For the Democrats, once again, it was a case of repeating their mistakes and expecting different results.
This time they managed to arrange things such that a Republican candidate won the popular vote for only the second time in forty years.
The blame game is in full swing right now. While many of the problems are short-term, this story has a long-term aspect that brings more immediate issues into focus.
In the coming days, we’ll be treated to a lot of statistical analyses of the election results, and a lot of useful information will be contained therein. However, the more important numbers are as follows:
In 2020, Joseph Biden received about 81 million votes, while Trump got 74 million.
In 2024, Trump got just under 72 million, and Kamala Harris got just under 67 million.
In rough terms, Trump’s vote count declined by around 3%, while the Democratic candidate’s votes declined by almost 19%.
The decline in voting for both parties matters, irrespective of how the Republicans came out ahead.
Given that the 2024 poll was less urgent than the post-COVID election in 2020, the question of why so many Americans voted for Trump remains. Donald Trump espouses nonsensical policies, disrespects the military, and is either mentally ill or in the early stages of dementia.
Understanding the Trump electorate requires examining the political history of the United States, specifically 1948. That year, Harry Truman, the unloved sitting president, defeated Republican Thomas Dewey in one of the greatest shock results in American electoral politics.
Truman, an ex-machine politician from Missouri, was drafted onto the ticket of Franklin Roosevelt’s final reelection bid in 1944 and assumed the presidency upon FDR’s death in April 1945. Dewey’s victory in the 1948 election was such a foregone conclusion public opinion firms stopped polling months before.
Two facts about the 1948 election are significant for this story.
One is that Dewey was anathema to a significant part of the Republican electorate. He represented the northeastern, financially linked wing of the Republican Party.
The GOP candidate was an internationalist with a patrician demeanour. He refused to engage in red-baiting, telling his campaign manager he was not “going around looking under beds”.
All of this did not endear him to the party’s right wing. They were isolationist to the point of xenophobia and fanatically anti-communist.
For Republicans, Dewey’s primary asset was that he wasn’t Truman, and there was a widespread feeling that he had been foisted on them by powerful northeastern elites.
A second key fact about 1948 was that it was the fifth straight presidential election lost by the GOP.
No Republican had come so close to the presidency since Herbert Hoover’s administration had come to grief for doing nothing in the catastrophic first years of the Great Depression.
A complex political history leads from there to Donald Trump.
The Republican Party’s problem was how to get people in the bottom 50% or so of the income distribution to vote against their immediate economic interests. The New Deal was very popular.
While one can argue about the effectiveness of this or that measure, the Second World War contributed immensely to the economic recovery, and lower-income Americans ended up much better off.
More importantly, the Roosevelt Administration distinguished itself from Hoover by giving the public the impression that the government cared about their problems and struggles.
The Republican counterstrategy has undergone many variations between 1949 and now, but it amounts to engaging in a politics of deflection.
In the 1950s, the object of this deflection was communism. This was the era of McCarthyism and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, a period of divisive witch hunts that was moderated but not ended by McCarthy’s censure by the Senate in December 1954.
In the 1960s, the Republicans picked up on race as a powerful addition to their political arsenal. The passage of civil rights acts accelerated a shift away from the Democrats on the part of southern voters.
George Wallace’s insurgent presidential campaign in 1968, under the slogan, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” illustrated the power of racist narratives for the white electorate, much of which viewed racial politics as a zero-sum game (if non-whites get something, we lose it).
From these components, we get the politics of today’s Republican Party. Hysterical anti-communism (maintained in the face of a dearth of actual communists) and race-baiting (brown men are coming for our white women) equals a reservoir of extremist sentiment that has colonised the party.
Along the way, this has extirpated the party’s other wing. There are no moderate Republicans anymore. This extremism has also appropriated the symbolic content of American conservatism.
A great example is how Donald Trump has assumed the mantel of Ronald Reagan’s party even though his politics bear no resemblance to those of the great communicator, as Reagan was called in his heyday.
Against this background, more immediate factors came into play to doom Harris and the Democrats.
The last two years of Biden’s presidency saw elevated inflation, which was in part due to wage pressure. According to one recent estimate, the US has about 8.5 million unfilled positions, and the labour shortage is exerting upward pressure on wages.
At the same time, there was also a significant amount of price inflation driven by corporations deciding to elevate profits in markets for consumer goods that are highly oligopolistic and thus uncompetitive.
This cost the Democrats much support, although the irony is that neither Trump nor his associates ever provided any concrete explanation of how they would combat it.
Moreover, Trump’s oft-threatened plan to deport millions of “illegals”, in addition to being fabulously expensive and a gross violation of human rights, would be intensely inflationary.
Whatever else one might say about the situation of undocumented people in the United States, they do a lot of highly strenuous work for low wages. Absent their participation in the process, there is likely to be considerable upward pressure on consumer prices.
Ultimately, the Democrats also suffered because Kamala Harris’s candidacy, in many essential respects, amounted to serving up leftovers from a meal that was not very popular the first time around.
The United States is stuck in a cycle of slow growth.
While Trump’s claims about how he would regenerate industrial employment and wages don’t pass the chuckle test, the Democrats’ unwillingness to challenge the interests of their ultra-wealthy donor base means that they don’t have much to suggest in terms of alternative solutions.
The Harris campaign centred on two ideas: 1) Let’s elect a black woman, at the very least as a gesture to the 51% of the population that is female, 2) Donald Trump is a nutjob.
Much as both things have value, they cut little ice with white men who no longer have access to well-paid jobs, or old white Americans who fear brown faces and the prospect that their granddaughters will have to play basketball against (or share bathrooms with) trans people, who are simply just men in their eyes.
Trump looks and sounds like the kind of person that white America trusts. Whether that can be generalised to other, non-Trump Republican candidates is dubious.
There is good reason to believe that Trump’s health is not good. But he can still do a great deal of damage if he can get the tinfoil hats in the GOP’s congressional delegation to resonate at a common frequency.
There are people out there who will not do anything to support the current order, and they are not totally wrong.
Something like half a million people voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein (who had a lot of problems over and above having no chance of winning). But even if they had voted for Kamala Harris en masse, it would not have affected the outcome.
Likewise with that segment of Muslim Americans who were so alienated by the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza that they chose to vote for the highly Islamophobic Trump, who was delighted to turn their pain to his advantage. And flaunt it.
Annoying as these things are to people trying to keep a problematic political order from transforming into Mad Max in the near future, they are not real the issue.
The Democrats continue to fail to present a serious alternative program. They are so afraid of being called communists (which happens in any case) or of alienating Jeff Bezos (who also seems to have effected a rapprochement with Trump) that their only policy is Republican, but less crazy.
Until the Democratic Party offers an alternative politics, one that actively engages with the problems of Americans rather than recycles Republican policies in hipper clothing, their fortunes will languish.
The world is a dangerous place, and getting more so by the second. The hour is coming after which it will be too late for the Democrats to become anything more than a footnote at the end of history.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
