There will be no shortage of debate about Tuesday’s election in the coming weeks and months, but one point of consensus has consolidated quickly: Trump’s victory confirms the realignment that has been evident for years in voting patterns and statements by Democratic officials. While it was possible to see 2016 as an aberration, it is now clear that the Democratic party is no longer the default party of the working-class. It is now a party of the college-educated Americans and shrinking majorities of Blacks and Latinos.
Trump won electoral and popular victories with large margins of working-class voters across the country, with notable increases among women with no college education, minorities and rural voters. Trump built “a more diverse coalition of voters than any Republican nominee in 20 years,” Politico noted, “despite running a racially charged, testosterone-soaked campaign that demonized immigrants.”
Acknowledging realignment does not settle anything, but merely opens the door to a number of questions demanding answers. “There is much we still don’t know about what happened, and about what the next few months and years hold,” writes Mark Krotov in n+1.
Is this a new, definitive realignment, or is Trump unique? How will the Democrats respond to the decisive failure of its much-vaunted suburban coalition, and how will we respond when they inevitably respond in the worst way possible? How will we take care of one another? What are we up against?
For the left, these questions should ring with a sense of déjà vu. Eight years ago, the party also ran a flawed candidate with centrist politics and instincts. Hillary Clinton avoided Wisconsin entirely in the homestretch of 2016; the Harris campaign sought to correct this error by campaigning in the state with Liz Cheney. As Ryan Grim observed on Drop Site, Harris spent more time in the Midwest campaigning with Cheney and Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, “the Sanders-esque leader of the United Auto Workers, fresh off his union’s historic victory in a strike against the Big Three automakers, who represent the pride of the industrial Midwest.”
Once again, the strategy of targeting moderates was a miserable failure across the swing states. In suburban Pennsylvania — home of the mythical moderates that Chuck Schumer famously said would replace formerly Democratic rust-belt voters — Harris lost counties that Biden had won decisively in 2020.
Following the 2016 loss, there was a pregnant moment when party leadership seemed open to questioning the political logic of crushing the Sanders insurgency to protect Clinton’s candidacy. But it soon became clear that the center-right would hold — an early sign being Tom Perez’s election as chair of the DNC over Keith Ellison — and the robust conversation many had hoped for was shut down. This led author and organizer Jonathan Smucker to warn in January of 2019:
If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that’s stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It’s on us to outmaneuver them and win.
Five years later, it is again up to progressive forces to determine what kind of party rises from the ashes of what Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) described to The Wall Street Journal as “a historic disaster of Biblical proportions. The Democratic Party, as it is, is dead.”
As in 2016, wresting control of the party’s future must begin with establishing the narrative of its failure. For Jacobin, Matt Karp writes that Trump’s victory was a shock, but “can hardly be seen as a surprise.”
Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans…
Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She herself ran a cautious but mostly competent race, moving to the right on the border, as voters seemed to demand, pummeling Trump on abortion, and — at least in her paid messages — wooing working-class voters with a bread-and-butter focus. But in the end, these narrow tactical decisions were overwhelmed by the altered nature of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” — a constellation of NGOs, media organizations and foundation-funded activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing attempts to win over Black men with promises of legal marijuana and protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions in the race helped raise historic sums of money — over $1 billion in just a few months — but also marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,” abortion rights and personal identity but largely uninterested in material questions.
Voters making over $100,000 a year swung toward the Democrats in record numbers [but] the Liz Cheney Democrats were dwarfed by a vast working-class swing toward Trump… Even as progressive pundits hailed the post-Dobbs gender gap, boasting that Republicans had ruined themselves with female voters for a generation, non-college-educated women swung toward Trump by 6 points.
Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans but two-thirds of yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric, is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters? Almost 80% of the voters who listed the economy as their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. How much can a few months of targeted advertising do, compared to a broader Democratic shadow party that has been trumpeting the health of the economy — low unemployment, wage growth and a booming stock market — for over a year now? If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them.
In his Substack newsletter, Unpopular Front, John Ganz highlighted how Democrats further weakened their muddled principles by failing to express them as part of a coherent vision of the future. “Having a clear vision of things, even if it is unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one,” he writes.
Trump’s campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that’s run against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This is not particular to this or that candidate [but] of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of itself and ameliorative, it’s not a bold vision of the future as it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary, but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking… It longs for an old age of consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were willing to venture boldly and that’s part of what appealed to people. He said, “Follow me and make history,” a dubious claim made by others before him, but it excites people.
According to Bernie Sanders, the candidate at the center of the aborted 2016 intra-party debate, constructing such a bold vision will require a break from center-right tinkering with neoliberal policies. Echoing the views of those who supported him eight years ago, he wrote, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
In his economics Substack, the monopoly-focused Big, Matt Stoller reports on a number of similar post-election statements from a labor movement that remains crucial to the project of reinvigorating and reconceiving the Democratic Party as the party of working people. James A. Williams, Jr., leader of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, berated a party leadership that “has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working-class message that addressed issues that really matter to workers. The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump.”
In “Bernie Would Have Won,” at Drop Site News, Krystal Ball reviews all of the ways the party ignored this advice eight years ago, only to once again “run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era.” The path not taken in 2016, argues Ball, looms larger than ever:
Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And — never forget — he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried-out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.
And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left.
Writing on Substack, Freddie DeBoer, sought to get ahead of this scapegoating project, telling Democrats-in-denial,
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on The New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces. You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late. You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it.
At the center of this question is a foreign policy that left many cold, especially young voters. At the Intercept, Natasha Lennard writes that “Democratic strategies have failed and harmed the most vulnerable communities both in the U.S. and those who suffer under the yoke of U.S.-backed wars.”
It’s too early to tell whether the Democrats will learn from these losses, or simply — as they have before — groundlessly blame the left for failures that have little to do with left-wing voters. Those who have opposed Israel’s genocide are an easy punching bag but do not account for Trump’s victory. Establishment Democrats have themselves to blame, but the left has no time to wait for self-reflection on the part of this predictable party.
Lennard’s Intercept colleague Jonah Valdez, meanwhile, described the impact of Biden/Harris foreign policy on many Democratic voters, especially Arab Americans, in his election post-mortem. The piece included testimony from Reem Abuelhaj, a Pennsylvania organizer with No Ceasefire No Vote PA, a group pushing for an arms embargo pledge from Harris.
“I entered the voting booth and found myself unable to stop crying,” Abuelhaj told The Intercept on Tuesday evening. “All I could see was the face of a child in Jabaliya” — a city in northern Gaza — “holding the body of their younger sibling who was killed over the weekend. I voted down the ballot but left the top of the ticket blank.”
Some of her friends and family joined her, unable to get themselves to cast a ballot for Harris. Others who did vote for Harris cried or felt physically sick, she said. One friend said she had voted for Harris “but prayed for forgiveness afterward.”
“This was a day of grief and devastation,” Abuelhaj said.
A few progressive commentators focused on finding shards of light in the aftermath of the vote tally. Writing in his email listserv, the writer, activist and academic Peter Dreier noted that the project at hand does not begin from scratch, and the American population is not aligned with the economics of the GOP’s far-right agenda. “Trump did not win a landslide like FDR in 1936, or Johnson in 1964, or Nixon in 1972, or Reagan in 1980, or Obama in 2008,” notes Drieir.
He won by a small margin in the Electoral College and the popular vote. Even so, public opinion polls show that Americans are NOT divided on most key issues. For example, a vast majority think there’s too much wealth and income inequality, that rich people and big corporations should pay more in taxes, that the government should do more to protect the environment and consumers, that labor unions are a good thing, that undocumented immigrants deserve a path toward citizenship, that the government should help limit drug prices, that all Americans are entitled to health insurance, that the federal minimum wage should be at least $15 an hour, that same-sex marriage should be legal, that police should not engage in racial profiling, and so on. But public opinion doesn’t get translated into policy without politics, and elections are about politics — mobilizing people to vote around issues they care about.
In Missouri, about 58.5% of voters voted for Trump. At the same time, 58% of voters voted for Proposition A, which will hike the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave. Trump is against raising the federal minimum wage and against paid sick leave, while Harris is for both of them. But obviously many Missourians voted for Trump AND Proposition A. Similarly, quite a few Americans voted for Trump AND voted for state ballot measures in favor of abortion.
The current Democratic party has been demonstrated to be incapable of understanding and acting on these contradictions. Doing so will be the job of a new-look Democratic party, an inarguable moral mandate for which was delivered Tuesday night.
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