When Joe Biden's sputtering campaign finally ended and Kamala Harris took over, there was a moment -- perhaps a day or two -- where it seemed she might energize the Democratic base enough to beat Trump. This didn’t happen. Harris lost to Trump by a significant margin, and Democrats now face a sweeping defeat, not only in the race for the White House but also for the Congressional House and Senate.
At first glance, the story appears straightforward: Americans chose a white supremacist man over a woman of colour. What more is there to say? The polls confirmed what we know to be true -- that this is a racist and sexist society. A nation built on stolen land and slave labour that has yet to fully reckon with its past has reservoirs of prejudice, hatred, and resentment that a bigoted billionaire could easily stir up. Sexism, too, is widespread. So, it’s not shocking that in this self-proclaimed bastion of democracy, some 70 million people voted for a convicted felon who promises to expel immigrants en masse. From this perspective, Harris’s defeat was inevitable, as was Trump’s victory -- further proof of a rightward-moving American society sliding toward outright fascism.
The University of Florida’s Election Lab reports that about 62.5% of eligible voters turned out to vote—fewer than the 66% who voted in 2020 when Trump lost to Biden, but higher than the 60% who turned out in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college, and the presidency, to Trump. Out of a voting-eligible population of about 240 million, eighty million -- a solid third -- sat out this election.
Lower turnout aside, early polling data (final tallies will take a while) shows that Democrats lost ground with every demographic -- notably women, younger voters, and Latino men. Even more troubling for them, their margins in traditionally blue states have shrunk. In New York, for example, Biden’s 23-point margin of victory fell to just 12 points for Harris against Trump. It’s tempting to break down each demographic (women, young voters, Latinos, etc) and try to pinpoint a specific issue that influenced their voting. Analyzing the data in diverse ways will yield different insights, but this general loss of support for a sitting vice president is striking.
But this result looks different if we zoom out a bit and understand how we got here. The Great Recession of 2009 saw a big dip in US GDP, and in the decade that followed, a jobless recovery and stagnant wages fuelled a growing disillusionment with Barack Obama’s policies, especially among young people. In 2011, inspired in part by Tahrir Square, state workers occupied the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, while the Occupy Wall Street movement late that year ignited the imagination of millions across the country. In 2013 and 2014, rampant police racism and impunity under the nation’s first Black president led to the Ferguson uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 2016, the US, like many countries, was increasingly polarized. Trump understood this and campaigned as an open and proud bigot, slandering protesters, immigrants, and Black people. Hillary Clinton stuck to the strategy she and her husband had crafted since the 1990s: Claiming the centre by appealing to the right. Leading up to the Democratic primaries the progressive base of the party thought they were staging a revolt, as they rallied behind Bernie Sanders against the neo-liberal old guard, but Bernie eventually folded his campaign for the nomination, and his supporters were cowed and coerced into voting for Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote (so it’s not true that Americans would never vote for a woman president) but lost a couple of key states and thus the presidency because of the profoundly un-democratic electoral college system.
Policy-wise, the Clintonite strategy of trying to capture the centre has meant adopting and adapting to Republican positions to chip away at voters in so-called swing states (states where voters might lean either way). This has led to a rightward shift among liberal Democrats, and Democratic politicians have increasingly legitimized conservative discourse on various social issues like immigration, crime, and even core liberal causes like reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights.
Even as the party leadership have moved rightward, their base has shifted left. This is evident in various state and local referenda where the support for progressive causes -- reproductive rights, immigration, spending on social services -- contradicts Democratic leaders’ insistence on orienting towards the centre-right. It is also evident in the mass struggles which continued through the Donald Trump administration and into Joe Biden’s term, from the state-wide teachers’ strikes of 2018-19 to the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests, following the police murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
Thanks to the US’s two-party system, this growing leftward-moving public has nowhere to register its discontent. Many opt to not vote at all, while the others must be corralled by a Bernie Sanders, an AOC, an Ilhan Omar, back into the Democratic tent, where they are asked to be patient as the Party leadership backpedals, accommodates, and compromises with the Republicans.
Kamala Harris is the product of this 30-year rightward drift: She ran as a former prosecutor, promising to crack down on border security. She quickly gained support from party centrists and raised millions from tech industry and Wall Street moguls. She said she would give her opponents “a seat at the table.” She even campaigned alongside neocons like Liz Cheney, hoping to win over Republican voters. But what did Harris offer to the 80 million people who sat out the election? Her proposals for an “opportunity economy,” with promises of tax cuts for workers, loans to form small businesses, and a ban on price gouging were insufficient to inspire hope for change.
Will the Democratic leadership change course, take the lead of Bernie and the squad, and finally embrace a progressive agenda for social change? Of course not; it is a party committed to upholding and maintaining the machinery of empire abroad and the interests of capital at home. Instead, brace yourselves for a flood of liberal hand-wringing and blame in the months and years to come. Those who voted for third parties will face the brunt of the backlash, as will anti-genocide protesters, especially Arab and Muslim Americans.
We come then to the elephant in the room: Yhe Biden/Harris administration’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While Harris paid lip service to calls for a ceasefire, she silenced her critics on the left and snidely dismissed anti-genocide protesters at her rallies, even as the US sent billions in military aid to Israel. Regardless of her formal commitment to Zionism, she continued to defend Israel’s “right to defend itself” more than a year into the ongoing massacre. When it became clear that she was losing support from key Democratic bases, like in Michigan, she made a last-ditch effort to win them back by promising to end the war if elected. Did her campaign really think people would believe her after her unwavering support for Israel all this time?
Simply put, in her zeal to support the war abroad, Kamala Harris lost the war at home. But with Trump back in control of the US empire, we can expect a proliferation of newfound liberal anguish about the hitherto-overlooked Palestinian victims of Israel’s war on Gaza. Soon, a false narrative will take hold. Kamala Harris would have ended the war had she been elected; pro-Palestine protesters and the left are to blame for its continuation. This will only further alienate the so-called Democratic base, especially young people.
Make no mistake: There will be mass resistance to Trump’s policies from day one, just as there was during his first term. But with an emboldened right-wing, much will depend on whether the left can overcome its disorientation and help this resistance coalesce into a political force that can challenge the decrepit duopoly that is the American system and offer an alternative to the dead-end of Democratic Party.
Nagesh Rao is a writer and freelance contributor.
