balance of forces — although they can sometimes strengthen or weaken them — and can therefore be influenced by movements outside the electoral arena.
Today in the U.S., the balance of forces is weighted decisively in favor of the right because the left is so weak. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” as the saying goes. When the Democrats echo the Republicans in veering rightward, and the left follows the Democrats in pursuit of winning elections, voters hear no left-wing alternative viewpoint. As such, the right carries the day.
This is the situation we face today. It is easy to scapegoat immigrants for society’s problems when there is no left-wing explanation for falling wages and high inflation: the divide and conquer policies of the capitalist class.
The only possibility for shifting the balance of forces is through struggle — and organization — at the grassroots level. We caught a glimpse of what such struggle might mean last year, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck the Big Three Automakers and won. We also saw a glimpse this past spring, when pro-Palestinian protesters formed encampments at college campuses across the U.S.
But a much more significant rise in grassroots and class struggle is a necessary precondition for shifting the balance of class forces. Until then, the wealthiest people will continue celebrating their good fortune. The status quo will prevail, no matter who we did or didn’t vote for. And Trump will be taking office in January, with consequences that no one can now predict.
