Donald Trump souvenir figures for sale in New York City (February 2020) | pio3 / Shutterstock
The following remarks were first presented on November 13, 2024, in a public lecture at the New School for Social Research.
Donald Trump’s substantial victory was a big deal, but not yet a full-scale political shift. Trump made a successful move in the trench warfare that now defines American politics, which have seen three Democratic and four Republican victories since 2000.
Anyone who knows what will happen in 2028 probably doesn’t know much. We are in a long and intense conflict with an uncertain result. A student in one of my classes said that the election result felt like a gut punch. Maybe so, and we should all be in the gym as it likely won’t be the last blow.
Many anti-Trump voters and activists briefly imagined Kamala Harris as Glinda, the good witch who would sweep the country off its feet on our way to the land of Oz. Her victory would vanquish Trumpism: He would retreat to worry about his court cases and properties, and his movement would dissipate. Instead, we get Trump and a succession battle in both parties, stretching from now to 2028.
Although the last election was not 1932 or even 1980, elements of the strong pro-Republican current of those years have appeared in reports on the 2024 results. We see these signs among Latinos, in northern blue states, and in strongly Democratic cities like New York City. The window is open for a sequence of Republican wins, but it is not guaranteed.
In anti-Trump settings, the first question asked about accounts of the election might be, “Should we move to the left or the right to do better?”. We might rework this choice by means of reflection and creativity. Otherwise, we will probably be stuck with moving to the right to remain within shouting distance of an administration we mean to criticize.
Why did Trump win?
Trump gained strength from several themes, programs, and symbols: strong opposition to unauthorized mass immigration; a negative view of Joe Biden’s economic performance, especially regarding inflation; a critique of real and alleged cultural radicalism in and near the Democratic party; and the claim that Biden and the Democrats were weak and foolishly multilateral in international politics.
Several of these themes gain force by intersecting Democratic divisions. For example, think about immigration. It has very often ranked in the top three issues in terms of public concern in the last few years. Trump amplified his anti-immigration position. This is good politics; it responds to a public concern while working on a Democratic division. Many Democrats support something like the Obama policies; others reject almost any limit on immigration. That sharp division meant near paralysis in the first few years of the Biden presidency, when Harris did not want to go near the border.
Trump also did well in avoiding contexts that would manifest his growing problems with clarity and focus, notably after his debate with Harris. In his debate with Biden earlier in 2024, he was Christopher Hitchens or Gore Vidal. Against Harris, he was another 80-year-old-guy who couldn’t make his point. He avoided the mainstream media in favor of podcasts and Joe Rogan.
Rather than apologizing for his crimes, he refashioned himself as a charming rascal, a right-wing George Clooney. He was proud to be on or outside the line, with a sense of humor. He made no apologies for his shady record, but sought to be clever, agile, and unconventional–as well as enraged and threatening.
I have cited reasons for Trump’s strong performance. With an electoral result this close, nothing was “bound” to happen. In this context, how do we assess Harris’s campaign and the Democratic performance?
Why did Harris and the Democrats lose?
Harris and her campaign were better than expected, but not great. Remember that Harris failed badly in 2020 as a presidential candidate. Even when she became vice president in 2021, she did not command attention.
This record helps explain why Joe Biden remained so long—we have put too much weight on his self-image. Pelosi and others who have criticized him for sticking around are not being honest. It’s implausible to think they failed to recognize Biden’s decline.
Democratic leaders did not see Harris as a very appealing alternative in 2023 or early 2024. They feared that an open Democratic primary process would undermine her standing without producing a clearly superior alternative. There was no Obama in the wings, just an always-willing-to-lose Bernie Sanders and several Democratic hopefuls who might have been dynamite, and might have been Tim Kaine or Tim Walz. Harris would probably have won—it is hard to beat a sitting vice president—but was bruised and weakened for the general campaign.
When someone loses a relatively close election, there are many accounts of what happened and what should come next. With the vast mass of commentary on offer, we should be cautious of two things. First, beware of anyone who says that what happened confirms what they were saying all along. This stance is at best tedious. It is only a few steps away from a nearly conspiratorial claim that “I knew the truth, but powerful agents prevented Harris and other leaders from enacting my advice.”
Second, be cautious about a genre of commentary that I would call pseudo- or polemical self-criticism, the kind that says, “We must look carefully at why the Democrats lost. Via this introspection I have found that my adversaries were just as terrible as I always knew.”
Explanations for the outcome
Here are the main contenders in efforts to explain why Harris and the Democrats lost an election they might have won.
- They had a poor candidate. Although she was much better in this last campaign than her presidential run in 2020, Harris still appeared as vague and uncertain about aims and policies. She was smart, self-confident, suitably indifferent to Trump’s bluster. At the same time, she was weak on new or compelling ideas, evading questions that set her up to outline interesting ideas. She also seemed caught between her 2019-2020 leftist persona and her 2024 center-left stance. She might be done as a presidential candidate—but not if the field looks as weak in three years as it did in mid-2023.
- Democrats were dishonest. They were dishonest about Biden’s declining condition from 2022 into 2024, until his debate with Trump. They were dishonest about whether there was a “crisis at the border” in the first years of the administration. They were dishonest about whether inflation was a serious problem until it was politically too late. All these modes of dishonesty reflected political divisions.
- The Democrats abandoned the working class. Taken literally, this is a silly claim. Biden was the most strongly pro-union president we have had for decades, for example. What Sanders and others mean is that Biden did not aggressively pursue the social democratic policies they prefer. Yet listening is not the problem. There is little evidence that a large number of people want strongly social democratic policies. Accounts of Biden abandoning the working class rely on the idea that leftist Democrats have a popular and viable package of structural reforms that would elude the deep antigovernment sentiment of recent decades. Maybe such a package can be built, but it is not now on anyone’s desk.
The “working class” seems to want things that are hard to deliver and not always the preference of Democratic leaders. They want rising wages and income (more than they want greater equality). They want to limit or end inflation (rather than supporting government projects that might augment it). They tend to want less regulation, via the anti-government sentiment that is so widespread. What if Democrats “listen to the working class” and hear people who don’t share their positions?
- The Democrats were hostage to cultural and policy radicalism. There’s something here, even if critics go too far. The Democratic Party relies on alliances with a range of movements, as it should. Calls for cultural and social change come from decentralized movements, with no central authority or coherent leadership structure. Advocates of the most radical versions of proposed changes claim that their views capture the core of the movement. Consequently, Democrats are caught between accepting positions that are politically risky or appearing to sideline political forces they generally support and whose aid they need. As movements radicalize, no one in the movement or in the party has the authority to compel a self-limiting moment. Police reform becomes “defunding the police”. I will use a counterexample from some years ago when this dynamic had not yet taken over. Democrats, feminists, and gay and lesbian political forces waged a campaign for gay marriage. A nontrivial number of advocates were not comfortable with that reform on grounds that getting rid of discrimination should mean rejecting marriage altogether in order to unburden both gay and straight people of a broken institution. If the big slogan of the movement had been “smash marriage”, how would it have gone?
- The Democrats should have taken a much more critical stance toward Israel. Doing so might have mobilized parts of several ethno-religious groups as well as some younger people on the political left. Maybe there is a state for which this is a plausible interpretation—Michigan is the best candidate. I can’t see a broader case. The distribution of votes by Jews, over 70 percent for Harris, suggests that were lots of pro-Israel votes (among Jews and non-Jews) to be lost by such a move. Most likely, a more critical view of Israel by Harris-Walz would have produced a substantial net loss of votes.
There is merit to these accounts of Democratic failure, but not enough to tell us that Harris had to lose. The election “had to be” close. We proceed after 2024 in an extended conflict between two broad political camps, with no certain outcome.
The shifting social and political map
What else did we learn about American politics in this campaign? I will mention topics for which I do not have full analyses or clear political answers.
- Daniel Bell was right. More than 50 years after his famous book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, we learned again that the class-politics alignments of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century are no longer the driver of politics in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The surprise is that in the US we have a nearly complete inversion, in which more education and more liberal and left politics are strongly linked (until we get into Musk territory). Thus the only borough of New York City where Harris gets a landslide victory is Manhattan! We don’t have a good explanation of this deep process. The simplest explanation is that people around and below the median income want more income, don’t trust government, and react critically to cultural radicalism.
- We need a new political sociology. Many people say that the Democrats lost or didn’t pay attention to the working class. This claim intersects a new framing—people who didn’t graduate from college are the working class and those who did are the elite. This approach provides an awful map of our changing society. People who graduated from high school but went no further amount to less than 30 percent of the population. Many people went to college for a period, and many more earned associate degrees. Together, they constitute a group nearly as large as high school graduates.
Depicting college graduates as the elite rather than the working class is silly, as this elite includes over a third of the population. The college versus high school formulation also ignores a crucial income and education cleavage, between those who got a bachelor’s degree and the 15 percent of the population with a further academic or professional degree. What’s the map? How do social and political alignments work now?
- The Democratic electoral map of ethnicity and race is deeply flawed. For at least the last 20 years, Democratic and left-wing political strategies have relied on the idea of a solid and expanding center-left and left bloc of nonwhite voters. That’s gone. This partly imaginary force has splintered.
One component, Black people, remains strongly pro-Democratic but as much center-left as leftist. The fastest growing and now largest group, Latinos, just barely leans Democratic, roughly 55-45 percent, with ample signs of further shifts toward Republicans. Asians are closer to Latinos than Black voters in their orientation. We have burgeoning ethno-racial variety along with the relative political isolation of Black voters, who along with Jews and people with PhDs in the social sciences constitute the outlying groups who vote more than 70 percent Democratic.
Politics now
Political time doesn’t stop while we do the research and reflection required to cope with strong anti-government sentiment, produce major wage increases for much of the population, and figure out how to support efforts at cultural and social change without generating an endless series of Bill Maher jokes and Republican videos.
Taking on these projects as serious intellectual and practical inquiries is basic to building an alternative to Republican domination in coming years. These projects take time. Before we can hope to get far on them, we—those who voted against Trump and are unhappy with the likely course of national politics—face two difficult tasks.
The first entails building and sustaining guardrails against the strong authoritarian elements of the new administration, with constitutionalism as our basic claim. This is crucial and means enlisting the broadest possible range of opponents of administration actions and policies that threaten constitutional norms.
The second task involves looking at current Democratic and left-wing policies and programs to see if we can come up with something relatively new and more attractive by the beginning of the next presidential campaign. This task requires sustained attention, starting immediately. Otherwise, critics of Trumpism may end up recycling the positions that failed in 2024.
