The US election results were a massive defeat for the fight against authoritarianism everywhere
Tuesday, 5 November 2024 will go down in history as a dark day for everyone in the United States and around the world who is committed to upholding democracy and an independent judiciary, to a free press and the fight against climate change, to human dignity and common decency. The 45th President of the USA is set to become the country’s 47th: as matters currently stand, Donald J. Trump has secured just shy of 75 million votes — significantly more than the incumbent Vice President of the USA, Kamala Harris, who received only 71 million. Trump won 312 votes in the Electoral College, well above the 270 required for his election. At 78 years of age, Trump is the oldest person ever to be elected president in the USA’s 248-year history. He will also be the first sitting president to have been convicted in a criminal trial.
Trump’s Republican Party has also managed to regain majority control of the nation’s powerful Senate: soon, the Senate will comprise 53 Republican senators, and only 47 Democrats. And while the last remaining votes for the House of Representatives are still being counted, it is now all but certain that the Republicans will manage to retain their narrow majority in the lower chamber as well. Given that the conservatives also hold a majority (6 to 3) in the country’s constitutional court, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party will now control all three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. This means that Trump will hold all the keys to power in his hands.
Who Voted for Trump?
In contrast to the 2016 federal election, in which Trump was elected to the presidency without having received a majority of all votes cast, he did manage to win the popular vote for the first time in this, his third election. Moreover, in this election cycle, every state, with the exception of Utah and Washington State, has recorded a shift to the right.
And the picture doesn’t get much better when you look at the exit polls. While Harris managed to rally majority support among female voters (53 percent, to 45 percent for Trump), Trump won among male voters by 55 to 42 percent. Once again, his leading margin was particularly high with white men (60, to 37 for Harris), but he also managed to secure — for the third election in a row — a clear majority among white women voters (53 to 45). Harris’s endeavours to garner support among this demographic proved a dismal failure.
Only two groups of voters maintained the ardent level of support for the Democrats that they had shown for Joe Biden four years prior: African-Americans (85 percent for Harris, 13 for Trump) and Jewish people (78 to 22). Contrary to popular belief, Trump only recorded minor gains among Black male voters (with this demographic voting overwhelmingly in favour of Harris, 77 to 23 percent). Of all voter groups, Harris received the highest approval ratings among African-American women (91 percent to 7 for Trump) and senior citizens (93 to 5).
Trump gained ground among virtually all demographic groups — and in some cases these gains were substantial. For example, he won 46 percent of the overall Latino vote (Harris secured 52 percent), and even managed to win the Latino male vote, with 55 percent to Harris’s 43 percent. That a majority of Latino men would cast their vote for Trump in spite of the fact that he has spent years inciting hatred against Latin American immigrants has left progressive observers in a state of profound dismay. It is important to note here, however, that Latinos do not form a single homogeneous group; while Cuban Americans in particular have traditionally shown staunch support for the Republicans, the party’s reach is far more limited among the country’s Puerto Rican community and citizens of Mexican descent, for example.
Nonetheless, it would appear that ethnic background is playing an ever diminishing role in terms of how US voters cast their ballot, with level of education proving to be an increasingly decisive factor instead. As expected, Harris prevailed among college-educated voters, whereas Trump won over the (much larger) group of voters who do not hold a college degree — and especially those voters who have never been to college (63 percent, to Harris’s 35 percent).
These results indicate that the Republicans were able to successfully engage some sections of the working class. Even among voters who live in a household with at least one union member, Trump came in at 45 percent. And he also secured the majority of votes cast by members of households with an annual income of less than 50,000 dollars — while Harris, by contrast, scored among wealthy voters who have an annual reported income in excess of 100,000 dollars. When it came to the issue of inflation, Trump secured 74 percent of the vote among people who reported having been impacted by inflation in recent years, while Harris won 77 percent of the vote among those who said they had not been affected.
In other words: for the majority of voters, the most compelling factor influencing their decision was the economic situation. The inflation triggered by the COVID pandemic has resulted in steep increases in the price of food, rent, and domestic property. While the Biden administration was able to bring inflation back under control, the overall outcome has not been lower prices, but rather merely slowing the rate of price increases.
Against this backdrop, it hardly comes as a surprise that a significant portion of voters hold the current government — of which Harris is Vice President — responsible. The bitter irony is that the Biden administration had in fact attempted to effect a social democratic transition away from the same old neoliberal formulae, only to be stymied from within its own ranks. Furthermore, in those areas where Biden was successful — infrastructure programmes, economic growth, lowering unemployment levels —, these same successes obviously made a tangible difference for too few people. And voters are not generally known to vote in line with abstract political programmes or statistics, but rather on the basis of their lived daily experience.
As Vermont senator Bernie Sanders — arguably the most influential leftist in the US, who was re-elected to another six-year term in the US Senate — put it, “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. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.” As the party of the status quo, the Democrats did not promise these kinds of changes to the working class — but Trump certainly did. As was the case in the federal elections of 2016 and 2020, he once again capitalized on the widespread dissatisfaction among US citizens with regard to the establishment politics of Washington DC — with resounding success.
Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Trump’s administration will ultimately uphold the GOP’s reputation as the party of big money. Instead of fighting domestic poverty, the Republicans will provide financial relief for the rich and curtail the rights of labour unions.
Abortion and Migration
Another issue occupying voters on election day was the right to abortion. In their alliance with evangelical Christians (who voted for Trump by a margin of 82 to 17 percent), the Republicans have managed in recent decades to turn the topic of abortion rights into a partisan political issue. Virtually all of those in favour of abolishing the right to abortion voted for Trump.
After abortion proved to be a winning issue for the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections for the House of Representatives, Harris also chose to rely on its galvanizing effect in 2024. But this strategy did not pan out, despite the fact that the Democrats were able to add constitutional amendments on the right to abortion to the ballot in ten different states. Measures to protect abortion access were passed in seven of the ten states; in the state of Florida, a majority voted in favour, but the measures could not be passed due to the state’s high voter threshold of 60 percent.
This did not mean, however, that all proponents of abortion rights also voted for the presidential candidate who advocated them, as the Democrats had hoped. A mere 14 percent of voters stated in exit polls that they considered abortion the most important issue of the election — and of that figure, one in four voted for Trump. (By comparison, 32 percent of respondents cited the state of the economy as the decisive factor.)
As is the case in Germany, the debate around immigration in the USA is also dominated by right-wing discourse. A total of 87 percent of Trump voters believe that migrants living in the USA without a valid residence permit should be deported. Throughout the course of the 2024 election campaign, the Democratic Party ran on a platform of tightening border controls. But once again, Trump was clearly perceived by voters to be the strongest candidate on this issue.
The Issue of Foreign Policy
Traditionally, foreign policy issues have only had a minor influence on the outcome of US elections. This remained the case in 2024, with only four percent of voters citing these issues as the most important. Russia’s war against Ukraine was notably virtually absent from either party’s election campaign.
The war in the Middle East, on the other hand, was a different story. A large number of Democratic voters disagreed with the Biden/Harris administration’s policy of unconditionally supplying weapons to the Israeli army, with anger regarding this issue especially high among US Americans of Arab heritage. In Dearborn, Michigan, for example, a city with a population of 100,000 and a sizeable Arab community, Trump won by a margin of 42 percent to Harris’s 36 percent. Four years prior, Joe Biden had won here with more than two thirds of the vote. In 2024, the candidate for the Green Party (whose ideology is scarcely comparable to that of the German Greens), whose campaign focussed almost exclusively on the war in Gaza, achieved 18 percent of the Dearborn vote. Yet this barely had an impact at the national level: Jill Stein won only half a percent of the total vote nationwide — roughly the same amount as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had already withdrawn his candidacy and appealed to voters to elect Trump to the presidency. This means that even though Harris’s campaign lacked any sort of commitment to ending the supply of arms to Israel, which did ultimately cost the party votes, the issue did not, in view of Trump’s considerable lead, prove decisive to the outcome of the election.
A Crushing Defeat
It bears mentioning that the election also heralded (at least a sliver of) good news from the other end of the political spectrum, with numerous significant figures from the left returning to Congress: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will retain their seats in the Senate, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Summer Lee will continue their work in the House of Representatives. Another notable development in this election cycle is Sarah McBride’s win in the state of Delaware, which makes her the first ever transgender person to be elected to the US Congress. Furthermore, a number of leftists, including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), won seats at the state level.
Despite these gains, it still seems difficult to see a silver lining given the overall outcome of the election. After all, Trump’s victory clearly indicates that the global struggle against the rising tide of right-wing authoritarianism has suffered a crushing defeat. And given that this defeat occurred in what is still by far the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world, the repercussions will be profound and global.
The days that followed the announcement of the election results were thus marked by deep dejection and grief on the part of progressives in the USA. Heated debates are currently raging on the left and among Democrats regarding the possible reasons for the party’s defeat. Many centrists continue to rally behind Kamala Harris, claiming that her defeat was due primarily to the fact that she was only able to launch her campaign at a very late stage in the race. Yet this viewpoint fails to acknowledge that Harris’s campaign was very clearly riddled with a series of abject miscalculations. Her strategy of trying to win votes from her rivals by appearing on the campaign trail alongside ousted Republican representative Liz Cheney failed just as miserably as her attempt to win over (white) women living in suburban America. The fact that prominent figures in the Democratic Party are now claiming Harris ran a “flawless” campaign is likely due to their unwillingness to reassess their policies, even in the face of such a resounding defeat.
Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, disagrees with his party’s positive appraisal of the Harris campaign: “When progressives like Bernie [Sanders] aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned [by Democrats] as dangerous populists. Why is that? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base? … We need a firm break with neoliberalism.” A poll conducted by Data for Progress in July of this year confirms that left-wing demands such as expanding healthcare benefits (60 percent) and increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy (64 percent) are supported by a clear majority of US citizens.
For the results of interest surveys to translate into electoral majorities, a decisive change of course will be needed — away from the blandishments of big money and towards the real-world concerns of the working class. But as things currently stand, it is clear that this will prove anything but easy for today’s Democratic Party.
Translated by Louise Pain and Sam Langer for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
Top image: AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey