I’ll confess something up front. I hate election postmortems. I’m not sure anybody likes them, especially after an election that may be catastrophic for one’s particular demographic. But given that, as usual, the Democratic leadership is already drawing all the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s defeat by convicted felon Donald Trump, I suppose there’s value in making an argument for what the right lessons should be.
In any case, let’s run through some of the false narratives already being floated, the most prominent of which are that Democrats “cater too much to the far left” (or, as many more bluntly put it, they’re too “pro-transgender”) and that the working class (or the electorate as a whole) has “moved to the right.” Yes, a number of 2020 Biden supporters do appear to have voted for Trump in 2024—that is not in question. The problem with a phrase like ‘a movement to the Right’ is that it will most likely be understood as a meaningful shift in the electorate’s values—a shift we can expect to see moving forward—rather than as a snapshot of a single election cycle. If the Democratic Party in particular reads it this way (and there’s every indication that they do) they will likely take it as a signal to move even further to the Right, when their rightward movement may well have been a key problem in the first place.
In any case, while the facts do not bear these early narratives out, what we do know is that genuine economic struggle and a broken information ecosystem certainly shaped the election. This is all, of course, in addition to the misogyny and racism that undoubtedly drove some 2020 Joe Biden voters in key swing states with large White working class populations like Pennsylvania away from Harris and into the Trump camp. But that’s clearly not the whole story.
My Flytrap colleague Katelyn Burns has already made a good case against blaming the heavy Democratic losses on transgender people, a demographic that includes both me and her. As Burns writes, “Republicans may have won on trans issues, but Democrats didn’t lose on trans issues—they just forfeited the game from the jump.” Burns stresses that Harris tried to avoid talking about trans people and our rights; there was also no Democratic pushback against Republicans’ anti-trans ads and campaign rhetoric.
For my part, I’m not sure that Republicans “won” on the issue in any sense except that some Democrats are now, as is sadly typical, already running with the false notion that supporting trans rights is a problem for the party. Burns also correctly points out that incumbent parties worldwide have been punished in recent elections due to both inflation and high housing costs, making a strong case that the benefits of the Biden economy that establishment Democrats have so condescendingly (and repeatedly) bragged about simply aren’t being felt by many struggling Americans.
I agree—and I argued the same thing back in June. It simply doesn’t matter that inflation is down and that modest wage increases have reached the working class when housing, education, childcare, and healthcare are unaffordable, and, as Burns put it, this economic squeeze likely led many to vote for “blunt-force change.”
As Don Leonard thoroughly demonstrates at The Conversation, official government economic data obscure the harsh realities millions of Americans face, with the costs of critical necessities disproportionately burdening the people least able to afford them. Unsurprisingly, 2024 voting patterns reflect the resulting discontent:
According to the exit poll data, Kamala Harris won among families who made less than $30,000 in 2023 and those who made more than $100,000. By comparison, Trump won among families who earned between $30,000 and $99,999—too much to qualify for government assistance, but—in many cases—not enough to get by.
One could still maintain, of course, that the economically struggling Trump voters voted against their own interests—insufficient improvement is better than making things worse, after all, and Trump will inevitably make things harder for most Americans—and so that needs to be explained.
Further, voter turnout for last week’s election was high, so Trump’s win can’t simply be attributed to Democratic-leaning demographics staying home. Democrats must admit that a significant proportion of voters, including many working-class voters, switched from voting Democratic in 2020 to voting Republican this year. This has been widely acknowledged, of course, but reducing this fact to a rightward shift in the working class runs the risk of yet again drawing the wrong lessons from an election.
A large slice of American voters are notoriously low-information for a variety of reasons: economic pressures, including the need to work multiple jobs, leave many Americans with little time to read or think about electoral politics; decades of right-wing radio and Fox News cleared the way for an even broader (and more radical) right-wing ecosystem that sows majoritarian grievances and conspiracy theories; legacy media outlets continue to legitimize right-wing narratives with their relentless bothsidesism; and social media, which has proven eminently susceptible to misinformation and the spread of conspiracy theories, is now thoroughly dominated by right-wingers since Elon Musk bought and destroyed Twitter.
Writing for Slate, Amanda Marcotte argues that the climate of misinformation in which numerous Americans live played a particularly important role in the 2024 election. In building that case she points out that many Trump-voting Americans, in addition to opposing union busting, support abortion rights, paid family leave, and minimum wage increases. Yes, while some are so fed up they’ll vote for any candidate who appears (however absurdly) to be “an outsider,” many of these voters, it stands to reason, must genuinely not fully grasp that they just voted against the policies they support.
So what are the right lessons to draw from this hot mess? For one, Republicans did not win a mandate to persecute transgender Americans, deport millions of immigrants, bring back prayer in public schools, or implement policies that further impoverish struggling Americans while enriching millionaires and billionaires. Sadly and predictably, the legacy media are already proving willing to push the idea of a Republican mandate, despite the data showing that the GOP agenda doesn’t reflect most voters’ actual values and desires.
Secondly, the Democratic leadership really is out of touch with the realities faced by ordinary Americans. Yes, there is a longstanding false belief, annoyingly difficult to dispel, that Republicans are better for the economy, and that must factor into what happened last Tuesday. Racism and misogyny surely also had a significant impact. But the argument we’re seeing from numerous Democratic strategists and fundraisers that Harris ran a perfect, or even a great, campaign is flat-out wrong.
And, since learning the wrong lesson often leads to future losses, it’s absolutely crucial for the Democratic Party to get it right at a time when the stakes are perhaps the highest they’ve ever been. But given their predilection for neoliberalism and fixation on the vanishingly small number of ambivalent Republican voters, a widespread media narrative about an electorate moving to the Right all but assures that Democrats will move even further Right in pursuit of those votes.
Harris and her surrogates alienated the base and other likely Democratic voters, not only by getting extra cozy with the likes of Liz Cheney and other Republicans who were never realistically going to win over any significant chunk of Trump voters, but also with the ways they addressed Gaza, trans rights, and the economy. And it seems to be domestic, and particularly bread and butter, issues—much more than foreign policy—that shaped American voting, given the data cited earlier. More or less telling Americans to be grateful for economic improvements that barely affect those who are still struggling is counterproductive to say the least.
At the end of the day, it’s possible there was nothing the Democrats could have done to stave off the perfect storm that’s brought an insurrection inciter whose own former chief of staff calls him “a fascist, for sure” back to power—and this time with a Republican Senate (and probably House) that will be, in all likelihood, ready to do his bidding. But if Democrats hope to win in the future—and I am not giving up on our institutions holding out enough so that future American elections will still matter—they will have to stop scapegoating the Left and the marginalized and wrap their heads around the fact that neoliberalism and talking down to struggling Americans about the state of the economy make for a losing strategy.
