It's been a week since the election, and at the national level things didn't shake out as I had thought, and certainly not as I’d hoped, to put it mildly. Trump the Republican Party successfully won the presidency, swept the swing States, retook the Senate, and while we still don't know the final results in the House, it will be a matter of a seats in either direction. Kamala Harris received over 10 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump received nearly the exact same number as he did when he last ran. In other words, last Tuesday was a collapse of the Democratic Party and a repudiation by the voters.
I gave my reasons last week for when I thought Harris would win and obviously my assumptions, like so many other pollsters and pundits, were wrong. I thought that abortion would carry the day and that Trump's sheer incompetence and hateful negativity wouldn't turn out enough of his voters. Neither of these turned out to be the case. Exit polls show the economy was overwhelmingly on voters minds, with abortion and immigration distant runners-up. As we sift through the aftermath, what can we learn about what led to such a cataclysmic loss by the Democratic Party, and the return of such a profoundly repugnant character as Trump in our politics.
First, we need to remember how dire things were before Biden stepped down and Harris entered the race. At the time it was clear that Democrats were headed for a route even worse than witnessed last week. Democrats had hoped Harris could change that dynamic, but exit polls seem to suggest that voters did not see a distinction between the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. While misogyny and racism no doubt played a role in her loss, her inability to separate herself from Biden undoubtedly hampered Harris's campaign. Critiques can certainly be leveled, but the broader point here is one we made at DSOT repeatedly throughout the election: the biggest mistake on the Democratic side was Biden seeking a second term, instead of allowing for a full and robust primary to take place.
Even more concerning, exit polls show that the Democrats lost the working class: People making $60,000-100,000 voted for Trump. It may seem insane when Republicans offer objectively worse policies to these voters, but starts to make sense when one considers that childhood poverty and hunger doubled under the Biden administration with the expiration of the child earned income tax credit, and real wages, adjusted for inflation, were higher for middle income families in 2019 than 2024, and on top of that, young people had to resume their student loan payments under Biden. We can, and should, point out that many of these hardships were primarily supported and caused by Republicans, but the lived experience for many in the last 4 years was that life got harder when Biden and the Democrats were in charge.
In other words, as Bernie Sanders says, “The Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.”
Speaking of Bernie, Democrats lost Latinos and young men in this election, core elements of the constituency put together by Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and these constituencies now seem to have left the party. Only time will tell how durable this realignment will be.
Zooming out a bit, what seems clear now is that this election was not an isolated event. It comes on the heels of nearly two decades of “change candidates” winning the presidency. Since 2008, the candidate who has convinced the American people that they represent a new direction for the country has won. It happened in 2008 with Obama and again in 2012 when Obama ran against Romney. It happened in 2016 with Trump, it happened with Joe Biden in 2020, and now again with Trump in 2024. The American people are profoundly tired of the direction this country is headed, and it seems they will continue to give power to whoever represents change until their needs are met. So, while it’s enormously disheartening that the hatred, bigotry, and insanity of Trump and the Republicans’ campaigns were not disqualifying to voters, we shouldn’t give in entirely to despair and think that half of our country is indeed driven by this same hatred and bigotry.
If we take a deeper look, we can see that in many states Progressive Democrats like AOC, Rashida Talib, or Ilan Omar won races against Republicans and ran far ahead of Kamala Harris. Simultaneously, Trump ran ahead of almost all Republicans down-ballot, as seen, for example, in the defeat of Keri Lake to Reuben Gallego. The situation gets even more hopeful when we take a look at ballot initiatives. As usual, when the people are given a direct voice in policy, they choose to support protecting abortion rights, raising the minimum wage, and supporting more workplace protections, regardless of partisan politics. This is the point DSOT makes every week, and it is further bolstered by polls showing in blind policy preferences, 80% of voters prefer Democratic/progressive policies.
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