The US election: an update

In the final weeks of a close—and nasty—presidential election, a feeling of dread took over. This replaced the temporary and undeserved “Kamalamania” that had peaked as I wrote for the previous issue of International Socialism.1 The re-election of Donald Trump was expected, but it was still a shock. Its effects will be felt all over the world. The far right will welcome these effects; many others will be threatened by them. In this article, written soon after the election and before Trump’s inauguration, I will not repeat my characterisation of the candidates and their politics but instead examine the results and what led to them, while briefly commenting on the response of the political left.

What happened?

Trump won not only all seven swing states but, for the first time, a plurality of the national vote at 49.9 percent, which is 1.5 percent more than what Kamala Harris received.2 The Republicans also won a majority in both houses of Congress. Compared to 2020, Trump gained ground in 48 of 50 states. The Democrats had relied on Harris’s support for abortion rights to bring out the women’s vote. Women did indeed prefer Harris by 53 percent, but this was a smaller margin than Biden had achieved four years earlier. The percentages shifted towards Trump in the Republican rural districts, Democratic urban districts and in the contested suburbs.3 

That does not mean a majority in the United States voted for Trump. Some 36 percent of the electorate did not vote. That’s more than the 31 percent of potential votes won by Trump. Although Trump gained about 3 million votes, his victory reflected the loss of 6.3 million votes by the Democrats.4 This was not the massive shift to the right among voters it first appears to be, but it was a disastrous outcome for the Democrats. Even in some of the most conservative “red” (ie Republican) states, progressive legislation passed. That includes enhanced abortion rights in seven out of ten states with referenda on this issue on the ballot. In Florida, an abortion rights amendment fell just short of the 60 percent threshold but received 1.4 million more votes than Harris. Voters in some Republican states also approved raising the minimum wage to $15 (£11.90) an hour and mandated sick leave, while voting down school vouchers backed by the religious right and proposed limits to voting rights.5

In other words, progressive ideas were present during the election, but the Democrats could not connect with them. That they lost to Trump, despite his low approval ratings, is due to their core politics, not a tactical mistake in campaign messaging. Trump was able to get away with racist language, open contempt for democracy, violent insults and threats. That someone as outside the commonly accepted bounds of politics could move from pariah status to re-election demonstrates a crisis for which the old bipartisan neoliberal consensus has no answers. Most of Trump’s voters are not true believers. Yet, the results show that the working class is not able to vote as a class, with a good section, at best, tolerating Trump’s reactionary messaging.6

How did Trump win?

The economy was the prime concern for voters, especially for Trump supporters—93 percent of whom rated this as very important, compared to 68 percent of Harris’s supporters.7 Before the election, a majority of Americans said they were worse off than four years ago.8 These results are, among other things, part of an international rejection of incumbents, of whatever stripe, in the wake of the post-pandemic wave of inflation.9

Trump’s speeches often acknowledged economic problems, blaming the Biden-Harris administration for the cost-of-living crisis. This felt true to many. The campaign of the Democrats typically responded by explaining that the economy was fine, inflation rates had fallen and that unemployment was low. Things were indeed fine for some of those at the top. The majority, however, was not benefiting from the rising stock market and was struggling with prices well above earlier levels. Cumulatively, over Biden’s presidency, prices rose by 19.4 percent, a crucial issue for the 60 percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. In the context of decades of neoliberalism, accompanied by growing inequality and declines in unionisation, the feeling was that the “American Dream”, that each generation might be better off than the previous one, appeared to have died. The discontent is also reflected in growing rates of suicide and drug addiction.10  

The economic reality seemed a world away from Harris’s corporate-friendly campaign, which brought out celebrities and took advice from billionaires about an “opportunity economy” for the “middle class”, rather than focusing on combating inequality. An Associated Press poll shows a majority wanted “substantial change” in how the country is run; 30 percent said they wanted “total upheaval”.11 Harris, however, was not the candidate for change. Trump gave false answers, fed people’s anger and scapegoated the vulnerable, but he tied these scapegoats to the policies of Democratic elites.

Scapegoating migrants

A main theme of Trump’s campaign was scaremongering about migrants, calling them “criminals”, “illegals” and “animals”. It claimed they were swamping cities, hogging benefits and ruining the country because of the Democrat’s “open borders”. Trump pledged to institute the largest deportation programme in US history. He tied this to economic discontent: “I will protect our jobs. I will protect our borders.”12 

In 2016, Trump ran for office proposing to build a wall on the Mexican border, a project left unfinished. He also cruelly deported one and a half million people over four years. This was a fraction of what he had promised back then and fewer deportations than those carried out under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. This time, the scale of the rhetoric is far greater. Even if finding and deporting 11 million people may be logistically impossible, it will be hard for him to give up on his promise of mass deportations. His pick of Steven Miller, the far-right architect of many of his immigration policies, as deputy chief of staff, and the aggressively pro-deportation former acting Immigration Customs and Enforcement chief Tom Homan as person responsible for borders and deportations (“border czar”) suggests he is serious. At the time of writing, Trump was insisting he would deploy the military to carry out mass deportations.

The Democrats made no principled defence of migration. Questioned on a televised debate, Harris championed a repressive bipartisan border security bill scuttled by Trump for political reasons. She did not actively take the fight to Trump about his lies on waves of “migrant crime”. A left candidate could have put a class argument about the need for working-class unity between migrants and non-migrants, or directed anger against Wall Street and big business, rather than Trump’s scapegoats. Such arguments lie outside the worldview of liberal figures like Harris.

The same dynamic was at play on other issues. Republicans spent over $200 million on adverts calling trans people a threat to the nation, claiming: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.13 The Democrats retreated. The Democratic platform did not mention trans people, and their Convention did not include trans speakers. In an interview, Harris evaded a question about gender-affirming care, saying: “I think we should follow the law.” The law bans this care for young people in half of states, with 128 other anti-trans bills introduced in 2024.14

Despite this, some Democrats still argue the party was too woke, that it should have talked more about the economy and less about rights. However, the answer is not to pit “identity politics” against “workers’ issues”, but to address a multi-racial, multi-gendered class, and to cut through the divisive rhetoric of Trump. 

Other Democrats claimed Harris lost because the US is not ready for a black woman president—even as several pro-Palestinian women of colour were handily re-elected. Certainly, racism and sexism have played a long, horrific role in US politics. Yet, the hardcore racists and sexists were largely already in Trump’s camp when he stood against the white, male incumbent, Joe Biden. Even through black people still overwhelmingly voted for the Democrats, in this election, both black and especially Latinx voters shifted from the Democrats to Republicans. A strong candidate, raising pro-working class and anti-racist arguments could have won support by challenging prejudice—provided this was combined with a radical left challenge to the status quo.

Campaigning during genocide

The election took place during Isreal’s genocide in Gaza, bankrolled and supported by the US. The Widespread demonstrations have transformed the opinions of many about the Middle East, while the policies of Biden and Harris have remained unchanged.

An Uncommitted Movement had been successful in gaining protest votes during the primaries to choose candidates. Tellingly, the Democratic-connected leadership of the Uncommitted Movement focused on seeking to shift Harris’s policies, not breaking with the two-party system. The movement’s leadership would, in the end, undemocratically cave in to Harris. Large parts of the movement objected, arguing that genocide is not a “lesser evil”, instead endorsing a vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party.15 In the city of Dearborn, Michigan, where there was organising focused on the Muslim majority, Stein received 18 percent during the presidential election, moving the plurality from Harris to Trump.16 The issue of Palestine was emblematic. Many activists were sickened by Harris relying on an ineffective support of abortion as her only progressive plank, while campaigning with anti-choice Republican Liz Cheney, supporting Israel, and telling the Convention: “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”.17

Trump’s plans

A full discussion of Trump’s politics and policies lies beyond the scope of this brief update.18 Trump’s reactionary cabinet demonstrates how his style of MAGA (“Make America Great Again!”) politics has gained a following in Washington. He has shed the traditional conservatives who held back his impulses eight years ago, but his policies and appointments are still filled with contradictions. His foreign policy picks are people who combine neo-conservative hawkishness towards China and Iran with Trump’s more isolationist and transactional approach towards Ukraine and NATO. His pick of health officials, especially Robert F Kennedy for Health and Human Services, can be seen as an attempt to keep his right-wing anti-vaccine base supportive. Major Wall Street figures, who still defend Trump’s plans for imposing tariffs on imports, will be involved in economic policy making. The Attorney General, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and related picks show that Trump is serious about clearing those departments of more liberal staff and being able to use state power against his opponents. He will undoubtedly want to make headline-generating moves in the first 100 days and is being pushed to consolidate changes in the two years before the midterms as the Republicans still control Congress.

This will certainly not be a conventional Republican administration, but neither are we suddenly living under fascism. The working class and oppressed groups will face major threats; there will be struggles and socialists still have space to operate. The country is not in a fundamentally different state than before the election. Many of the working people who voted for Trump will be unpleasantly surprised that the promised economic improvements do not reach them. How long economic disappointment can be displaced into a radicalising resentment of imagined enemies or, instead, whether it leads to a conscious opposition to Trump and his class will be crucial questions in the coming period.

One threatening part of Trump’s assent is precisely his instinct to gain support by engendering hate and violence towards supposed “enemies of the people”. Ensconced in the White House and protected by the Supreme Court, Trump may prefer to pursue his goals through a commanding executive and compliant Congress, holding the mobs and far right in reserve. Nonetheless, the normalisation of racism and the emboldening of those further to the right cannot be ignored.

What next?

The day after the election, black people across the country received an intimidating text message telling them they had been selected to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation”.19 Such outrages should signal that this is the time to revive and build united fronts against racism and the far right. The extra-parliamentary insurgent right retreated after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, and they have been partially eclipsed by the looser MAGA movement around Trump. Still, it would be too early to write them off: they still exist and are using the milieu Trump has created to grow.

There are fears Trump may use state power to intimidate and limit left-wing activism, building on the McCarthyite repression of Palestinian solidarity under the Democrats. Repressive attempts are best defeated by continued mobilisation. On the days immediately after the election, there were some anti-Trump marches, if nowhere near the scale of those after Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

The disaster of the Harris campaign combined with the horrors of genocide in Gaza also opens room for the left to develop arguments for a break with the Democrats. Both the left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wrote angry condemnations of corporate Democrats after the results. However, Sanders, who campaigned for Harris, merely called for “conversations”. The DSA mentioned a goal of “a new party for the working class” and doubled down on electoral campaigns for left-wing candidates inside the Democratic party.20

Any viable electoral alternative will probably emerge elsewhere and will need to come as an expression of mass activity. We do not know for sure what struggles will erupt under Trump; the defence of immigrants looks like being a flashpoint. We can learn from the emergency mobilisations that defeated Trump’s “Muslim Ban” in 2017 and the “Day Without Immigrants” on May Day 2006—a bottom-up general strike of migrant labour that shut down workplaces and defeated anti-migrant legislation.

There have also been recent strikes by members of the dockers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, and industrial action by machinists in the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at Boeing won significant pay rises. Movements on the streets and workplaces can give each other confidence. We are not there yet and, at present, the left in the US is not large or embedded enough for the task at hand. We need to build up opposition to Trump’s agenda at scale and simultaneously fight for socialist political organisation independent of the two-party system. 

Eric Fretz is a socialist activist living in Brooklyn, New York.