George Binette explores why the Democrats lost and what a second Trump term threatens.

After billions of dollars spent on advertising blitzes and scores of flights criss-crossing swing states, the post-mortems and recriminations have begun with endless reams of newsprint, millions of social media posts and thousands of hours of commentary from podcasting pundits offering explanations for Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House.

For the first time since 1892 a former US president has secured victory after losing the office. At one level, of course, this is a remarkable turn of events – a 78-year-old man with a recent criminal record, who fomented a lethal riot at the US Capitol building and shamelessly spews racist and misogynist rhetoric at his rallies – has won not just by a substantial margin (312 to 226) in the Electoral College, but with an absolute majority of the popular vote. Trump is only the second Republican presidential candidate to win more than 50% at a General Election since 1988.

In the immediate run-up to 5th November, most opinion polls had pointed to a dead heat. There were even outliers suggesting that Kamala Harris was leading Trump in historically Republican Iowa, a state he went on to win by 14 percentage points. Once more the proliferation of polls has generated more heat than light. What few pollsters predicted was a slump in voter turnout from nearly two-thirds of the registered electorate in 2020, a slump that severely impacted the chances of the Harris-Walz ticket and several Democrats in ‘down ballot’ races.

Harris haemorrhages votes

In short, Trump’s triumph was much more a case of a collapse in support for Harris, when compared to Joe Biden four years before. The Republican tally actually fell in Ohio, but in a bad election cycle for incumbents internationally the absolute vote for Harris plunged far more. Trump’s most significant improvements came in the seven swing states, where the evidence points to notable gains compared to the last election. In contrast to the nation as a whole, most of those states seem to have witnessed an actual uptick in turnout to Trump’s benefit.

Tallies, especially in Pacific coast and southwestern states, are not yet complete, but it appears that Trump’s absolute vote will be around 75 million – barely higher than in 2020 – while Harris’ total fell by more than 10 million from the 81 million votes notched up by Biden’s previous campaign. Even my native state of Massachusetts, one of only three states where Harris topped 60% of the poll and so ‘blue’ that Republicans didn’t contest seven of its nine Congressional seats, saw a swing of just over four percentage points to Trump compared to 2020. Some 255,000 fewer voters cast ballots. All told, Harris’ share of the popular vote bettered Biden’s by slender margins in just three jurisdictions with electoral college votes: Washington, DC, Washington state and solidly Republican Utah.

Meanwhile, a second Trump administration looks likely to wield a stronger grip on political power than the first with Republicans having already secured a majority of at least six in the 100-seat Senate, with incumbent Democrats defeated in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania (not yet officially declared). While final results for 20 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives have yet to emerge, Republicans are all but certain to retain control of the lower Congressional chamber. Trump’s first term empowered a hard right majority on the Supreme Court for a generation: a further four years will afford the opportunity to appoint many more social reactionaries to federal judgeships – in short a Trump trifecta.

Democrats: autopsy of defeat

Inevitably, for leading Democrats and their media outriders, the inquest – or rather the blame game – has begun, given the scale of Harris’ and her party’s defeat. The Democrats’ grande dame, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, spoke to the New York Times pinning blame on a lame duck Joe Biden, not least for his refusal to withdraw far sooner. The Biden camp’s insistence on pursuit of a second term for an octogenarian who had displayed physical frailty and signs of cognitive decline long before the humiliating ‘debate’ with Trump in June undoubtedly damaged the prospects for any potential Democratic successor.

After the initial burst of energy and enthusiasm around Harris’ candidacy in late July and August, it had become increasingly obvious that her campaign could not disassociate itself from the unpopular administration in which she had served. It had few, if any, policies that resonated, much less amounted to a coherent vision for inspiring sceptical voters.

In the campaign’s final weeks, the Democratic standard-bearer appeared as if she were trying to lead a curious ‘popular front’ against the supposedly fascist Trump. Those orchestrating the campaign seemed set on evoking memories of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 approach and, of course, the repetition contributed to an even more disastrous outcome. Harris travelled to the likes of Michigan with former Republican representative for Wyoming, Liz Cheney, and boasted of an endorsement from Cheney’s father, the former vice-president who was one of the principal architects of the Iraq war.

The Democratic machine also dispatched New York Representative Ritchie Torres, a darling of the vehemently pro-Israel AIPAC, to Michigan in what seemed a calculated snub to the nation’s largest Arab-American population, which had already shown its dismay with Joe Biden’s unstinting support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza in the state’s Democratic primary.

The campaign touted the endorsement of billionaire media mogul Mark Cuban, a self-professed fan of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, an ardent opponent of the welfare state and defender of laissez-faire capitalism. The Democrats even squandered resources on countering a largely imaginary threat from the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who some conveniently blamed for Clinton’s 2016 loss. In the end Stein’s vote was derisory on a national scale and while voters for her may have cost Harris a county or two in Michigan Stein was not really a factor in Harris’ loss of the state to Trump by 80,000 votes.

Harris did pose as a consistent champion of abortion/reproductive rights, yet she failed to persuade sufficient numbers to her camp around the issue. Instead, electorates in several states won by Trump supported ballot initiatives that at least partially enshrined women’s right to choose. Trump’s decision last spring to back away from a federally mandated abortion ban didn’t dent his support among evangelical Christians and may well have kept some voters in the Republican camp. Even in now solidly Republican Florida, 57% of voters backed a pro-choice referendum, albeit falling just short of the constitutionally mandated 60% required for passage.

Racism and misogyny unquestionably contributed to Trump’s victory, though it is impossible to quantify their significance. A Trump presidency will encourage a range of ultra-nationalists and fascists both domestically and internationally. But explanations for Harris’ defeat that rely on the uniquely reactionary attitudes of blue-collar workers or the machismo of Latino men somehow seduced by Trump’s vulgar bloviating ignore the billionaire’s capacity to tap into deep-rooted economic grievances. This year’s result should also put to rest the cynical and lazy assumption that ‘people of colour’ constitute an homogenous voting bloc even as Democratic fears about African-American men deserting the party in droves proved exaggerated.

Bernie Sanders, who easily won re-election to the Senate from Vermont, proffered a quite different explanation for Harris’ stinging defeat. In a lengthy press statement, Sanders accused the party of having “abandoned working-class voters.” Sanders’ own left credentials have suffered over the last year as he was slow to call for a Gaza ceasefire, refused to join the chorus calling for Biden’s withdrawal from the race and loyally campaigned for the Harris-Walz ticket, even though marginalised after the party’s Chicago convention.

Nonetheless, Sanders remains a significant national figure whose pronouncements generate mass media attention and many retweets. And his comments clearly struck a raw nerve with leading lights in the party’s leadership. Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison dismissed Sanders’ criticism as “straight up BS,” claiming that Biden had been “the most pro-worker president of [his] lifetime.” Harrison cited some genuine justification for his latter statement, but then again Harrison is just 48 and the bar was set exceptionally low.

The Democrats’ abandonment of wide swaths of the US working class long predates the Biden administration or even Bill Clinton’s first term of office. That said, Biden’s ineffectual response to the sharpest spike in inflation in nearly two generations contributed substantially to his unpopularity. Headline inflation peaked at a little over 9% in mid-2022, but food prices rose far more sharply by 35% during Biden’s term. Attempts to assert that the economy was, in fact, booming and ‘you’ve rarely had it so good’ cut no ice with much of the electorate, though the majority of ‘union households’ did vote for the Democratic ticket, according to the Washington Post.

Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, appeared to assume a role as the campaign’s chief economic adviser. West, a former Obama administration official, took leave from his day job as the top lawyer for Uber and his name repeatedly crops up in media reports as central to pulling Harris rightwards on issues like the rate of capital gains tax where she positioned herself to the right of Biden. She swiftly beat a retreat from an admittedly vague proposal to curb corporate price gouging, which fuelled the inflationary surge in both Britain and the US. The remaining slivers of progressive economic policies never featured prominently. A post-election New York Times article featured the headline: “Harris Had A Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch.” This sentence doesn’t explain Trump’s success, but it encapsulates much of what lay behind Harris’ failure.

The immigration men

The Trump-Vance campaign and Republicans more generally succeeded in weaponising immigration whether at the southern border with Mexico or in states far beyond it. Most of the electorate may not have believed Trump’s September rant about (perfectly legal) Haitian migrants eating domestic pets in Springfield, Ohio, but the campaign struck a chord with all too many in attributing blame to immigration for a litany of domestic woes from crime to waiting times for medical care.

I watched much of the televised debate between the now Vice-President elect JD Vance and Harris’ running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz on 1st October. Vance, a first-term Senator from Ohio and author of the best-selling and highly polemical memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, proved a quite polished media performer, far more articulate and coherent than Trump, and much cagier in promoting straightforward fabrications. But like Trump he kept returning to the question of the border and the damaging impact of immigration on the nation’s social fabric. The genial, if slightly oafish, Walz was caught flat-footed and struggled to rebut Vance’s argument before generously suggesting that Vance – in contrast to Trump – might like to work on a “bipartisan solution.”

Of course, the polite exchange between Vance and Walz, always of marginal relevance to this year’s race, is now of purely academic interest. Trump’s ‘beautiful wall’ (paid for by Mexico) never became a reality in his first term, but there is every reason to take Trump at his word when he pledges to pursue ‘mass deportations’ from day one, partly because he would be building on existing practice. The United States ‘repatriated’ some 1.1 million people (most ‘voluntarily’) in 2023, though that was a slight drop from the previous year’s figure. To forcibly remove literally millions, as Trump has repeatedly suggested, would require a systematic redirection of resources, which looks altogether possible given the significance of immigration for much of the Republican base.

A future article will consider in detail the implications of a second Trump presidency and the prospects for resistance in the US itself. In the meantime, Trump’s victory is also one for the most reactionary elements in the US capitalist class from the bosses of extractive industries and enormous hedge funds through to the ‘world’s richest man,’ Elon Musk. Whether the new Republican administration will seek to implement the Heritage Foundation’s notorious ‘Project 2025’ in full remains to be seen, but Trump’s second term has a much clearer ideological blueprint than the first.

A glimmer of hope arises from the modest resurgence of union activism across multiple sectors. There were partial breakthroughs at the likes of Starbucks and Amazon, workers at Boeing struck for seven weeks to win a 38% rise over four years and hotel workers in several cities have mounted successful action in recent months. The United Auto Workers finally succeeded in winning recognition at a large Volkswagen plant in the historically anti-union South. A second Trump term will undoubtedly create a more hostile environment for workplace recruitment and organisation, creating a crucial flashpoint for effective resistance.

George Binette is a Massachusetts native, who has previously been a UNISON branch secretary and the Trade Union Liaison Officer for Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour Party.

Image: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/world/2024/02/10/trump-vows-to-undo-bidens-gun-restrictions-if-re-elected/ Creator: Matt Rourke | Credit: AP Copyright: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0

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