Understanding the Election
Don't Forget the States
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Like many others, I have taken some time to recover from the shock of the presidential election result, although it was no surprise. Fortunately, I could find a bit more mental distance with a long-planned visit to Toronto, to visit my daughter and son-in-law. For some reflections on this, see this post by Cathy Sunshine earlier this week:
Most of you have probably had your fill of post-election commentary, so just skip this if that is the case, and perhaps save to read later. But as usual I have been reading a lot, and I wanted to share a small selection of what I found most helpful.
Much of the content below focuses on the national presidential election. But I have also included two reports highlighting important contests at state and local levels. As noted in the post-election meeting of NOPE Neighbors on November 13, that is a fundamental reality in shaping strategies for the next four years.
The image, taken from that update, shows the lineup of "trifectas," i.e., states with governor, house, and senate controlled by a single party, as of 2024. As of next year, from this year's election, two states (Minnesota and Michigan) will shift from Democratic to split government. Republicans won the State house of representatives in Michigan, and the balance in Minnesota will either be divided with 67 seats for each party, or Republican if either of two recounts goes Republican. There would then likely be 15 Democratic trifectas, 23 Republican trifectas, and 12 divided governments. For an analysis and history of state-level trifectas, see https://ballotpedia.org/State_government_trifectas.
Data from 2024
The Presidential Election
The outcome of the presidential election was not really a surprise. Almost all the analysts said it could go either way, including my son Samuel Minter, who in his spare time does one of the best compilations of polling data, available on his site Election Graphs (https://electiongraphs.com/2024ec/).
As you can see from the snippet below, his "best case for Trump" scenario of 312 to 226 was exactly the result after the votes were counted.
As always, there was an abundance of alternative explanations. Among the summaries of these, Walid Shahid´s "Postmortem Palooza” was one of the best.
Three representative commentaries below, by Bernie Sanders, Matt Karp, and Robert Reich, outline what in my opinion is the fundamental factor responsible for the presidential outcome. I have added bold type for emphasis in these articles, so that should not be attributed to the authors.
Democrats Must Choose: The Elites or the Working Class
By Bernie Sanders
Boston Globe, November 12, 2024
https://portside.org/2024-11-12/democrats-must-choose-elites-or-working-class
The results of the 2024 election have confirmed a reality that is too frequently denied by Democratic Party leaders and strategists: The American working class is angry — and for good reason.
They want to know why the very rich are getting much richer, and the CEOs of major corporations make almost 300 times more than their average employees, while weekly wages remain stagnant and 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
They want to know why corporate profits soar while companies shut down factories in America and move to low-wage countries. They want to know why the food industry enjoys record breaking profits, while they can’t afford their grocery bills. They want to know why they can’t afford to go to a doctor or pay for their prescription drugs, and worry about going bankrupt if they end up in a hospital.
Donald Trump won this election because he tapped into that anger. Did he address any of these serious issues in a thoughtful or meaningful way? Absolutely not.
What he did do was divert the festering anger in our country at a greedy and out-of-touch corporate elite into a politics that served his political goals and will end up further enriching his fellow billionaires. Trump’s “genius” is his ability to divide the working class so that tens of millions of Americans will reject solidarity with their fellow workers and pave the way for huge tax breaks for the very rich and large corporations.
While Trump did talk about capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent, and a new trade policy with China, his fundamental explanation as to why the working class was struggling was that millions of illegal immigrants have invaded America and that we are now an “occupied country.” In his pathologically dishonest world, undocumented immigrants are illegally participating in our elections and voting for Democrats. They are creating massive amounts of crime, driving wages down, and taking our jobs. They are getting free health care and other benefits that are denied to American citizens. They are even eating our pets.
That explanation is grossly racist, cruel, and fallacious. But it is an explanation.
And what do the Democrats have to say about the crises facing working families? What is their full-throated explanation, pounded away day after day in the media, in the halls of Congress, and in town meetings throughout the country as to why tens of millions of workers, in the richest country on earth, are struggling to put food on the table or pay the rent? Where is the deeply felt outrage that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care for all as a human right while insurance and drug companies make huge profits? How do they explain supporting billions of dollars in military aid to the right-wing extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has created an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is causing massive malnutrition and starvation for thousands of children?
In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.
This election was largely about class and change and the Democrats, in both cases, were often on the wrong side. As Jimmy Williams Jr., the president of the Painters Union, said, “The Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working-class message that addresses issues that really matter to workers. The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump. That’s not good enough anymore!”
As an Independent member of the US Senate, I caucus with the Democrats. In that capacity I have been proud to work with President Biden on one of the most ambitious pro-worker agendas in modern history. We passed the American Rescue Plan to pull us out of the COVID-19 economic downturn; made historic investments in rebuilding our infrastructure and in transforming our energy system; began the process of rebuilding our manufacturing base; lowered the cost of prescription drugs and forgave student debt for five million Americans. Biden promised to be the most progressive president since FDR and, on domestic issues, he kept his word.
But, unlike FDR, these achievements are almost never discussed within the context of a grossly unfair economy that continues to fail ordinary Americans. Yes. In the past few years we have made some positive changes. We must acknowledge, however, that what we’ve done is nowhere near enough. In 1936, in his second inaugural address, FDR spoke not only of his administration’s enormous achievements in combatting the Great Depression, but of the painful economic realities that millions of Americans were still experiencing.
Roosevelt’s words remain relevant today: “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day … I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children … I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”
Of course, the world is today profoundly different than it was in 1936. We are not in an economic depression. Unemployment is relatively low. People are not facing starvation. But the Democratic leadership must recognize that, in a rapidly changing economy, working families face an enormous amount of economic pain, anxiety and hopelessness — and they want change. The status quo is not working for them.
In politics you can’t fight something with nothing. The Democratic Party needs to determine which side it is on in the great economic struggle of our times, and it needs to provide a clear vision as to what it stands for. Either you stand with the powerful oligarchy of our country, or you stand with the working class. You can’t represent both. While Democrats will be in the minority in the Senate and (probably) the House in the new Congress, they will still have the opportunity to bring forth a strong legislative agenda that addresses the needs of working families. If Republicans choose to vote those bills down, the American working class will learn quickly enough as to which party represents them, and which party represents corporate greed.
...
It’s Happening Again
And until Democrats can find a way to win back some large chunk of working-class voters, Donald Trump’s successors will be favored in the next presidential election too.
By Matt Karp
Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor.
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/its-happening-again-trump-election-win
“It is happening again.” This morning, with Donald Trump in command of another crushing presidential victory, the dreadful words from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks sit like lead inside many stomachs. As the climax of a frenzied campaign and the triumph of so much that is vicious and corrosive in American society, Trump’s second election comes as a shock. And yet, as an event in contemporary history, it can hardly be seen as a surprise.
First and most prosaic, there is inflation. Did America really elect a dictator because Frosted Flakes hit $7.99 at the grocery store? Read that sentence again and it doesn’t sound so absurd.
At a deeper level, 2024 has taught us a hard lesson: in a global society defined by consumption rather than production, voters loathe price increases and are ready to punish rulers who preside over them. Across the biggest election year in modern history, with billions voting worldwide, incumbents have taken a beating, left, right, and center: the Tories in Britain, Emmanuel Macron in France, the African National Congress in South Africa, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Kirchnerism in Argentina last fall. Today post-pandemic inflation, aggravated by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has claimed the scalp of yet another incumbent government.
In America, the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She herself ran a cautious but mostly competent race, moving to the right on the border, as voters seemed to demand, pummeling Trump on abortion, and — at least in her paid messages — wooing working-class voters with a bread-and-butter focus. But in the end, these narrow tactical decisions were overwhelmed by the altered nature of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” — a constellation of NGOs, media organizations, and foundation-funded activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing attempts to win over black men with promises of legal marijuana and protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions in the race helped raise historic sums of money — over $1 billion in just a few months — but also marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,” abortion rights, and personal identity but largely uninterested in material questions.
In the last weeks of the campaign, Harris clearly pivoted in the same direction. At rallies and in interviews, she zeroed in on Trump himself as a deadly threat to America’s existing institutions. She barnstormed the swing states with Liz Cheney, labeling Trump’s verbal attack on Cheney as a “disqualifying” incident. In her final tour of the Midwest, she paused her own speeches to put Trump clips on the Jumbotron, seeming to believe that the former president would somehow defeat himself with his own words.
It worked, in the sense that Harris won voters with college degrees by 15 points, a larger margin than in 2020. Voters making over $100,000 a year swung toward the Democrats in record numbers. The moderate Republicans in the suburbs, famously invoked by Chuck Schumer eight years ago, keep trickling into the Democratic coalition. It seems to serve them well enough in the midterms but not so much in the big-ticket contests. This year, the Liz Cheney Democrats were dwarfed by a vast working-class swing toward Trump, in many flavors: rural voters, low-income voters, Latino voters, and black male voters, from Texas to New Hampshire. Even as progressive pundits hailed the post-Dobbs gender gap, boasting that Republicans had ruined themselves with female voters for a generation, non-college-educated women swung toward Trump by 6 points.
Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans but two-thirds of yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric, is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters? Almost 80 percent of the voters who listed the economy as their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. How much can a few months of targeted advertising do, compared to a broader Democratic shadow party that has been trumpeting the health of the economy — low unemployment, wage growth, and a booming stock market — for over a year now? If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them.
Finally, it is only fair to add that Harris faced a uniquely difficult task in this election. For over a year, an already unpopular Democratic president has lacked the physical capacity to communicate with the public. Nevertheless, the shadow party stuck with Joe Biden, propped him up, angrily shouted down any dissenters who questioned whether his political skills — not to mention his judgment, on Israel/Palestine and elsewhere — had entered a terminal decline.
After Biden finally malfunctioned at the debate, it still took Democrats a month to swap him off the ticket. (For all the memes celebrating Nancy Pelosi for her “ruthless” role in this last-minute effort, few bothered to note the fecklessness of the Democratic leadership that had allowed Biden to last that long to begin with.) Harris thus entered the race with a makeshift campaign, already trailing heavily in the polls. Plucked to join the Biden 2020 ticket as a first-term California senator, she herself lacked any experience defeating Republicans in a competitive statewide election.
Between the global hex of inflation, the slow creep of dealignment, and the Biden fiasco, the prospects for a Republican victory in 2024 were always large. Trump himself seemed to recognize this better than the pundit class, running a cavalier campaign that junked much of his rhetorical “populism” for an embrace of billionaire budget cutters like Elon Musk. His arrogance has been rewarded with another term. Like most second terms, it is likely to end in disappointment for his supporters, frittered away in unpopular policy lurches, a rush of scandal, and lots of time on the golf course. But until Democrats can find a way to win back some large chunk of working-class voters, Trump’s successors will be favored in the next presidential election, anyway.
There was no mandate for Trump. There was no red shift. There was only a blue abandonment
Robert Reich
Nov 14, 2024
Trump is saying the election gave him a “very big mandate.” Rubbish. It wasn’t a mandate at all. It wasn’t even a “red shift” to Trump and the Republicans. It was a blue abandonment.
We now know that nine million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020.
Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That’s no big deal. The bigger news is that Harris got 10 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 (400,000 fewer in the battleground states). Harris campaigned hard in the battlegrounds, so her erosion from Biden’s vote there wasn’t nearly as much, proportionately, as it was everywhere else across the country.
The biggest takeaway is that Biden’s 9 million votes disappeared.
Why? It couldn’t have been because of virulent racism because we elected a Black man, twice. It couldn’t have been misogyny, since Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, and Clinton’s actions and statements probably triggered more misogyny in 2016 than did Harris’s in 2024. There’s no evidence of illegal vote tampering or of voter suppression nearly on this scale. In fact, it was easier to cast a ballot this year than in 2020.
So what happened to the 9 million? We can’t know for sure but it seems most likely that those 9 million potential voters — mostly working class — said to themselves, “I won’t vote for Trump because he’s an asshole. But I won’t vote for the Democrats either, because they don’t give a damn about me.”
The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90 percent — the party of people who don’t live off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy. Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure.
Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago. Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what’s the Democrats’ task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.
This isn’t a blue-state versus red-state phenomenon. It’s a class phenomenon. In Missouri, one of the reddest of the red, voters passed an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by a wide margin, even as they overwhelmingly rejected Harris. It looks like they did the same in Alaska. In ruby-red Nebraska, roughly 75 percent of voters backed a measure to institute paid sick leave, although they rejected Harris. (Nebraskans also came close to unseating their incumbent senator in favor of Dan Osborn, a union activist who ran as an independent and railed against corporate overlords.)
Americans across the board want a fairer economy. Trump Republicans won’t deliver one. Instead, Trump and his allies are readying more tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy and regulatory rollbacks. They’re preparing to hand the country over to billionaires. Democrats! This is your opportunity! Take it!
State and Local Elections
This section includes one overview post by Troy Matthews and one from Down Home North Carolina on victories in rural areas of North Carolina where they organize.
State-Level Democrats Pull Off Big Wins in Key States
Despite top of the ticket losses, Democrats had key victories at the state house level that will help protect the rights of Americans over the next four years
Troy Matthews
Meidas Touch Newsletter, Nov 14, 2024
https://meidasnews.com/news/state-level-democrats-pull-off-big-wins-in-key-states
Democratic candidates for state legislatures won big in several key swing states last week, showing Democrats voted solidly for down ballot candidates when faced with GOP control at the state level. Despite top of the ticket losses, state Democrats over performed, delivering crucial victories in state Houses where bodily autonomy and voting rights hang in the balance.
District level data is not yet available to thoroughly dissect each race, but some key results include:
Pennsylvania Democrats have successfully secured enough seats to protect their crucial majority in the state House.
In one of the highest-profile battlegrounds of the cycle, North Carolina Democrats are projected to gain enough seats to break the Republican supermajority in the House. This win restores the veto power for incoming Democratic Governor Josh Stein in that state.
Democrats are projected to gain at least 10 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly and four seats in the Senate on new maps. This was the first election since 2011 that legislative races were held on non gerrymandered maps.
In a majority-making special election, Democratic candidate Ann Johnson Stewart has emerged victorious, protecting the Minnesota Senate majority. While the full Minnesota Senate was not up this cycle, this seat in this special election was a must-win for defending the Democratic majority in the chamber.
Kevin Volk, the Democratic candidate for Arizona Legislative District 17 that was featured in a MeidasTouch story, won his seat, defeating the Republican incumbent in a GOP-leaning district. Other results from Arizona are still coming in at time of writing.
The victories come after record investments in state-level races by the Democratic Party. This summer, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) launched the Summer of the States Program to highlight key races for state houses all over the country.
While DLCC President Heather Williams called the results of last week overall "neutral," it's clear the critical wins, especially in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, showed that their hard work paid off.
"I would say our team, our leaders, our candidates, they were incredible," Williams said in an interview with MeidasTouch. "Much of it was the fact that these candidates were just engaging with voters, meeting them where they were having real, honest, authentic conversations."
"We broke that super majority in North Carolina, giving Josh Stein the veto pen when he heads into office, which is, you know, a really meaningful thing," Williams said. "In Wisconsin...we picked up a bunch of seats, 10 in the assembly, four in the senate, which puts us in a prime position exactly where we wanted to be headed into 2026."
Williams believes the election was closer than many of the pundits are claiming it was, suggesting that a GOP landslide didn't occur in swing states, especially given the state house results.
"The red wave didn't exist. We're in a fairly neutral place, meaning half of Americans, nearly half of Americans had their rights protected by Democrats in the states pre-election and they still do post election."
"It's sort of a cycle like this where everyone's attention was federal, right? What I'm most proud of...we stayed really disciplined," she continued. Now that the 2024 election is passed, the DLCC is immediately turning next to contests in Virginia, Michigan and other states where special elections are upcoming, along with prepping for the midterm elections in 2026.
"We have a pretty good idea, right, of what's competitive next cycle. We head right into Virginia. We must protect the house. There's a governor's race there. So that will be critical for us in 2025," Williams said. "And then in 2026...the Michigan house is back on the ballot, the Pennsylvania house is back on the ballot."
"Wisconsin's in a really strong position to challenge that majority in 2026 and it'll be under Trump's presidency, right? With Republican federal control. And if the past is prologue, that tends to be a harder election for the party in power."
What We Won This Tuesday — Down Home Outliers in a Red Wave
Down Home North Carolina
https://downhomenc.org/2024/11/07/down-home-outliers-in-a-red-wave-organizing-works/
On Tuesday night, our scrappy working-class members defied the national trends and scored dozens and dozens of wins across North Carolina. Today we are celebrating our working class members who fought, ran, won, and protected millions of North Carolinians from radical extremists last night. Even as we come to grips with the election of Trump, those of us at Down Home have grasped one undeniable truth. Our organizing works.
As we prepare to go through the storm, we remain committed to our course, as described in our theory of change:
“If we build the power of the multiracial working class in small town and rural NC, we can win improvements now and move toward a future that reflects our values.”
In a cycle where 90% of the nation’s counties moved appreciably to the right, Down Home’s rural counties bucked the trend, reducing the rate of rightward movement and effectively reversing in six counties. You can literally see our efforts in the circled outlier counties, representing the impact of Down Home’s year-round organizing and electoral work, on the NYT map below:
We are still crunching data, but compared to national averages, our counties bucked the trend by the following metrics:
Alamance County overperformed by 4.3%
Ashe County overperformed by 5.3%
Cabarrus County overperformed by 5.8%
Chatham County overperformed by approximately 6%
Johnston County overperformed by 5.5%
Transylvania overperformed by 6.1%
Down Home’s 2024 electoral program was the largest in our history, more than four times larger than our program in 2022. All told, our program covered 25 North Carolina counties and achieved the following metrics:
636,874 door knocks, representing 131% of our goal
779,017 phone calls from within our own program, exceeding our goal
1.7M phone calls total with allies, 230% of our goal
833,973 texts
1287 relational vote turnout leaders
…as well as digital, mail, faith organizing, and narrative work
On election night, that power found expression in a range of cherished victories, including:
Resoundingly defeating Mark Robinson and rejecting his extreme agenda. We elected Josh Stein by almost 15% in what was supposed to be the closest governor’s race in the nation. We want to stress that our work to define Robinson as an extremist had him down 5% BEFORE the CNN article hit.
Defeating Michelle Morrow, the radical extremist who attempted to take control of North Carolina’s K-12 public schools. We elected our champion, Mo Green, by just 1.18% in a statewide race that Down Home and Public School Strong helped to elevate.
The final seats that broke the Republican supermajority, giving Governor-elect Josh Stein a veto to protect North Carolinians from radical legislation, including abortion bans. As in 2022, the supermajority was broken by a single seat in Down Home’s turf. We narrowly won HD 24 in Wilson County by a total of 871 votes, where we knocked 59,079 doors and logged 9,293 conversations with voters.
Our statewide Public School Strong Voters also had a big night as we experimented with our first electoral cycle as a coalition. Across the state, 40 of our Public School Strong candidates were elected, including the following highlights:
Alamance County elected Seneca Rogers and Down Home member candidate Tameka Harvey to the school board
Johnston County elected Down Home member April Lee to the school board
Person County elected Down Home member Jason Torian to the school board
Local race highlights included:
Electing member Antoinetta Cash-Royster to the Person County commission by just 5 votes...we’re currently working on ballot cure
Electing member Mark Speed to the Franklin County Commission
Electing Mark Manning to the Pitt County Commission
Additional Recommended Reading
Thomas B. Edsall, "How Resilient Is the Emerging Trump Coalition?¨
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/democrats-republicans-class-realignment.html
"Key to Trump’s Win: Heavy Losses for Harris Across the Map"
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/us/politics/voter-turnout-election-trump-harris.html
Astra Taylor, "Overthrow the donor class. And the consultants, too"
Rachel Bitecofer, "Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy"
Jared Abbott, "The Working Class Has Left the Building"
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/working-class-voters-democrats-trump
Branko Marcetic, "Four Myths About Kamala Harris’s Loss"
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-election-loss-democrats-left
David Sirota, "How Harris Lost the Working Class"
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-trump-election-democrats-workers
Qasim Rahid, "What Went Wrong in the Democratic Party?"
Jim Newell, "The Real Reason Kamala Harris Lost"
Jeff Schuhrke, "How Biden, Harris and the Democrats Abandoned the Working Class"
https://inthesetimes.com/article/biden-harris-trump-working-class-bernie-sanders-2024-election
Michael Tomasky, “Why the Democrats Have Been Making the Same Mistake—for 44 Years”
https://newrepublic.com/series/62/democrats-working-class-voter-loss
The Ink, "Why immigrants defected to Trump"
Isabella Weber, "Inflation Didn’t Have to Doom Biden"
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/inflation-biden-economy-price-controls
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, "Democrats Demobilized Their Base"
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/6/keeanga_yamahtta_taylor_democrats_demobilized_their
Gabriel Winant, "Exit Right"
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/
David Sirota, "Handbook for the Politically Deceased
https://www.levernews.com/handbook-for-the-politically-deceased/